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The Digital Agency

Ralph Chivers, CIO, Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, New Zealand

Ralph Chivers, CIO, Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, New Zealand

I am in great danger of saying nothing new here. In fact, I hope it’s not new, although perhaps it might be presented in a new way. In this article I share my thoughts on the capabilities a digitally ambitious Agency will need, with a particular focus on leadershipcapabilities.

Digital Transformation

We have all seen the failures that have been caused by delivering a technology solution to a customer that doesn’t really want it. Even worse is allowing an expectation to develop that “everything will be better when the new technology arrives” while in the meantime doing nothing to change the underlying business practices.

With very few exceptions, a technology project is an input into a business transformation project. But even saying it like that is wrong. All digital transformation should be initiated, managed and delivered as a business transformation initiative that happens to be supported by technology. That puts technology delivery in its proper context and ensures that the initiative’s governance and management are clear about the real job that needs to be done: transforming how the business operates. In other words, business transformation must be a key competence for the Digital Agency and its leadership cadre.

Digital Leadership

We should expect all of our future leaders to be competent in digital transformation in the same way that we expect them to be competent financial managers, to adroitly navigate their legal challenges, and to manage and develop their people. They should understand what digital technologies can do for them and to be confident in identifying and exploiting opportunities to do things more efficiently and more effectively by leveraging those technologies.

That doesn’t mean they all need to be mini-CIOs (as that term is understood today) but they do need to understand technology sufficiently well to understand the opportunity space, and to craft the shape of their business units accordingly.

To some extent these skills will tend to come pre-packaged as the so-called millenial generation make their way into executive ranks. However, in the medium term there is a need for significant up skilling and a structured inclusion of digital skills development targeted at senior and middle management.

All Digital Transformation Should Be Initiated, Managed and Delivered As a Business Transformation Initiative That Happens To Be Supported By Technology

Digital Asset Ownership

In addition to being digital transformation leaders our managers need to be confident and competent in managing technology assets, just as they are with traditional “old economy” assets. They must be the financial/asset owners of the IT systems that drive their businesses, giving them the right incentives to manage them efficiently and effectively. They need to exhibit all the symptoms of ownership in every sense of the word, especially given that these assets are intimately connected to their business model and business transformation objectives.

It’s also important to recognise that the nature of these assets is changing. Historically ICT assets (in the CIO’s eyes) have aligned with capital assets (in the CFO’s eyes), but as more-and-more services transition to the cloud with consumption-based charging, this relationship increasingly breaks.The traditionally strong link between financial asset management and digital asset management has to evolve to one that focuses on a Digital Agency’s real assets: its information, its technology supply framework, and the digital competence of its staff. These all need to be just as actively managed and invested in as the “tin” once was.

Digital Service Delivery and Identity Management

It will become increasingly unacceptable in the digital age for customers to have to maintain separate electronic relationships with many different Digital Agencies in order to manage their personal and business affairs. Currently it is not uncommon for a business or a citizen to have to provide the same information and validate their circumstances multiple times to multiple Agencies, for ostensibly the same purpose.

Addressing this problem increasingly requires the Digital Agency to work with other agencies to deliver genuinely customer-centric services, with all of the financial co-operation and system integration complexities that entails. In other words, taking digital service delivery to “the next level” of sophistication requires an all-of-government approach that requires some level of government-wide governance. As we all know, that’s hard work, but it’s important to make our customer’s experience more joined up and satisfactory.

Equally challenging is the inescapable conclusion that integrated digital service delivery has to be underpinned by some form of digital identity management. That is not a big challenge for businesses, but can create significant public policy concerns in relation to citizens. We need to find a way to making digital identity management work at a national level while also protecting citizens’ legitimate rights.

Do we still need a CIO?

I was recently asked how I was going leading my agency’s digital transformation. I answered that I wasn’t, that I was supporting the executives in my Agency with their digital transformation efforts. As this article makes clear, I am absolutely persuaded that that’s the right approach. In fact I’d go as far as saying that if an Agency believes that digital transformation is the CIO’s job, then they are already in trouble.Yes we will always need some high-end technical expertise in our Agencies just like we will always need legal and financial expertise. But more critically, we need transformation skills, digital skills and information-age asset management skills that are in evidence in all of our leaders at every level, and we will have to invest heavily to get there.