| LEARNING PROCESS IS PART OF THE DEAL |
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The problems with eNatis stem from bad governance, not bad ideas Management Review Business Day 23 July Jonathan Yudelowitz THE LONG QUEUES, FRUSTRATION AND CHAOS at vehicle licensing offices contradicted the transport ministry’s initial assurances that eNatis was working. The dissonance between the public relations and reality indicated that things were fundamentally wrong. With hindsight, one hopes all role players will learn the right lessons. One hopes they will realise where they went wrong and avoid blaming, shaming and spin, so that the implementation of future systems can benefit. eNatis affects the whole of society and the economy; its lessons apply equally to implementation of large systems in state functions as well as other organisations. Large electronic systems have many benefits. They handle drudgery, add value to business and revolutionise the government’s interface with the public. Implementation is always difficult; the new system supplants the many comfortable ways individuals did their jobs before – whether those ways were adaptive, illogical or idiosyncratic. People freeze or resist if they do not immediately grasp the potential of the entire system. Such resistance is often a healthy, productive scepticism (particularly after the rapidly fading memories of the dotcom bubble) which prevents them being fooled by charlatans or romantic idealists. Besides, the process of learning to use a new concept or system is not linear; it is an iterative process, involving lots of trial and error. Few people mastered the intricacies of a personal computer, a VCR or any other gadget immediately after a reading the instruction manual. eNatis shows us that good intentions, policy statements and a transformation agenda are not good enough. Being in the public eye, eNatis’s failure stimulated quick learning and extra resource allocation. Suddenly, all the new servers and other essential investments – whose importance the planners, project managers and government officials had apparently underestimated – were brought on stream. However, government and politicians are not the only ones to blame. The IT industry is quick to promise solutions to everything; many of those promises it cannot keep. The dilemma implicit in all change processes seems to have been ignored: one needs a project plan to prioritise and sequence activities and enable measurement through milestones. However, both the future and people’s adoption of new ways are essentially unpredictable. One has to “learn as one goes”, being cognisant of, but not limited by, a project plan. It is clear from the public auditor’s report that problems and shortfalls in the initial planning and budgeting were highlighted but ignored (a headline The Star of May 23 read: Transport department says it’s in dark on eNatis audit). eNatis, like most systems implementation failures, is attributable to bad governance, not bad ideas. Mature governance is a process through which all role players face up to the dilemmas implicit in complex reality together. The rules and role clarification merely provide focus and boundaries. Good governance itself demands the self-esteem necessary to be confident enough to confront others with unpopular or tough opinions, while having enough humility to listen to feedback, and admit mistakes and helplessness. Mature governance is not just a marking of milestone achievement on a project calendar; it focuses on resolving issues and dilemmas, not on ego and image. No-one can accurately predict how a new project of eNatis’s size will roll out. There are too many unpredictable variables: interest rates changing the cost profile, people leaving, new people having to be trained, and so on. Good governance means dealing intelligently with underestimates, the need for more budget, or dealing with the possibility that the system itself might not work – and then dealing with the problem as soon as possible once relevant information has come to light. Priorities and resources need to be re-allocated based on insight gained from experience. Conflict between the plan and reality, clients and consultants, needs to be continually resolved. The failure of eNatis is an opportunity for the transport ministry to learn from experience. Facing the mistakes made is a necessary process in a culture that knows how to create new ways of doing things in a sustainable manner. Staff members need to be properly and thoroughly trained to cope with new systems. They need to be shown how to make sense of them. Users need to understand the purpose of the change, how it compares to what they are already doing, its effect on all the stakeholders they work with and, not least, they need to know how to mess up the system in order to understand the right way of operating it. One can assume that none of this was properly done. Some of the root causes of the failure lie in the unfamiliarity of the idea, the lack of implementation competence, and short-term thinking – we don’t seem to know how to invest for the long term. |
