Little Hoover: GovOps Secretary Calls Out Blame Culture, Compliance Fixation

The previous iterations of the Little Hoover Commission’s hearings on IT project delivery heard practical input on how to improve state IT undertakings.

The third and final hearing in the series boiled down to the need for drastic cultural bureaucratic change. Government Operations Secretary Nick Maduros gave candid testimony that dragged the state’s culture of blame and its apparent confusion between rigid compliance and project success.

“We have built a system that, quite frankly, has the wrong incentives. We've confused technical compliance with actual success, and we haven't built a system that rewards success and rewards thrift,” Maduros said.

In fact, thrift is often punished the following budget cycle in the form of baseline funding reductions.

The focus on highlighting project shortcomings through audits, while wins are simply noted as “no findings,” underscored the secretary’s point. Maduros was not advocating for reduced oversight, far from it, but instead a system that looks holistically at how effective the work being done is for the departments and the citizens they serve.

“There is a lot of potential for blame and not a lot of celebration of our successes. And part of what that yields is a culture of technical compliance, because what is rewarded is that you comply with all of the required procedures,” he told commissioners.

Another area where IT projects often falter is with the bureaucracy that the secretary said “hopelessly blurred the lines of authority,” which will ultimately “hopelessly [blur] the lines of accountability.”

Maduros, like several previous expert witnesses in the commission's series of hearings on this issue, also called out the state’s self-destructive love affair with never-ending IT mega projects — pointing to the ongoing payroll system project as one such example.

Rather than building a massive system and letting off the gas until it's at the end of its useful life, Maduros said technology should be built and maintained to keep it functional for as long as possible.

“We need to lose the notion that we build a thing, and then it exists, and then it falls apart over the years, and then 20 years later we come back and try and get another giant chunk of money to build it again,” he said.

Many of the issues around IT stem back to the state’s budget process, where departments are forced to ask for emergency funding to keep projects on track and above water. Maduros floated the idea of an IT version of architectural revolving funds that departments could use to keep up with maintenance and basic operations of critical systems and projects.

As for organizational improvements, the secretary said he sees the California Department of Technology shifting toward a cross-government consulting role rather than acting as an oversight “hall monitor.” In that vision, he said, the knowledge base would be collective and less tied to individual leaders and would ease the flow of critical information between disparate departments.

Maduros noted the state is paying more attention to pricing, adding that many departments are paying different rates for the same tools.

“We're building a price checker tool that I think can save hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said. “Everyone should be paying the lowest price possible, as far as I'm concerned, and so we're bringing all that data to bear to drive purchases to the lowest price providers.”

Center for Digital Government* Executive Director Rob Lloyd also shared his unique perspective on project delivery, noting that government IT in the U.S. has a fairly bleak track record — some 0.5 percent of projects land on time and on budget.

He said alignment and clarity early in the projects are two of the most critical components of success, while executive sponsorship will determine the project’s longer-term staying power. He sees procurement as one of the prime areas ripe for innovation.

*The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, Industry Insider — California’s parent company.