A sure way to disgruntle a gruntled employee is to change the computer system. Someone is happily working away on Word for Windows or WordPerfect or some other favourite program and suddenly an order comes from on high that the place is to transfer to Ami-Pro or Excel or something else. There are several possible reasons: an arrogant new boss wants everyone else to change to what he is used to (and it is usually a he); a boss who is good at business but knows nothing about human nature or information-technology buys an upgrade and cross-over to a new program at a very good price; a boss who knows a lot about information technology but nothing about human nature upgrades hopelessly inefficient software. Several people in the public sector have expressed horror to me privately recently about sudden pending changes; and I’m sure the private sector is just as bad. At the moment, though, the public-sector is (to use a rabbit-shooting cliche) in the spotlight. Last week the Department of Finance began its softening up of other departments with the report of the Information Technology Review Group. Its main recommendation was the appointment of a Chief Information Officer within the Department of Finance to clean up the way the Commonwealth uses information.
This chief will not be very popular in the departments which have basically run their own IT fiefdoms since information technology was first introduced into the Federal Public Service (when a phone was put into the Treasury in 1901). His chief is going to be a little like the bosses mentioned about who set about disgruntling gruntled employees _ except he will be doing it to whole departments. Now, departments do not like interference from other departments (least of all finance) at the best of times, but interference in the IT area goes to the heart. This is because it reaches into nearly every aspect of what every department does. At present the Australian Public Service has 100,000 personal computers and dozens of very large mainframes dotted about the country, though mainly in Canberra.
Several of the shortcomings the new chief has to look at are: Departments with large under-used computer systems that would be much more efficient if they did the work of two or three departments. (Departmental co-operation; never been done before). Departments with large IT sections doing just the that department’s IT when outside companies specialising in IT could do the whole thing much cheaper. Failure to seize the opportunities of the economies of scale that a $2 billion a year purchasing order draws (though it must be remembered that a large chunk of that is already committed because of multi-year contracts). Failure to get a semblance of efficient uniformity because different departments use different programs and different platforms.
We have the makings of an interdepartmental war here. Finance’s agenda is cost cutting especially through out-sourcing or privatisation; whereas other departments want the things they have traditionally wanted _ lots of ever-expanding programs and control. The new chief is going to meet some suborn resistance _ some of it quite justified. Some of it will come from quite low down. The review mentioned the several sorts of word-processor and spreadsheet programs in the service, ominously hinting that someone might decide that the whole service will use the same programs on the ground of efficiency. A guerrilla war will break out. People will use their favourite programs on their “”personal” computers and resist change (for what they see as the worse) to the end.
The task for the new chief at this end of the scale is not to make sure the programs are the same, but to make sure they are compatible: that a document or spreadsheet created in one can be read in another. It does not matter much which program the thing was created on. There may indeed be a great efficiency dividend out of this. Programs tend to be most compatible when raw text, numbers and formulas are transferred. They tend to be less compatible when fancy formatting and distracting graphics are used. It might mean a welcome emphasis on substance rather than form. In the meantime, any cost-benefit analysis of changes to IT has to factor in the heavy costs of staff resistance.