• Home
• GOVERNMENT CXO
• E-GOVERNMENT
• CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT
• TAX AND REVENUE MANAGEMENT
• GOVERNMENT PROCUREMENT
• GREEN GOVERNMENT
• GOVERNMENT DATA MANAGEMENT
• GOVERNMENT SECURITY
• GOVERNMENT CLOUD
• GOVERNMENT ANALYTICS
• GOVERNMENT GIS
• CONNECTED GOVERNMENT
• DIGITAL INCLUSION
• EDUCATION IT
• HEALTHCARE IT

Central Government, E-Government

Reflections of a government CIO

By Robin Hicks | 21 October 2009

Laurence Millar was one of the longest serving GCIOs in Asia before he resigned in April. The former New Zealand government IT supremo talks Robin Hicks through the ups and downs of his tenure, and the lessons he learned along the way

In April this year, the GCIO and Deputy Commissioner of the State Services Commission of New Zealand, Laurence Millar, resigned after the publication of a report that criticised the procurement and management process of the Government Shared Network, which was discontinued because it was underused and running at a loss. Unshackled from his duties in government, Millar is free to speak openly about his experiences and accomplishments, removed as he is from the goldfish bowl of public life.

In the following interview, Millar reveals why he thinks the NZ$28 million (US$18 million) GSN project didn’t work, takes full responsibility, but says he wouldn’t have tackled the role any differently if he could have his time again. For those wanting to follow in his footsteps, he offers some sage advice on how to take on the biggest job in government IT.

Describe your early impressions of your former department when you took the job in 2004. I worked in New Zealand government for most of the 1990s before moving to work in Asia in 1998. After five years I returned to NZ, and took the Government CIO job in 2004. I felt that the progress in e-government had been less than it could have been. The government portal hadn’t moved forward enough from the work that I had done on it almost 10 years earlier, and there were numerous obstacles standing in the way of reform.

One was the structure of government. In New Zealand, government is highly decentralised, each agency is legally autonomous, and there was little sense of working for the same collective organisation. This made driving government towards change uniquely challenging. If you were responsible for running prisons, then that was your focus, despite the links to other parts of government. The examples of collaboration were limited.

What were your main ambitions back in 2004? I wanted to increase the pace of change. And I wanted to increase the level of recognition for that change. Often in government, people don’t get recognised for doing great work. There’s a tendency to step away from giving or receiving praise. And that gets in the way of people wanting to make a difference. Civil servants, certainly in Westminster-style democracies, are the invisible agents that fulfil a Minister’s wishes. And New Zealand is not a country that is big on praise anyway. The tall poppy syndrome applies. But I believe that if people are given a spotlight, at least a small one, the recognition of the value of their work builds momentum.

What sort of status did the Government CIO have compared to other senior officials? New Zealand’s government does not have a hierarchical structure. Each department stands as a separate department with its own departmental head. All report to the head of the civil service, who was my boss. On one level, the Government CIO is a staff function rather than a line management function. You act as a matrix manager across all departments. Decisions remained with departmental CEOs, but not all departments are created equally. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs has an important role, but, with all due respect, has less weight than the Ministry of Justice. New Zealand does not have a government IT department – each department has its own IT function. Understanding where the GCIO fitted in was key. I had to create a shared services government organisation, which has now moved from State Services Commission, to the Department of Internal Affairs, as an operational business in its own right.

Over five years, we built a portfolio of shared services and moved them into a line agency. This meant that the States Services Commission could return to its core role – providing leadership, coordination and advice on the management of the state sector.

In an interview with FutureGov’s Managing Editor James Smith in our January 2005 issue, you set out to “transform the operation of government through the use of the internet” by June 2010. Is New Zealand is on course to achieve it? That interview, which I think was in the first issue of Public Sector Technology & Management [the original name of FutureGov], was serendipitous – both of us were starting on something new. I had been in Singapore to talk to a group of government leaders. James and I managed to connect and talk about where government was going, and where each of us was hoping to go in the future. In 2004, the picture was starting to become clear. It wasn’t just about transforming government through technology - it was about making a bigger shift. It was about transforming culture, people and values. The idea that that by 2010 government would be transformed has an implication that once you get there, your work is done. This is clearly ludicrous. Strategies to improve government performance do not have an end stage. There is always opportunity to develop them. My former boss, the head of the public service, had a vision for this bigger change – the Development Goals for State Services – and e-government was embedded in this wider transformation agenda as “Networked State Services” - one of six goals.

I’m not sure others in the region have done this. When we updated the e-government strategy in 2006, we set out three indicators for achievement of Networked State Services. First, we measured the grouping of services/transactions that apply technology to allow an individual - from one place at the same time - to access multiple programmes. The second measure was synchronisation of transactions across channels – email, web site, call centres, whatever. Thirdly, we measured the extent to which technology supports a user having to give the same information to government only once – driving out duplication of data and duplication of effort. At that stage in 2006, there were a lot of agencies putting services online, but the citizen had to jump through a number of different hoops to get them all together.

In that strategy update, we also looked ahead to a new goal for 2020. We were talking about participation, interaction and consultation. That was the long game. I am very proud of the team that picked this as the key issue in 2006, as it has now become mainstream thinking. There would be networks rather than hierarchies.

There were would be big change. But because it was not clear what the changes would be, it was important to start the dialogue about how technology would affect the links between government and the citizen. It is so important to advance with technology and match your channels with the citizen experience in the real (non-government) world. These channels will only be successful if they’re designed from the point of view of the citizen, not the government agency. People want straightforward things from government. They want polite, prompt services that will stand the test of time, and increasingly they are wanting to be listened to.

Another goal was joined-up service delivery by 2007. Would you say this was satisfactorily achieved? Definitely, yes. The 2007 goal was that technology was integral to government services. In June 2007, networks and internet technologies were regularly used to deliver government information and services, and New Zealanders could interact and transact with government across the variety of channels they are familiar with in their daily lives. The technology was well integrated within individual agencies. But were we going as far as wanted to in terms of joined up services between government agencies? No we weren’t. That’s why we set the indicators for 2010 to drive towards more joined up service delivery.

How did the way in which New Zealanders access government change over the five years you were GCIO? It shifted online. New Zealanders were increasingly using banking and trading goods on the internet, and were wondering why they couldn’t access government online. Now all imports to and exports from New Zealand are done online. You can record the buying and selling of property and motor vehicles on the internet - there is no paper involved. Now the Inland Revenue’s cost of tax collection has gone down because a large percentage of people do their tax returns online. You can register your car, and although it will be a few years before you can apply for a driver’s licence online, most individual agency transactions are available online. It really depends on what the customer expects, and the extent to which an agency uses incentives to drive transactions online. Welfare work has to involve personal connections, obviously, because welfare is not just about paying benefits. All student loans are done online because students operate online.

The Government Shared Network (GSN) has come for some criticism, which ultimately led to your resignation. What is your response to those critics? Looking back, what we set out to do in 2005 was to improve government information security while connecting departments and reducing telecommunications costs. As the internet was getting more dangerous, we had to make sure our data and services continued to be secure. To do that government had to take on the role of integrator, because the market did not offer a solution. Ironically, by the end of 2008, we had achieved our goals for government security, collaboration and cost reduction. As a result of industry changes, including the competition created by the GSN, the total cost for government broadband went down. But unfortunately, there wasn’t sufficient uptake of the network to cover the ongoing operating costs, and government decided not to continue to subsidise the GSN; now there is a transition to an outsourced private service.

Given where the industry wasin 2004/5, the GSN was the only path we could go down. And in 2009, the right choice is to engage the private sector. It has been, in a sense, the natural evolution for the service. I’m not sure I could distil down precisely what the criticism was, but at its root, the project failed because it did not break even. We had 15 agencies using it, but we needed double that for the network to be financially viable – in a sense the model was set up wrong. Criticisms in the report [written by the diplomat and administrator Neil Walter] were primarily related to the way the project had been run, rather than the end result. There was untidiness in the way the project’s governance system was set up, and I think those criticisms were accurate – for example we hadn’t produced monthly reports that were expected for a project of that size. I accept those criticisms. But remember that we were effectively a start-up within government. We needed a degree of flexibility. You have to take risks if you are going to drive change. Sometimes you get the risk equation wrong.

The nature of reporting on the public sector is such that once questioning takes a certain line, it is impossible to find a way out of it. Look at what has happened in the United Kingdom, with the major health IT project that is having some difficulties; often the judgements people make are based on less than a comprehensive understanding of the facts. In the private sector, it can often be more a case of ‘this is what we achieved, never mind how we did it’.

Do you feel that the failure of the GSN was unfairly reported? The media did their best to report it as they saw it, but a partially successful project is not as big a story as a failed government project. And the nature of the media is to take a complex story and simplify it. Opinions were formed in 2008 on a project that began in 2004 when the telco industry was completely different.

How would you rate your achievements over the last five years? Massive. If you look back at where we started in 2004, no one can doubt that the shared services we launched – an identity verification service, a Public Sector Intranet, and a state-of-the-art government portal in particular – now deliver great value for taxpayer dollars. We developed ground-breaking policy and guidelines in the areas of Digital Rights Management, participation, treatment of Intellectual Property in software contracts, and use of offshore ICT providers; we have a blog going, and had built a genuine sense of momentum and optimism.

What were your biggest achievements? The major legacy is iGovt, which is a way for citizens to interact with government through a secure portal with a simple log-on feature. It proved to be a cornerstone in online service delivery and won international recognition. I am pleased that I created a culture to never stop pushing the boundaries. Part of that was to recognise that when you try new things, sometimes they don’t work. In our use of wikis and blogs we’ve made mistakes. And the thing about social media is that when you make mistakes you make them in public. In 2007, we created a wiki of draft legislation of the Police Act, and we had to pull back a bit. But if you don’t try new things, you won’t succeed. If a bank manager never had a failed loan, then they’re not lending aggressively enough. But it‘s not always the same in government – you need to consciously and actively manage the risk associated with change. Finally, the introduction of the Gateway methodology to manage the assurance of all major government projects – both ICT and other major investments – provides a robust and enduring framework for improved government performance.

What are the key lessons learned from your experience as a government CIO? If you could live your time again, what would you have done differently? I would have changed almost nothing in how I fulfilled the GCIO role. But there were a few things I learned along the way. The first is to choose to do the things that you know can really make a difference. I read Michelle D‘Auray (Canada‘s first GCIO) say that government CIOs fail because they try to do too much. Second, make sure you’ve got the right people around you, and support them when they take risks. I was fortunate in that I inherited a good team and there wasn’t a need for a big clear out when I arrived. There was enough quality to ensure that we were able to evolve and build momentum.

Third, learn from what other GCIOs have done, whether that’s Ann Steward [Australia], Ken Cochrane [Canada], John Suffolk [UK] or Vivek Kundra, (and Karen Evans before him) [USA]. The job of information sharing used to be done by consultants, but now we’re better at talking to each other to determine what works and what doesn’t. These conversations take place at all levels within each of the jurisdictions.

So are you an advocate of exporting e-governments models, as South Korea and Singapore have tried to do? Every government is unique because of the nature of the political system and the citizens it serves. To take a single government’s approach to technology then export it wholesale is not plausible –unless you’re starting from scratch. In New Zealand, we think that the private sector is much better than government at operating commercially, and our approach is to encourage companies to go overseas, sell their services and use the New Zealand government as a reference.

What is your advice for GCIOs following in your footsteps in New Zealand, and for GCIOs across the region? Two things are important. First, to understand what your government wants, and align your work programme to the priorities of the elected officials. In New Zealand, this currently involves better front-line service delivery and reusing government data to create value. The second thing is to understand what the public wants. In my former role, we used online market research to understand what the public wanted from government online. The research targeted early adopters – digital natives already operating online – as the canaries in the coal-mine, to give us advance warning of the future. They wanted transactions to be done wholly online, not 70 per cent online, followed by a form that needed to be printed out, filled in and posted. And the most important things to them were privacy and ease of use.

It sounds so blindingly obvious, but we spend a lot of time designing things how we think they ought to be, and forget that citizens should participate in the design of the services they use – because they are voters too.

So with social media, it’s best to dive in and experiment, even though the risks are higher for government? I’ve been talking to the new people in the Obama administration recently, about the risks of open dialogue between policy makers and the public. We know that in an online world, there can be a rapid escalation of discussions into a flame ware, and maybe with Web 2.0 you don’t choose topics of discussion like gun control and marijuana use for our first set of topics! However in New Zealand we used Web 2.0 for policy development on bioethics, and we know that pre-birth treatment is a highly contentious topic. So I guess the conclusion is dive in, with your eyes open.

One of the things we learned was the need to be authentic. If you’re using social networks as marketing channels which are out of sync with your organisation’s values, you’ll be caught out really quickly. If you pretend to care but you don’t, you’re asking for trouble. When you blog and receive a reply, if you have to get clearance from your boss before posting, you lose everything about what it means to operate in social media.

Any regrets about your tenure? Ultimately we achieved what I had hoped we would. Leadership theory tells us that after five to seven years you have to move on. My career plan was to calls it quits after June 2010, when the e-government strategic goals for government transformation had been met. Another year would have been nice, but I was getting close to my use-by date, and ultimately the GSN was adjudged to have been unsuccessful. Someone had to step up and take responsibility. As a GCIO you live your life in a goldfish bowl. It’s just the way it is.

---