Legacy, that is, systems that work (and have worked for a couple of decades or longer in many cases) both do the lion’s share of the transactional work in government, but also hold back the realisation of many policy aspirations.

Our legacy systems are so entwined in our overall architecture with dozens (even hundreds) of interfaces and connections, and complicated code bases that few understand, that changes are carefully handled and shephered through a rigorous process whenever work needs to be done. We’ve seen what goes wrong when this isn’t handled with the utmost care. There were the problems at the TSB, or at Natwest, RBS and Tesco Bank, for instance.

The big problem we are facing looks like this:

Our policy teams, and indeed our IT teams, have much bigger aspirations for what could be achieved than the current capability of systems.

We want to replace those systems, but trying to deliver eveything that we can do today, as well as even more capability, is a high risk, big bang strategy. We’ve seen what goes wrong when we try to do everything in a single enormous project, whether that be the Emergency Services Network, the e-Borders programme, Universal Credit etc.

But we also know that the agile, iterative approach, results in us getting very much less than we have today with the promise that we will get more over future releases, though the delivery timetable could stretch out some time with some uncertainty.

The agile approach is an easy sell if you aren’t replacing anything that exists today. Monzo, the challenger bank, for instance, launched with a pre-paid debit card and then worked to add current accounts and other products. It didn’t try and open a full bank on day one – current accounts, debit cards, credit cards, loans, mortgages etc would have taken years to deliver, absorbed a fortune and delayed any chance to test the product in the market.

It’s not, then, either/or but somehow both/and. How do we deliver more policy capability whilst replacing some of what we have and do so at a risk that is low enough (or manageable enough) to make for a good chance of success?

Here’s a slide that I put up at a conference in 2000 that looked at some ways that we might achieve that. I think there’s something here still – where we build (at the left hand end), some thin horizontal layers that hide the complexity of government … and on the right hand side we build some narrow, top to bottom capabilities and gradually build those out.

It’s certainly not easy. But it’s a way ahead.

Original source – In The Eye Of The Storm

Comments closed