22 October 2023
By Katja Hemmerich
This week, the Fifth Committee resumes consideration of the proposed new information and communications technology (ICT) strategy for the UN Secretariat. The strategy was initially proposed last year as a result of a recommendation from the Advisory Committee for Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ) for a new strategy. The ACABQ however raised a number of concerns with the current proposal related to a lack of detail and clarity on how the strategy will be implemented, what it will cost and how it addresses gaps and shortcomings from the previous strategy (A/77/7/Add.22). Consideration of the proposed strategy was then deferred to this session of the Fifth Committee.
The weaknesses highlighted by ACABQ are not unique to the UN’s Office of Information Technology (OICT). Many IT entities in national governments have, and are, struggling with similar challenges of balancing traditional IT support, maintenance and security functions with adoption of new technologies and digital transformation. Many Western governments, in particular, applied decentralized approaches to their IT functions. The previous ICT strategy for the UN Secretariat took a very centralized approach. Neither has been considered effective in allowing an appropriate level of IT governance, innovation or digital transformation, so our spotlight explores these challenges and a new approach of Digital Service Teams being used by several governments to overcome them. Using their lesson learnt, we suggest some questions for further consideration by OICT, Fifth Committee members and OICT's client departments within the UN Secretariat.
Why the organization of IT is complicated
OICT’s previous strategy for the period 2015-2020 was focused on centralizing limited IT resources within OICT to use them more efficiently, reduce duplication and bring a more coherent approach to what was not just a decentralized but fragmented IT landscape. Prior to the strategy, there were 2,340 different IT applications being used across the UN Secretariat, meaning they also needed resources to maintain and update them. By 2019, this had been reduced to 988, which presumably also led to significant cost savings (see A/74/353). Early research on centralized IT functions across the publics sector also demonstrated that:
"Centralized CIO offices have the advantage of making decisions more effectively and keeping oversight in a single organization.” - Brown and Grant, “Framing the frameworks: A review of IT governance research”, 2005
Centralized decision-making is helpful in rationalizing duplicative technologies, rolling out enterprise-wide systems like Umoja and Inspira and ensuring coherent governance of IT infrastructure, assets and systems. Despite improvements in these areas, OICT's previous approach does not seem to have yielded all the expected benefits of a centralized strategy. The Board of Auditors still maintains concerns about effective IT governance and oversight in the Secretariat (A/76/5 (Vol. I)). Paradoxically, the centralized approach did not prevent management from insisting on highly customized approaches to the new ERP systems because “managers were reluctant to redesign business processes”. As the Joint Inspection Unit pointed out, the high level of customization of ERP systems across the UN system resulted in inflated costs, delays and a lack of realization of efficiency gains (JIU/2012/8). The proposed new ICT strategy recognizes that the previous centralized approach needs more operational flexibility, while continuing to ensure coherent IT governance. Yet, as the ACABQ points out, it fails to explain exactly what this means in practice (A/77/7/Add.22, para. 20-21).
But the UN is not alone in struggling to find and operationalize the balance between centralized control and operational flexibility in the IT space. Many national governments took somewhat different approaches but also ended up with comparable problems. E-Government and the automation or digitization of processes has largely been driven by making processes faster and more efficient, with resulting cost-savings once the change has been implemented. Many governments therefore simultaneously outsourced many of their IT services with a view to cutting budgets and getting ‘private sector level’ quality services. The minimal IT capacity hat remained in-house often lacked the technical and managerial capacity to effectively manage projects and contractors, resulting in quite significant IT disasters and reputational disasters (the repeated Obamacare website crashes are just one such example). The skeletal IT offices also struggled to be able to innovate or develop strategies to adopt new technologies that other government departments or the public found useful.
The challenge that both the UN and national governments face is that they recognize they need to facilitate innovation and digital transformation, which requires an operational understanding of business needs and freedom to ideate and explore that does not fit with highly centralized systems. However, they also need to ensure effective governance, maintenance and security of vast IT systems and data, which is subject to increased risk with greater decentralization. A further complication is that digital transformation is an evolutionary process that goes beyond the implementation of new technologies and extends organizational transformations that are hard to identify and articulate initially. Consequently, they are virtually impossible to plan and budget for, as is expected in any bureaucracy, and which has caused the ACABQ, for instance to question much of the proposed ICT Strategy.
“Digital transformation is considered a process without an end status, unlike previously designed e-government projects with a start and an end date, a measurable and defined end status, as well as a fixed budget. Instead, digital transformation is a continuous process that needs frequent adjustments of its processes, services, and products to external needs.” - Mergel et al., “Defining Digital Transformation”, 2019
A potential solution for Digital Transformation
So how can all these challenges be reconciled and addressed? One solution that has been successful at the national level is the creation of hybrid, multi-disciplinary Digital Service Teams (DST) outside of the IT office to focus on innovation and digital transformation. The IT office therefore prioritizes its resources on centralized governance and oversight of the IT landscape and maintenance and security of systems. Once innovations and digital transformation initiatives have demonstrated that they work and are ready to scale, the IT office is a key player in institutionalizing them within the IT landscape.
The creation of Digital Service Teams were based on a recognition that digital transformation is an organizational change process that is much bigger than just adopting new technologies and requires new ways of working that are not always in line with standard bureaucratic rules and procedures. The DSTs, which exist in Italy, the UK, Canada, the US and Estonia often sit in the Prime Minister or Cabinet Office, have their own budgets and unique delegation of authority to allow for faster decision-making and adaptation of procurement processes to facilitate faster experimentation with private sector partners. Perhaps most important is that they are not made up of just tech and IT experts.
“DSTs work in close collaboration with agency-level product owners or process owners. The interdisciplinary teams include experts provided by DSTs, such as design thinking, development, or acquisition experts, who then include those with the core knowledge about the processes or administrative acts to collaborate with them on a redesign or co-design of a process….The main approach used is human-centered design and development – in which the end-user is at the center of all considerations and therefore has to be included in the process.” - Ines Mergel, Digital Service Teams in Government, 2019
The Digital Service Teams are therefore one option that could be considered to operationalize the enhanced collaboration that OICT envisages with business owners across the Secretariat for innovation and digital transformation, while balancing governance and oversight imperatives. It would also allow some of the vagueness inherent to digital transformation to be ring fenced, thereby allowing more detailed planning and budgeting for the more traditional elements of the new Strategy and clarification of different delegations of authority, as requested by the ACABQ.
Digital Transformation Discussion questions
Digital Service Teams may not be the only way to address the need for balance between centralization and operational flexibility across the IT landscape, but they do provide some interesting discussion questions for OICT and Fifth Committee members to consider as they review the new ICT Strategy. Given the importance of business partners and OICT’s proposal department-specific ICT Committees, staff in other Secretariat departments may also want to consider the following questions:
What is the role of the Technology Innovation Governance Committee and how does it facilitate exploration and ideation of innovations? What authority does it have?
What is the role of ICT Innovation Networks? Are they part of OICT and how do they relate to the Technology Innovation Governance Committee? What types of expertise are part of the ICT Innovation Network?
What is the role of the entity ICT Committee, is it focused on governance or is it a tool for relationship management?
Will ‘Business relationship management’ be operationalized through staffing structures, i.e. dedicating a relationship manager to each of the 70+ Secretariat departments, or through the use of human-centered design approaches, or some combination thereof?
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