Category Archives: IM/IT Strategic Planning

Government and Education

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What exactly does government do?  No, this is not the start of a Libertarian rant, this is a question of what are some of the big building blocks of a modern government as it pertains to education.  My first pass suggests that there are eight, as listed below.  It will be interesting to do some research on each of the blocks in sequence and see if I missed any or included too much in my first pass.

Functions that Are Good for Your Constitution

By way of clarity, this is not a discussion about the philosophy of government, the degree the state should interfere in the economy or the affairs of its citizens or the programs it should (not) provide.  Also, this focuses exclusively on education although I consider education starting at birth and ending with working.  In addition, there is a continuous exit and entry process.  A high school student gets their first job or a middle-age person is laid off and returns to school for re-training.  To this end, I am proposing that there are 8 core functions or enablers of education:

  1. Curriculum: what gets taught.
  2. Delivery & Institutions: who delivers the curriculum.
  3. Registration: who are students being taught.
  4. Results & Performance Management: how was school and is the process of teaching getting better, worse and changing fast enough for the environment.
  5. Certification: how do we know the student passed and how do we assess the veracity of the claim.
  6. Compliance: are the parties involved in the above doing what they are supposed to?
  7. Funding: who pays for all of the above and according to what formulas.
  8. Governance: where does the buck stop.

Limits of Education

Each of the above functions transcend the Education government-function and are found more or less through out the rest of government.  Conversely, there are functions that are absent or implied in the above list that are more prominent in other areas of government.  For example, taxation exists in the Education function, at least in Canada, through property assessments.  However, I will de-emphasize this function mostly because other areas of government perform these tasks on behalf of education (e.g. a ministry of finance). 

As a straw dog and 50,000-foot view, what do you think?  Have I missed a function noting the focus on education or would you remove an element?  Next stop on the school bus, curriculum. 

PRMM – How is That Planning Thing Working Out for You?

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This is the second in a series of blogs on a Practical Risk Management Method or PRMM.  At the bottom of this blog is a refresher of the other steps.  This step’s premise is don’t separate your planning activities from your risk management activities.  In other words:

Planning = Risk Management. Planning is ultimately about managing uncertainty which is a fancy name for Risk.  At this point you may be saying:

  1. Of Course: we already do this. Good on you, see you at the next blog!
  2. Great Idea: this may be incrementally more work during the planning process but ultimately over all less effort for the organization.
  3. What is This Planning Thing you Speak Of: hmmm, we may have identified your top risk.

I am afraid I can’t help you if you fall into the last category but hopefully these blogs can help you if you with the first two.

Continue reading →

Practical Risk Management Model

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Is traditional risk management practical?  If so, why do so many organizations struggle to do it well?  As a quick refresher here are the three steps of virtually all risk management methods:

  1. Establish business objectives.
  2. Identify and quantify some or all of the risks that may prevent the organization from achieving these objectives.
  3. Figure out what you are going to do with the resulting risks (e.g. ignore, manage, transfer, assign owners, etc.).

An Practical Risk Management Method (PRMM)

What makes risk management impractical is that it is often a bolt on and/or a parallel activity.  In addition, risk management often gets bogged down in too many risks and not enough value add (see my blog “Guns, Telephone Books and Risk?” for more on this).  PRMM recommends the following steps:

  1. Planning = Risk Management. Incorporate risk management into existing operational, tactical and strategic planning; don’t separate the two.  Why?  Because planning is how organizations manage uncertainty which is a fancy name for Risk.
  2. Are You Any Good at Change? Evaluate how well your organization responds to change (e.g. when uncertainty becomes certain).  When the unexpected happens, was your response chaotic and uncoordinated or did it go more or less to plan?
  3. How Strong is your ARM? ARM or Antifragile Risk Management is a system that focuses on building robust and resilient organizations.  While step 2 above measures the organization in action, this step anticipates your organization’s uncertainty resiliency.
  4. A Certain Test of Uncertainty.  The organization’s risk/opportunity log is used to stress test the work done above.  Testing measures the robustness of the organization and the scope and reasonableness of the collected risks.  This is the traditional risk management step in PRMM.
  5. Don’t Stop. Modify/improve your plans and keep going.  All of the above activities are meant to be both periodic (e.g. the annual planning process) or continuous.

My next blog are some thoughts on step 1 above, integrating risk management into the planning processes of the organization.

Citizen Centeric Experience – PwC Event 2017-11-24

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In my ongoing effort to remember the key notes from events and conferences I have attended, some thoughts on Rethinking the Customer/Citizen Experience; 2017-11-24.  The overview blurb was:

We will look at transformation through the lens of both the ultimate end-user experience, and the internal employee perspective which inherently must be connected to successfully implement change.

Personas and Small Things Create Big Results

Two key themes that came out of the event.  The first was the use of personas to aid in develop a good customer experience.  The second was the importance of implementing big things through a series of small steps.

Personas

Developing a persona is an attempt to understand behaviors of customers/clients.  These are done to help frame development and make changes.  The recommendation is to limit the number of personas to less than six and ideally 3-6.  A single persona is then used to track a collective journey through a process journey.  One description of a persona is as follows (Adapted from Agile Modeling):

A persona defines an archetypical user of a system.  The idea is that if you want to design effective software, then it needs to be designed for a specific person. Personas represent fictitious people which are based on your knowledge of real users. Unlike actors, personas are not roles which people play. In use case modeling actors represent the roles that users, and even other systems, can take with respect to your system. Actors are often documented by a sentence or two describing the role. Personas are different because they describe an archetypical instance of an actor. In a use case model we would have a Customer actor, yet with personas we would instead describe several different types of customers to help bring the idea to life.

It is quite common to see a page or two of documentation written for each persona. The goal is to bring your users to life by developing personas with real names, personalities, motivations, and often even a photo. In other words, a good persona is highly personalized. 

Personas and the Public Sector

According to PwC, personas have been used successfully in various public sector organizations including the Canadian federal government.  My Spidey-risk-senses however went up over two aspects:

  1. The volume of the personas.  Governments do things that no one else wants to do, given the myriad of our product lines; can we realistically develop personas for the breadth of services provided?
  2. Personas as a Cause Celebre. What is the risk of personas becoming a political nightmare? Our society has become increasingly sensitive and intolerant to labels. What are the risks of not having the right personas to meeting a groups demands or having to remove a persona because it does not match an external groups political objectives?

Personas But Tread Carefully

The answer is to use personas but create them through engagement with those they represent. As well, some political mettle is likely required to explain to role of a generic persona that provides a model or analog to society at large (heck, is this not the description of a representative democracy!). Nevertheless, have an emergency risk mitigation plan for either the creation of politically mandated personas or for suppression/modifications of personas for similar political imperatives.

Other than these risks, using a customer experience focused technology methodology can be highly applicable to the public sector. Like most things though, the proof is in the execution and delivery. This leads us to the second part of the morning’s presentation –

Small Steps to Implement Big Change

I am a big fan of the Agile method (e.g. small successes building over a few weeks to a larger objective) versus waterfall.  My observation for governments though is that the larger organization has a hard time with Agile.  It is easier to understand and support a multi-year, multi-million dollar project (e.g. put a man on the moon by the end of a decade) than approve the objective but in a series of short sprints (e.g. what do you mean you plan to have 520 sprints to get a man on the moon!).

Of course I am not being entirely fair to governments in saying this.  After all, it was Apollo ELEVEN that landed on the moon, Apollos ONE through TEN were examples of very LARGE sprints. Nevertheless, here is my thinking about any project:

  1. Large objectives are fine (moon, replacing an aging system, etc.)
  2. The objective must be broken into a series of steps (phases, projects, etc.)
  3. Each step in turn should not exceed the following:
    1. Six months in length
    2. $500,000 in expenditure
    3. 25 people for the entire project team.
    4. Only start upon the successful completion or closure of a prior step.
    5. Turn over is limited but also encouraged, e.g. no more than ~90% of the team is the same project to project but no less than ~50% of the team has changed.
  4. The above measures can be an average for a system, thus
    1. Subsequent phases can get larger but only after smaller projects have successfully concluded
    2. Professional judgement and risk tolerance is encouraged so that the above is a strong guideline and not a set of absolutes.

 

 

 

Day 3 – Greying Population, AI and Extremism

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This is the third list of potential disruptive factors that could influence the Canadian Public Service over the next decade or so.  See the previous blog for the first set of three and Seven Days of Disruption blog for the entire set.  These are in support of November 22, 2017 FMI Conference – Disruptive Writers.

  • Depopulation Waves (2015)
  • Evolving Artificial Intelligence (2015)
  • Geopolitical Realignment (2015) and Continued Global Violent Extremism (2015)

Depopulation Waves

Adapted from A.T. Kearney 2015: As global population growth slows, some countries’ populations are already shrinking. Global population growth is decelerating from 1.8 percent in the 1980-2000 to just 1.1 percent in the 2000–2025 period. The three main drivers of depopulation are aging, international migration, and high mortality and morbidity rates.  Depopulation presents a range of challenges including labor shortages, weaker consumer demand, lower tax revenue and higher health care costs as the greying population lives longer.

Editor Note: Additional impacts to the above are a massive transfer of wealth from the baby boomers to their children.  Of course this wealth is only of value if the economic and social structures continue to exist to support them.

Evolving Artificial Intelligence

Adapted from A.T. Kearney 2015: Artificial intelligence (AI) is already used in sectors as distinct as finance, journalism, and engineering, and it continues to find new applications. For instance, AI is used in security trading dark pools, writes breaking news articles, and dominates humans in many games (such as chess, backgammon, Scrabble, and even Jeopardy!). It is also being leveraged in an attempt to cure cancer (as part of the Big Mechanism project being run by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA]) and make lethal decisions on the battlefield through its integration into the weapons systems of several countries. Increasing investment in deep learning technologies will enable AI to expand to even more sectors.

Editor Note: This topic has been explored in detail both in the business press and in fiction (anyone remember HAL from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey?).

Geopolitical Realignment and Continued Global Violent Extremism

Adapted from A.T. Kearney 2015: Global economic and political power is increasingly diffuse thus compli­cating leadership efforts within the international system. In the years since the Global Financial Crisis, the United States and other Western powers have receded from the global stage  while rising regional powers have increased their political influence.  These changing power dynamics are decreasing the effectiveness of global political institu­tions. These institutions have transformed little in the past 60+ years and are failing to accommodate shifting power dynamics.  Global arms spending, has grown in recent years after decades of decline following the conclusion of the Cold War.

Today’s most pressing issues, including security concerns, are global in nature but cooperation has proved increasingly difficult in the current international environment. The international security architecture has been slow to address global terrorism and transnational organized crime. Moreover, lack of trust in govern­ments and businesses complicates international efforts to prevent cyber threats.

Editor Note: Canada has been a direct participant and beneficiary in the international movements of the second half of the 20th century.  From being a founding member of the United Nations and NATO to conceiving the concept of peace keepers, Canada has been described as ‘punch above its weight’ in international affairs.

Day 2: Power, Cyber-Security and Renewables

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This is the second list of potential disruptive factors that could influence the Canadian Public Service over the next decade or so.  See the previous blog for the first set of three and Seven Days of Disruption blog for the entire set.  These are in support of November 22, 2017 FMI Conference – Disruptive Writers.

  • Changing Nature of Power (2015)
  • Cyber Insecurity (2015)
  • Dawning of a new urban transportation age and the Canadian City (2017 and editor)

Changing Nature of Power (2015)

Adapted from A.T. Kearney 2015: In today’s world, power is increasingly fleeting and diffuse.  It is disseminated across individuals empowered by new technologies such as search engines and social media; to lower levels of government, including cities; and to start-ups and user-driven networked organizations. The rise of the global middle class is leading to greater individualism and expectations for service from their governments and from businesses, with consumers having never had a broader freedom of choice. Global trust in most institutions reached an all-time low in 2015, with governments continuing to be the least-trusted institution.

Editor note: So What?  The answer is that trust is foundation of a society and an economy.  It profoundly reduces the transaction cost in both.  Public institutions support this trust by enforcing social norms. In a strange twist, public institutions are sometimes powerless at the hands of a small but vocal group of individuals.

For example, an August 2017 discussion on free speech at Ryerson University was cancelled because the University was concerned about safety and security.  Described as domestic terrorism by one of the panelists, this is an example of public institution (Ryerson) self-censuring thought and discussion with a resulting degradation of its own power and trust.  While the individuals involved may congratulate themselves on forcing their view points onto an entire institution, they should also recognize that they are sharing a common heritage with the black, brown or red shirts who dominated politics a century ago.

Cyber Insecurity (2015)

Adapted from A.T. Kearney 2015:While the upside of the Internet is enormous, cyber threats continue to multiply. Estimates put global cyber crime losses at somewhere between $375 billion and $575 billion annually.  All connected devices and systems are vulnerable to attack. Computer systems, for example, are vulnerable to ransomware. The growing IoT also lacks strong security systems and is highly vulnerable to data theft.  To make matters more complex, the cyber arena is a growing domain of warfare between countries, in which businesses can be caught in the crossfire. The “Darknet”—parts of the “Deep Web” that are not discoverable by traditional search engines—remains a serious criminal threat, especially with the rise of crypto-currencies. It is cloaked with encryption software that provides anonymity to users. The Darknet is used as a source of cyber attacks, as well as a place to buy and sell ransomware and other cyber weapons. Another business risk of the Darknet is that it provides a marketplace for stolen data collected through cyber attacks, augmenting hackers’ motivation to continue conducting such attacks.

Editor note: Governments see online services as a way to provide better government for fewer resources.  The Singapore, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom are acknowledged leaders in this effort although the Canada Revenue Agency has also made great strides in allowing for a digital experience.  Nevertheless, governments have a number of challenges including the Facebook-effect, the Shiny-bauble problem and resource asymmetry.

Facebook Effect – You are the Product

The Facebook-effect is the problem of comparing government services to a for profit service such as Facebook.  If Facebook can provide service xyz or make its offerings free, why can’t a government?  There are of course a number of answers to this.  Firstly Facebook is not constrained by the same legal, moral and democratic frameworks.  Facebook has an entirely different revenue model.  For social media, the user is the product.  Thus your likes, shares and contributions builds up a profile of you as a person which can then be monetized.  For governments such monetization of a citizen would be outrageous.  Finally, Facebook can fail while governments are expected to be enduring.  If Facebook ceased to exist tomorrow it would be inconvenient but a new social media product would take its place (anyone still using MySpace?).

The Shiny-Bauble Problem

Governments like to implement new things.  Ribbon cutting and shovel turning is good press and leads to the primary objective of any government – staying in power.  As a result, governments get distracted by the Shiny-Bauble which have a short-term effect or solution that has little enduring value and may cause long-term harm to a society.  The worst thing about Shiny-Baubles is that they may become entrenched in a society by a small group who benefit from the government largess.  In other words, the only thing worst than a Shiny-Bauble is trying to turn one-off.

Resource Asymmetry

Governments often have fewer and less enabled resources to delivery digital services or fight cyber-threats than the legitimate and illegitimate competitors.  The above Facebook discussion is one aspect of this resource asymmetry and consuming valuable government resources pursuing a Shiny-Bauble is another.  A darker example of asymmetry is that the bad guys only need to look for and exploit a single weakness in a government’s cyber environment.  At the same time, a government must fight all threats while trying to provide services.

Dawning of a new urban transportation age and age of renewables (2017 and editor)

Adapted from A.T. Kearney 2015: The global urban population has risen steadily over the past two decades. According to the United Nations (UN), there were about 2.9 billion urbanites in 2000, but that number has increased to 4.1 billion and will hit 4.5 billion in 2022. The number of megacities, defined as cities with 10 million or more inhabitants, rose from just 17 in 2000 to 29 in 2015, and the total is projected to rise to 36 by 2025. Hyper-urbanization is heightening congestion levels in cities around the world. The age of the automobile may be ending as cities adopt innovative new technologies and use more traditional mass and individual transit methods to enable smarter and more sustainable urban transportation and growth.

(Editor) Public transit and electric vehicles are two ways that urbanization will change the face of a city but tele-commuting and promoting walk/bike-able cities are another.  This raises a challenge for Canadians as much of our housing stock has been built since the mid-20th century and the economics and logistics for all of these mitigating solutions will require significant government investment and coordination.  It will also require a change in cultural norms and expectations as owing a home has become central to financial and personal-security well-being.

Seven Days of Disruption

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On November 22, 2017, the Edmonton Chapter of the Financial Management Institute is running an event entitled ‘Disruptive Writers‘.  In addition to hearing 3 great speakers discuss their books on either future disruptions or managing change, we will be playing a game called ‘Pin the Tale on the Disruption‘.  Sort of a mini-Delphi of what participants at the conference think will be the biggest challenge to the Canadian Public Service between now and …. ohhhh, say…. 2025 (e.g. about 7 years hence).

The Source of Disruption

There is a variety of sources for the disruptions but they are primarily based on the excellent work of the A.T. Kearney who have produced 3 Global Trend documents (available as follows):

It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future (Yogi Berra)

A word of caution about the difficulty of making predictions.  Inevitably something better or worse will have muscled all of the excellent possible futures out of the picture.  In addition, Black Swans and the unpredictable are a near certainty.  So, to my future self, I profusely apologize/acknowledge for being so absolutely wrong/right in naming the following future disruptions.

A Laundry List of Disruption (in alphabetical order)

  1. Accelerating Global Climate Change and the cost to mitigate (2015 and editor)
  2. Biotechnology: Frankenstein, Super-bugs and Super-cures (adapted from 2016 and editor)
  3. Canadian Competitiveness and Productivity (editor)
  4. Changing Nature of Power (2015)
  5. Cyber Insecurity (2015)
  6. Dawning of a new urban transportation age and the Canadian City (2017 and editor)
  7. Depopulation Waves (2015)
  8. Evolving Artificial Intelligence (2015)
  9. Geopolitical Realignment and Continued Global Violent Extremism (2015)
  10. Growing debt overhang (2017)
  11. Immigration and Changes to the Canadian Values and Characters (editor)
  12. Indigenous Power (editor)
  13. “Islandization” of the global economy (2017), NAFTA Negotiations and the rise of protectionism (editor)
  14. IT Revolution 2.0 and the Rise of the Machines (adapted from 2015)
  15. Post Consumerism (adapted from 2016)
  16. Quebec and Regional Tensions (editor)
  17. Resource and Commodity Supply, Demand and Price (adapted from 2015)
  18. Rising storm of populism; Canada and Cultural War in the Age of Trump and the Progressives (adapted from 2016 and editor)