The election is over and, hopefully, we’re all speaking to each other again. By all accounts 2016 was the most abnormal election season ever, and while our attention was focused on the drama surrounding who would become the next president, there were interesting events afoot in the government IT space that deserve more attention.
Many of us have talked for years about disruptive technologies, events and methods. I have moderated many conference sessions and panel discussions involving the notion of disruption, hoping to encourage government (and its industry partners) to find new and better products, and new and better ways to work that improve service delivery. In one session at which I was a panelist, I offered the idea that as a large state government, California has more power and more ability to shape procurements and pricing, and to influence how projects are organized. Peering over the horizon years ago, we could see some of the concepts that are now taking shape.
But change in government can be slow to materialize, and perhaps that glacial pace is responsible for some of the surprise that we’re seeing now as a few state agencies and departments in California focus on agile systems development and modular procurements. Some reactions have registered as fear; in government we are seldom encouraged to take risks, and we’re not always successful at convincing decision-makers that a new way of doing something could be much better.
Be that as it may, the impetus for new ways in government appears to be growing.
In the human services space, a small wave of federal “guidance” is suggesting to states that smaller procurements are better and an organic evolution of requirements is preferred. One of the biggest sessions at the American Public Human Services Association’s Information Systems Management Conference this year was California’s showcase of its move to agile development and modular procurement approaches to its new Child Welfare System. The feds are getting impatient with states’ efforts at connecting systems and providing a more holistic view of a person and/or a family — and the federal government is backing up its guidance with technology funding parameters. Although the federal wave seems to be confined to one department at the moment (in terms of strongly worded advice), there are plenty of signals that suggest more is to come.
In the health services arena, states other than California are making bold decisions to go “all in” with not developing software at all. At the Medicaid Enterprise Systems Conference this year, Nebraska announced it’s not building a new Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS); instead, the state is asking bidders to provide an MMIS that the state will use with its data. While not for the faint of heart, “renting” software as a service could free up public resources to focus on some of the bedrock technology that is sorely needed around data, security, privacy and confidentiality.
At the south end of the state, San Diego County is wrapping up its ConnectWellSD project that shares data between probation and health and human services, as well as external service providers — a project that started as a traditional “waterfall”-style development method and moved in-flight to an agile method of project management. As amazing as that is, the real innovation here is that ConnectWellSD is one of the first major projects demonstrating intelligent information sharing. After a decade of work to provide a holistic view of a client, ConnectWellSD demonstrates interoperability of data at scale. While this project has been underway, several other states and counties have (finally!) initiated data sharing projects that promise big benefits in seeing the whole person/family.
That connecting systems requires collaboration is a no-brainer. Yet collaboration in practice is much easier said than done. One recent report observed that “59 percent of knowledge workers experience challenges with technology,” and 71 percent of millennials said they had “a variety of challenges using the collaboration tools provided to them.” This could mean that we have kludgy tools or byzantine communications structures that inhibit collaboration.
There is a lot of work to do. Many facets of successful collaboration are not technological and really do constitute the hardest part of change. The federal investments to help states make progress with these changes is encouraging, and those states and local governments that seize the opportunity for disruption are beginning to see the intrinsic benefit of sharing data.
It’s much easier to have 20/20 vision in hindsight, and — like the election — disruption may fall into a “be careful what you wish for” category. But it certainly doesn’t have to. How you frame the message has a lot to do with how the message is received, both up and down communication channels. The biggest conversation that we should be paying attention to is the one that’s encouraging intelligent risk-taking to find a better way.
