Newer posts are loading.
You are at the newest post.
Click here to check if anything new just came in.

Better, faster, cheaper ... emergent

Gov 2.0 Summit, 2010Carl Malamud gave the opening keynote at the Government 2.0 Summit yesterday and greatly magnified my disappointment at having missed the event. If you've seen Carl speak, you know he is one person on the agenda that won't give a "presentation" or a "talk." Carl is an orator from a different era. He gives speeches. Rousing, moving, elevating speeches that turn our shared history into a kind of sermon; that inform us and inspire our better angels in equal measure. This is the kind of speech whose stirring coda lifts an audience to its feet and leaves them hitting replay in their heads -- not just to pilfer the richest sound bites for their tweet streams -- but to gather it all in.


I absolutely agree with Carl that the failure in government IT is a failure to govern. We simply can't do without these things that we are trying so hard to build. Information technology is the infrastructure of governance, yet we fail to deliver it over and over again, and at great cost.


While much can be said about the business practices of the "beltway bandits," they are not exactly the modern analogs to those turn-of-the-century pharma companies Carl describes. In the world before the FDA those exploiters waged an asymmetric and undefended war on American consumers. The beltway bandits are waging a war too, but one with more conventional symmetry -- where the government on the other side is heavily armed with a bureaucracy of its own.


The end result is hardly a lion preying on sheep. A better analogy might be Mothra and Godzilla locked in a death embrace. If your view is from the side of the government it is easy to place the blame with the beltway bandits. However, get inside their world a little bit and you may see them as a bit less rapacious and a lot more hogtied. When the customer is more interested in earned value reports and paperwork than working software, well, that's what they get. The beltway bandits are without a doubt a Frankenstein's monster, but it took a Dr. Frankenstein to build them.

Really though, I don't care one whit who is to blame. The real issue is that all of this complexity of product and process keeps out participants, innovation, and success. Open access systems can experiment, innovate, and deliver things while closed or limited access systems evolve to deliver rents -- in the economic sense.


Carl's focus on open data, open systems, and misuse of intellectual property is important and relevant, as they will all contribute to moving government IT back into open access territory. But we will have to deal with the market and incentive factors as well -- and they are probably bigger. In other words, demonizing the bandits without addressing the root cause -- the lock-in incentives inherent in a single-customer market -- will just lead to new ways to lock them in.



I am beginning to be of the opinion that this approach fundamentally won't work for systems at the scale that government often finds itself building, especially as they interconnect into ever larger and more complex wholes -- even if bureaucracy wasn't an impediment.


So, if large scale software systems are like that, what do you do if you want one that is bigger or more complex than our plans-oriented methodologies can deliver? Well, our government has been busily demonstrating that you don't do it by planning harder and de-risking more aggressively.

What Carl intrinsically grasps when he suggests open data and open systems, even if he doesn't say it outright, is that government IT must recognize that it is entering a different realm, one where we need to abandon planning beyond a certain scale and adopt an approach that intentionally facilitates emergence. Intentional emergence isn't planning faster or harder, it's about structuring incentives, policies, and eco-systems to encourage the complex to emerge from the simple. This may not mean a fully atomized simplicity, but may come to look like our economy where pockets of planning coexist in an emergent ecosystem.


I'm not exactly certain how to replace systems engineering as the basis for large system emergence, but I have some ideas. They draw inspiration from the transition of a planned to market economy. Reforms to government IT should look less like a more comprehensive CMMI and more like China's market reforms of the 1980s -- less about systems engineering and more about ecosystem engineering focused on incentives and policy.



Don't be the product, buy the product!