Why is it important to focus on the public sector?

My research looks at engagement on public sector IT projects, so

Why is it important to focus on the public sector?

This might be a viva question and I can say that I justify this focus in the literature review (page 14) where I've written:
IT projects are important to the public sector because they are a key means of implementing government policy requiring often rapid changes to how the public sector department functions and provides services.
But maybe I've justified only the focus on IT projects, not on the public sector. The public sector makes policy and implements it through IT. Examples of failures of such implementation are:

• Libra system for the magistrates courts
• the National id scheme with an initial budget of £3 billion that went up to £5 billion.
• in 2003 the government introduced two credits: Child Tax Credit and Working Tax credit. The Inland Revenue's IT supplier created a new IT system for processing the tax credits, a system that went live in April 2003 with problems that took ten weeks to solve. Volumes were higher than expected and the testing window had been cut. Both suppliers and IR senior managers had to account for the fiasco to a Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee.

Public Sector IT continues to be problematic. The day after I submitted my thesis, a Public Administration Select Committee was interviewing IT expert witnesses on good governance and the effective use of IT (pd report is here). Witnesses pointed out that IS is there to implement government policy and government business change.

Hence, I see a need to focus on the public sector.

Why is engagement important?

Engagement is important

• to gain commitment
• for influencing
• for bonding
• to lubricate the wheels of IT implementation
• to align individual work with business strategy
• for understanding
• for feedback
• for good communication.
  

and a common cause of government IT failure is lack of effective engagement with stakeholders.

I notice that the government has just had another Parliamentary Select Committee Enquiry on government IT: Good governance and effective IT. A hearing on 8th March is watchable here and the minutes of 15th March are here.

And that is since I handed in my thesis, less than a month ago.

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OGC. 2002. Common Causes of Project Failure. London: Office of Government Commerce. http://www.ogc.gov.uk/documents/cp0015.pdf
Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology. 2003. Government IT Projects - Analysis of the Problem In POST (Ed.). http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/pr200.pdf

What attracted you to this project?

I looked at the client-consultant relationship in the public sector because public sector clients were paying too much and not managing their suppliers. The evidence for this came from media and from a series of reports that the National Audit Office published in the mid 2000s. The evidence was that

• IT projects were not being managed
• consultants were not being managed.

I put the two together, identified an NAO report that said that engagement between clients and consultants was important to a project relationship {NAO, 2006}, but found no academic research to cast light on such engagement. So here was a project asking to be researched.

What piqued my original interest arose from my MBA research in the early 1990s when a consultancy firm asked me to research the market for selling their services in the NHS. I thought the NHS managers ought to know what they were paying for and how much they ought to pay.

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NAO. 2006. Central Government's Use of Consultants: Building Client and Consultant Commitment, Vol. Supporting paper 1. London: HMSO.

Public sector IT cuts

Our new government plans to cut consultancy and IT in the public sector. I hope they know what they're doing because if the Management Consultancy Association is right here about clients getting £6 value for every £1 spent on consultancy, then the government is on its way to losing a lot of value.

The IT industry too questions the sense in cutting IT - see here.

Successful projects

Why do this research?

Much has been written on IT project failure. My research is of successful case studies so may identify how people did something right, thus allowing us to learn from successful experiences. That's a cheering change.

Would communities of practice improve IT projects?

Communities of practice share knowledge.

• Knowledge is both tacit and explicit. Why is that? Who said it? It's probably Nonaka and I can use his material to explain and give examples.
  
• Knowledge is social, not just one person's knowledge and I could find examples from the case studies I have
• Dynamic knowledge - i.e. knowledge changes with experience, including the project life cycle, so knowledge needs updating throughout a project.
• Keeping the social structures after a project finishes. But teams break up when a project finishes, so you lose, or loosen the knowledge. How can you keep those structures? Perhaps through communities of practice, perhaps through maintaining the social capital, keeping the networks going.

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NONAKA, I. (1994) A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation. Organization Science, 5, 14-37.

Keeping on track with public projects

The British Computer Society June magazine Project Manager Today has a helpful article,

Keeping on track with public projects,

that draws attention to a National Audit Office report on "Helping Government learn". But you need to subscribe to PM Today, which costs, so I've got only a hard copy. Apparently, accumulated learning is readily accessible - then after centuries of having a British Civil Service we should have learned a lot by now. The NAO is trying to ensure lessons are learned.

Discussion of research

We are due our PhD students day, when we have discussions around the table with ten minutes for each student to present their work to each other and to academics. Occasionally, academics have little to contribute but are still interested. See last year's discussion here.

Today, with no round table pressure I had the luck to discuss my research with a senior academic in IT, who works in the OU and has researched IT using social capital. He read the paper I'd sent to EURAM, and my OUBS web page, and then he asked me useful questions, like

• what's the difference between social capital and trust?
  
• what is capital?
• what is engagement?
  
• what is quality of engagement?
• why IT?
• why the public sector?
• where's the value arise from engagement?
  

He suggested relevant literature, including, Habermas. Habermas is not where I would have gone, but apparently he described four forms of communication:

• instructive
• strategic
• discursive
• co-ordinative (not Habermas's term)

I could use Habermas's forms as ways of analysing engagement along a spectrum. See the theory of communicative action.

Another interesting point he made is that there is an IS Professor Dunleavy at LSE who has researched and written on macro level IT systems in national public sectors. He's found that IT projects are governed by national interest in building capacity of an IT industry in a global market place. If a nation, such as UK or Japan has an IT industry then it is more loath to pull out of failing public IT projects than countries like Holland that doesn't have an IT industry to contribute to the economy.

May the PhD day turn out as useful.

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I suspect the Professor Dunleavy is the Patrick Dunleavy who wrote that really useful text on Authoring a Phd : How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation that I mentioned here.

Awards

It's interesting to see that the Home Office is recognising the efforts of staff and suppliers who drive value by offering awards. See here. One category is of collaborative working with the Home Office. I'd like to see the entrants for that, but another category is for contribution to a project or programme and that might be closer to my research interests.

Assumptions about engagement

I'm assuming that the unit of analysis is the project. Why is it the project, because if it's the project is there a problem with the project? Is there a problem with IT projects in the public sector? And if there is a problem why does engagement have anything to do with the problem?

• The NAO report (NAO, 2006) assumes that engagement is a good thing.
• I'm assuming engagement is a process.
• I'm assuming engagement is not a widely recognised management construct.
• I am assuming one kind of engagement exists. Or does it vary depending on something? What? Perhaps it's its quality that varies. I note that the quality of engagement requires: reciprocity, shared decision making, a high level of interest, and is action for something worth doing.

But some studies measure engagement, such as the IES. Though I don't have free access to its reports its summary defines engagement:

"a positive attitude held by the employee towards the organization and its values"

I'm not sure that the NAO writers meant the same thing. The IES survey used a diagnostic tool that ranged from training & development to job satisfaction, which to me sounds like motivation and motivating factors {Marcum, 1999}, so something other than engagment. And I don't think the NAO would measure its senior responsible owners engagement on the same characteristics as the IES uses.

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NAO (2006) Central Government's use of consultants: Building client and consultant commitment National Audit Office
Marcum, J. W. (1999) 'Out With Motivation, in With Engagement', National Productivity Review (Wiley), 18 (4), pp. 43-46.