another coffee, please

International Women’s Day 2013

Today, Friday March 8 2013, is International Women’s Day.

Look, I’d love to talk about how women are stronger than ever and yet equality is a mile away, but honestly, I don’t feel it, y’know? This whole gender debate is almost a bad thing (note, please, I said almost) in that it takes attention away from the really cool stuff that is out there right now. That it doesn’t take a male or a female to be able to see how cool these things are.

I do want to see more women in IT though, and I will do everything in my power to make that happen, but let’s talk about that another day. Today let’s be inspired.

AGIMO: Australian Government and IT

Link: http://agimo.gov.au/2013/03/06/kickstart-2013-11309/

Today, I had the pleasure of reading through the transcript of Australian Government CTO John Sheridan’s speech from Kickstart 2013. I have found a speaker I would absolutely love to see in person, because just reading this makes me excited; I can’t imagine what the people at the event must have been thinking and feeling. Wow. And he uses LEGO on his slides. Double wow!

He starts off by saying that technology is an integral, essential part of everyday life in Australia. How we’re beyond thinking of technology as though it’s a train coming towards us in a narrow tunnel. This is kind of refreshing for me, although I think there’s a long way to go before “using” and “understanding” technology move closer on the scale.

I love the old story of the executive who asks his poor IT guy why they can’t buy a new switch from eBay rather than waiting for an DOA unit to be processed, for example. “But I just got a new switch for my home network for $89!” he might explode once the emergency vendor PO arrives. So there is still a little bit of a gap there that needs to be crossed.

What I hear though is the Government realising that there is a lot of room for improvement in the way that Government does IT. You and I both know that governments in general aren’t very good at moving quickly, whilst IT is moving rapidly. On one hand, they must keep up with technology or it will happen without them with BYOD and iDevices and so on. It’s nice to see active improvements in this area like reducing the time it takes for a service to get into a Government-approved service catalogue. Cool.

Freedom

Something else the speech goes into and I found really refreshing was a discussion around availability of data. Not availability as in “always up” but availability as in “anyone can access”. Sites like data.gov.au are great. I love statements like this:

“this will be in one CSV file and you’ll be able to sort and play with that to your heart’s content”

This is why the Interwebs exist, right? To improve the availability and accessibility of useful data. It reminds me that just in 2009 inquiries about the HSC marking process in NSW had to be released via FOI requests to the NSW Ombudsman – the future is about making information available to interested parties without a whole lot of hoohah and kerfuffle.

People

Here is another quote that really resonated with me:

“The problem is not one of technology, it is a problem of personnel management, and that’s the sort of thing that technology should do if it’s getting it right. It shouldn’t be a barrier to what we do, it should be an enabler of what we do, so that we can focus, Public Service managers can focus, on the important things”

I love this because it’s true. I find myself telling people more and more, the hardest job in IT is not making the technology work. It’s about joining the technology to the people who are using it, and it’s about improving their quality of life. What I believe is that it’s not just the CIO who has to step up to the business and say “look, this is what IT can do”, it’s everyone on the team. Things like:

IT needs to be responsible for helping people adapt to new technologies, which are often sudden and unexpected (smart phones are a good example).
IT needs to be responsible for providing customer service, even though a lot of the time the technology itself is not customer facing (who do you complain to when systems are down or security breached?)
IT needs to be innovative, and think outside the norm. But it’s not about the fastest to innovate or the first to market – tried and tested technology for the government in particular, over cutting edge might-close-down-tomorrow shops.

These are all not specifically technological things. These are people things. These are great things that differentiate us from Skynet. I think that personnel management is that funny opaque part of the IT manager or IT professional’s role that is often overlooked (as “soft skills”) and is not given the attention it deserves. As an aside, I think it may be what gets more women into IT. Talk about that some other time.

Conclusion

All in all, if you hadn’t already gathered, I found the speech really, really exciting. I found it inspiring and motivating – enough to write my little piece on it anyway. There is so much more in there than what I’ve talked about so if you haven’t already, click through and read it (and appreciate the slides).

I hope that with visionaries and drivers like John Sheridan, Australia is going to be seen as a leader in the technology space with policies and services that other governments (and probably other enterprises as well) look at to emulate. I’m looking forward to it.