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May 24, 2004
DG.O 2004: BPC in eGovernment
Jochen Scholl discusses business process change in eGovernment and the DG.O 2004 conference.
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Jochen Scholl from the Univ. of Washington is speaking about his research in Current Practices in eGovernment-induced Business Process Change. The primary question of the research is:
How does eGovernment affect government business processes and how do business processes change in government differently from those in business.
Layne and Lee framework of eGovernment (PDF). The focus of this study is on vertical and horizontal integration phases of eGovernment, not information cataloges or transactions.
The study did a survey of senior public managers in New York State in 2003. The practices from private-sector Business Process Change theory that were ranked the highest (in order):
- Stakeholders - eGovernment project success depended on stakeholder inclusion
- Senior leadership support. Necessary to obtain funding and compete for scare resources. Necessary for multi-agency projects. Senior executives lose interest after a while.
- Workflow analysis. This ranked fairly high even though its more detailed than typical BPC work. "Detailed knowledge leads to better conflict resolution." Workflow analysis is more important in phase III and IV of the Layne and Lee model than in phase I and II.
- Cultural change readiness - education needed to overcome resistance. Some people felt that certain people may need to be removed from their positions in order to make the necessary changes.
- Process and resource inventory - provoked the most comments. This is instrumental in creating a shared vision. Very time consuming and so many projects are launched without doing this.
- Internal competency and Learning. This ranked fairly low. People thought domain knowledge was much more important than technical knowledge. This reflects a government culture that "government is fundamentally different than the private-sector." External experts have long learning curves.
- Consensus among citizens and officials. Broad consensus is obtainable, but not necessary. "That's what elections are for." Agencies should retain the discretion for directing the eGovernment projects.
Some summary ideas:
- Government agencies do not feel that seeking citizen consensus is important.
- Attention to stakeholder involvement appears as more pronounced and consensus seeking more frequent than in private-sector BPC.
- Longer project durations are OK
- Failure is not tolerated as frequently.
04:04 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Software Quality and Document Management Quickies
I'm getting ready to catch a flight to Seattle for the NSF's Digital Government conference (which I'll be blogging with any kind of luck), but before I leave I wanted to reference a couple of articles that are related to the discussions going on in the Ask Phil Forum. The first related to document management and the second to software quality.
The March issue of Baseline has a series of articles on software quality and even recounts instances where people have been killed by software flaws.
On the issue of document management, the May issue of CIO Insight discusses IT systems for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. One article in particular ddiscusses the technology of document management and gives some good advice on choosing a document management system.
07:33 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Bill Gates on Blogs and RSS
Did Bill Gates telling the CEOs in attendence at Microsoft's eighth annual CEO summit about blogging and RSS really chance things? I suspect most of these people had heard about blogs and RSS before. What they hadn't heard was a seeming endorsement by one of the world's leaders of technical change. After all, love him or hate him, you have to acknowledge that Bill has a nose for capitalizing on technical trends.
They all heard Gates describe blogs and RSS feeds as tools that "make it very easy to communicate" with customers, suppliers and employees.
The result, according to New York public-relations executive Steve Rubel, is likely to be a number of meetings of executives and their PR people and IT managers to explore this "blogging thing Bill Gates talked about." Rubel, of CooperKatz &Co., also wrote Friday morning, "The blogosphere changed. It feels very much like 1995 all over again."
Gates' endorsement of blogging, Rubel said, is likely to lead to more businesses using it: "Bottom-up business communication will only gain steam here." But there's more to the story. Gates' comments were also "a veiled declaration of war on Six Apart, Userland, Google and anyone else who makes blogging tools." Rubel's blog is called MicroPersuasion.From Did Bill Gates shake the blogosphere? :: AO
Referenced Mon May 24 2004 07:19:08 GMT-0600