Government IT: The 15-Year View

By Jodi Mardesich

Government, like many private enterprises, tends to act in the short term, planning for IT changes on a 12- to 18-month schedule. Because the pace of technological change has been so great in the past few decades, long-term planning for public and private enterprises alike is more difficult. Governments face the additional hardships of having to plan around economic cycles, societal changes, elections, and disruptive events. For example, consider how Sept. 11, 2001 changed the plans of many government agencies.

However, by planning for the future, as far as 2020 or beyond, government CIOs can be prepared for societal, government, and technological change that impacts IT's role in government and society. A new report from Gartner Inc. recommends that governments look at scenario planning on a 15-year time horizon to get a better picture of how the public sector is likely to be different from today. The report cites the e-government and digital society strategies that many government agencies formulated in the mid-to-late 1990s as having worked well.

"Many of those strategies created a frame of reference to coordinate a variety of policy, investment, and IT management activities that have clearly contributed to today's rapid intersection of technology, society, and economy," says Andrea Di Maio, vice president at Gartner.

Some projections did not come to pass, and some were wrong, Di Maio says, but taking a view toward the future gave governments insight into new opportunities and helped shape their strategic priorities.

According to the Gartner report, most of Gartner's government clients said they were interested in making decisions on a 12- to 18-month timeframe aimed at creating greater efficiency -- although a few are planning ahead as far as 2025. CIOs can get out of the short-term mindset by engaging in scenario planning to take into account possible outcomes that will affect their work in the future.

Scenario planning was championed by Peter Schwartz in "The Art of the Long View," a book about Royal Dutch/Shell's experiences with the strategic tool. According to Schwartz, scenarios are stories about the way things might turn out, "stories that can help us recognize and adapt to changing aspects of our present environment," he writes.

Scenarios are not predictions, Schwartz says. Rather, scenarios allow a manager to think ahead and be prepared for whatever may happen. Scenario planning involves posing a central question, coming up with a timeframe, identifying driving forces, plotting scenarios, and determining research needs. Government CIOs can use these tools to come up with possible scenarios and implications for the use of technology in government.

• Pose a question For government CIOs, Di Maio says, the central question might be, "How will government use and be shaped by technology in the future?"
• Decide on a timeframe CIOs might choose to look out five, 10, 15, or more years into the future. The Gartner report focuses on how driving forces will shape government in the year 2020.
• Focus on two driving forces Scenario planning involves investigating a combination of uncertainties. Driving forces could be societal, political, economic, environmental, or technological. The Gartner report cites two driving forces: "the degree of government intervention in the economy" and "citizen attitude to privacy and surveillance."
• Plot the scenarios Each driving force by itself could have various outcomes; when considering both, the scenarios become more complex. As an example, Gartner came up with four possible scenarios when the driving forces mix together. In one scenario, which Gartner dubs "status quo development," government takes very little role in the economy, and citizens' private information is protected. On the opposite end of the spectrum -- called "good Big Brother" -- government is heavily involved with the economy, and citizens allow greater intrusions in their privacy as a tradeoff for the economic protections the government provides.

"The scenario-planning technique does not attach any probabilities to these scenarios," Di Maio says, "but each scenario enables an exploration into how future technologies will affect government and, conversely, how the likely shape of government that is relevant to each scenario will influence technology adoption and development in government and in the private sector's dealings with government."

With the scenarios in mind, government CIOs can plot out potential uses of technology. A recent Forrester Research survey found that government IT leaders are interested in open source and service-oriented architecture, like their private sector counterparts. CIOs might consider how the use of these technologies might be impacted by the possible scenarios. An additional point to consider: governments still rely on many legacy mainframe systems, and these installations can have an impact on how government is able to adjust to technological changes.

"Inflexible, decades-old systems hamper business process re-engineering efforts," says Gene Leganza, an analyst with Forrester. 52% of government respondents said they were still running COBOL mainframe applications, compared to 29% of non-government respondents, but their goals for dealing with legacy systems was very different. 47% of government executives said that they still planned to eliminate all or most of their mainframe COBOL applications, compared with just 26% of the non-government executives.

Keep in mind too that scenario planning isn't necessarily owned by the CIO.

"This should be driven at the CEO level, or any equivalent role, depending on the particular government organization -- e.g., city manager or director general," Di Maio says.

Other roles in the IT organization that need to be involved include chief technology officer, chief architect, research and development, technology tracking, staff involved with innovation, and vendor relationship management. However, the CIO is likely to be tasked with the operational responsibility of carrying this forward and should be involved at the ground floor.

"Scenario planning needs to engage stakeholders from different parts of the organization, and the CIO's responsibility would be to keep the process on track," Di Maio says.

Government organizations and vendors looking at technology with a long-term view should use a variety of scenario development methods, Di Maio says. They should produce alternative scenarios, and look for commonalities across those scenarios in order to project possible outcomes and be prepared for the future.

Jodi Mardesich writes about business and technology. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Fortune, San Jose Mercury News, Salon, Slate, and Yoga Journal.