Institutionalizing Collaboration: Challenges for the

21st Century Public CIO

Theresa A. PardoSeptember 21, 2008

Corporate Leadership Council

National Association of Chief Information Officers

The Center for Technology in Government

Work with government to develop well-informed strategies that foster innovation and enhance the quality and coordination of public services. . .

. . . through applied research and partnership projects that address the policy, management, and technology dimensions of information use in the public sector.

Venues for Research

Improvements in Practice

Research-Practice Partnerships

Practical Problems of Government

Practitioner skill & knowledge Academic skill

& knowledge

Layers of complexity

Policy, program & economic contextOrganizational

setting

ToolsWork processes & practices

Our domain of interest

Policy

Management Technology

The NASCIO Survey:What does it tell us?

• How is the role of the CIO being viewed as a change agent?– Change Leader

• How will the role of the CIO change over the next 5 years?– CIOs will evolve into a much stronger role overseeing IT policy

and operations

• What challenge is most impacting the ability of state CIOs to develop more innovative technology solutions?– Governance 42%– Politics 23%– Skill 23%

Why these results, why now?

• Why must the CIO be a change leader?

• Why is the role of the CIO changing to be focused on policy and operational responsibilities?

• Why is there such interest in new governance capability?

Institutionalizing Collaboration

• Wicked and Tangled Problems.• The imperative for new governance capability• The Network as an Emerging Organizational Form• Information sharing as a cross-cutting issue for

Public CIO’s– A quick look at the leadership tensions in the

networked WNV response efforts.

• Enterprise governance structures as the mechanisms for institutionalizing collaboration.

Wicked Problems

• Pose broad and amorphous societal challenges, such as “broken urban neighborhoods” or “reforming public education.”

• Unstructured, cross-cutting, relentless problems. • Little consensus exists about how to define them,

cause and effect are unclear, and attempts to solve them often cause them to morph into different problems. Weber and Khademian (2008)

Wicked Problems

• Associated with multiple diverse stakeholders, high levels of interdependence, competing values, and social and political complexity.

• To top it off, they can sometimes be mitigated, but they are never fully resolved. Weber and Khademian (2008)

Tangled Problems

• Fall in the middle ground of a continuum of complexity and tractability, between those that are routine and well-understood at one end and “wicked problems” at the other.

• In the space between registering a deed and urban renewal.

Tangled Problems

• Plague the interconnected missions and activities of organizations operating in the same policy domain such as child welfare or city planning, as well as from the unintended consequences of interactions across different policy domains or professional perspectives.

Unprepared for the essentials

• Interoperability and transparency identified as “essential” to the efforts of the member countries to “increase country capacity in surveillance, early detection, diagnosis and reporting of cases – both animal and human.”

• The cost of not being prepared to share information, to coordinate our responses, and to work together, is well understood, “If we are unprepared the next pandemic will cause incalculable human misery.”

November 2007 meeting of the World Health Organization

Missed opportunities for collaboration

• A post-tsunami lessons learned report released by the Government of Indonesia and the United Nations noted the many missed opportunities for coordinated response among national and international responders.

• The consequence of this was a myriad of coordination problems resulting in each responder providing what they could based on an internal setting of priorities rather than a shared understanding of needs.

Post-Tsunami Lessons Learned and Best Practices Workshop; Report and Working Groups Output, Jakarta, Indonesia, May 2005, Government of Indonesia, United Nations.

Weak systems for processing and using information

• The 2004 bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report emphasized that a weak system for processing and using information is stymieing the U.S. government’s ability in leveraging the vast amount of information it has access to.

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States The 9/11 Commission Report (Washington, D.C.: July 2004).

Chaos in our systems?

• “Criminals are protected by the chaos in our systems.”

An Assistant District Attorney charged with integrated the 76 databases held by the DA’s office in her city.

Complexity and frequency of future challenges

• “While we can't predict future challenges, we know they will be there. We know they will be difficult, surprising in complexity, and growing in frequency and severity.”

A U.S. Local Government Public Health Official

Identifying the capability gap

• These kind of problems require a kind of cross-unit, cross-agency, and cross-sectoral approach to management that is – ill-suited to conventional bureaucratic structures,

– perceived as risky to leaders and administrators within them, and

– often alien in its needs for cooperation in a Madisonian system predicated on competition rather than cooperation. Wilson 1989

Changing landscape

• New organizational forms and interoperability emerging as central to solution strategies.

• New political and program priorities– Transparency

– Integrated service delivery

– Public value

– Regional and globalization

– And more

Challenge for the 21st Century Public Manager

• Navigating the transition to post-bureaucratic forms of organizing as a way of filling the gap in our ability to respond to the wicked and tangled problems of our day.

• This navigation process requires the new institutional capacity to work across the boundaries of organizations, sectors, and professions.

The transition

• As governments transition from cognitive networks to structural networks they must operate differently. Provan, 2006

– Cognitive networks – common goals, network as interaction

– Structural networks – shared administrative responsibility

History of Network Organizations

• 1946- Weber’s ideal bureaucracy: based on the “principle of office hierarchy and levels of graded authority”

• 1990- W.W. Powell introduced the network organization as an alternative form of economic organization that is separate from market and hierarchy

Two Traditions in the Study of Networks

• Tradition 1– Emerges from policy studies literature and focuses on

collaboration among bureaucrats, interest groups, and target populations for policy formulation and implementation.

• Tradition 2– Emerges from organizational studies literature and

investigates the use of non-hierarchical, non-market forms of organization in the public sector as an alternative to traditional bureaucracy.

Information and knowledge sharing networks

• Emerging in an increasing number of program and policy arenas.

• Differ from service delivery in that their purpose is sharing information and knowledge among participating organizations.

• They facilitate cross-program and cross-functional coordination and support communities of practice.

Information and knowledge sharing networks

• New forms of public organization.

• Networks and bureaucracy co-exist and interact (O’toole, 1997)

• Formal authority remains important.

• Other concepts - innovation, consensus-building, and risk taking - are equally important.

As a consequence...

• Public managers are turning to information sharing as a strategy for maximizing the value of information in providing services, responding to problems, measuring performance, and engaging citizens.

Complexity revealed

• The more these strategies are pursued, the more the complexity of cross boundary information sharing is revealed.

• The level of changes required to create the high-functioning cross-boundary capability necessary as among the most complex.

Understanding cross-boundary information sharing and integration

• No comprehensive definition of cross-boundary information sharing and integration exists.– “despite the widespread interest regarding the topic,

integration continues to be poorly conceptualized” (Barki & Pinsonneault)

– integrated information systems “means different things to different people in different contexts” (Harris, 2000).

• Current definitions tend to focus on social or technical aspects.

Modeling the social and technical interactions in cross-boundary information sharing

• An interdisciplinary study funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2002 to investigate two key questions:

– What are the critical factors and processes involved in sharing and integrating information across the boundaries of organizations charged with providing government services?

– How do technical and social factors interact to influence the effectiveness of cross-boundary information sharing and integration in these contexts?

Why West Nile Virus?

West Nile Virus Spreads Across United States

2002

West Nile Virus Spreads Across United States

Managing public health in the U.S.

• Public health in most U.S. states is a local government responsibility; primarily county-level

• The state primarily regulates delivery of these services and provides support.

• Local governments– New York has 57 counties – 33 of which have their own full-time

health services.– Colorado has over 2,800 local governments – each able to operate

independently in terms of its systems and practices.

West Nile Virus in New York State

• First human cases reported in 1999.• Existing (but previously unused) web-based

system was used to collect and provide access to West Nile virus related case data.

• Network became the platform for sharing mosquito, bird, mammal, and human data.

• Brought together animal and human public health professionals unaccustomed to collaborating.

West Nile Virus in the State of Colorado

• First human cases reported in 2003

• County health departments responsible for coordinating the response to the virus

• At the local level, the coordination of response efforts relied heavily on a less formal or single system.

West Nile Virus in the State of Colorado

• This ‘system of systems’ was comprised of e-mail, phone, fax communications, and geographic information systems

• Public and private sector human and animal healthcare facilities and providers involved

Information Sharing Complexity Matrix

Program Specific

Problem-solving

EnterpriseCapacity Building

Inter-governmental

Inter-organizational

Organizational

A definition

• Cross-boundary information integration can be conceptualized as a complex multi-dimensional phenomenon with four components, which cover a continuum from mostly social to mostly technical in nature.

Four components of cross-boundary information sharing and integration

• Trusted Social Networks– Networks of social actors who know each other and trust each

other.

• Shared Information– Sharing of tacit and explicit knowledge in the form of formal

documents, informal talks, e-mail messages, faxes, etc.

• Integrated Data– Integration of data at the level of data element standards and/or

industry/community data standards (e.g., XML).

• Interoperable Technical Infrastructure– Systems that can communicate with each other at the

hardware/operating system level.

Leadership (as an example)

• Research and experience tells us leadership matters.

• What we don’t know is how leaders make a difference in the context of information sharing and knowledge networks.– What mechanisms do leaders use to effect

change in this context?

Executive Involvement

Formal Authority

Informal Leadership

Cross-Boundary Information Sharing

Executive Involvement

Formal Authority

Informal Leadership

Cross-Boundary Information Sharing

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???

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Localized, Episodic, Problem Solving

Appropriate and Effective

Strategies

Informal Leadership

Executive Involvement

Trust among Key

Participants

Respect for Autonomy of Participating

Organizations

Clarity of Roles and

Responsibilities

Formal Authority

Availability of Financial

Resources

Willingness to Participate

Boundary Object Use

Cross-Boundary Information

Sharing

Leadership Variables Mechanisms/Mediators Dependent Variable

Localized, Episodic, Problem Solving

Appropriate and Effective

Strategies

Formal Authority

Willingness to Participate

Cross-Boundary

Information Sharing

Formal authority, appropriate and effective strategies, and willingness to participate

• “Well, just recently, with the state getting all the bioterrorism money, the state has basically forced people into regions, whether they make sense to be regions or not.

• Now if this makes any sense to you as being a region but, you know, that met their, they had some other thing divided up that way and so they said, these will be your bioterrorism regions. So, yes, we do have those. They're sort of state-imposed; they're not natural, people who naturally would necessarily be working together.”

• A county-level public health manager in Colorado

Institutionalizing Collaboration

• Navigating the transition to post-bureaucratic forms of organizing.

• Networks and bureaucracy co-exist and interact (O’toole, 1997)

• Formal authority remains important.

• The role of Enterprise IT Governance

Striking the balance in Enterprise IT Governance

Definitional Challenges

• What is governance?

• What is IT governance?

• What is the enterprise?

• Well defined in general, unclear in the context of networks.

Components of Governance

• Members – roles and responsibilities

• Authority

• Scope

• Process

• Organizational structure

IT Governance

• IT Governance is specifying the decisions, rights, and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT. Governance answers the questions:– What decisions must be made?– Who should make these decisions?– How will decisions be made?– What is the process for monitoring results?

(Weill& Ross, 1999)

IT Governance Frameworks

• Emerging throughout the world.

• Most have limited applicability to the network as enterprise.

• Context matters here as much as elsewhere, maybe more.

IT Governance: in the eye of the beholder

• California• Florida• Kansas• Kentucky• Maine

• Michigan• Minnesota• Pennsylvania • North Carolina• Virginia

What we learned ...

• The early focus of most states was on cost savings– new state-wide procurement and IT

consolidation efforts.

• Through use – it became clear this focus was insufficient to meet the goals of more broadly based enterprise IT governance goals.

What we learned ...

• Most are using a mixture of frameworks and structures.

• Most had central IT offices – some provided IT services support, development and management and others provided both services and policy and planning.

• Most chose hybrid/federal structure.

What we learned ...

• Formalized structures within states were similar– Most had advisory boards of some sort. – Most variation found in composition, placement

within the hierarchy, and authority.

• Many use ‘coordination mechanisms’ to help support their IT governance. – External committees, councils, and boards– Enterprise oriented offices, divisions or unites– Communities of practices (those that come together

to solve a problem relevant to the community)– Agency liaisons within central IT governance model

(re)Creating NYS Enterprise IT Governance

Purpose– To generate a set of recommendations for the design of

an enterprise IT governance framework for New York State government.

Approach– Engage CIO’s from NYS Agencies and Local

Government in needs analysis, prototyping, and capability assessment process over the next 12 – 16 months.

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Challenges for the Public CIO

• The ones we know already– Rapidly changing technology– Dynamic socioeconomic environment– IT workforce issues– Context matters– Public value argument– New and complex problems.

Challenges for the 21st Century Public CIO

• How can a governance structure support the effective operation of a network as an enterprise?

• How to leverage political will toward the institutional changes necessary for effective enterprise governance?

• What is the Enterprise?

To meet the challenges of the 21st Century

• CIOs must be change leaders.

• The role of the CIO must be focused on policy and operational responsibilities.

• Institutionalizing collaboration through effective governance is central to our ability to respond to the wicked and tangled problems of government.

Institutionalizing Collaboration: Challenges for the 21st Century CIO

Thank You!