A Moment of Reckoning for Humanitarian and Public Sector
In the public and humanitarian domain—as in business and commerce—it is the fabric of data, security, apps, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence that makes possible much of what society takes for granted. An ecosystem of interwoven technologies, often invisible to the end recipient of any service, orchestrate the vast, historically unthinkable systems through which students are educated, police are assigned to duty, the hungry are fed, and the most vulnerable migrants are transported from conflict, housed, and treated for their injuries.
I often use the word "fabric" to describe this fact of modern life, for it is indeed an intricate tapestry of data and computing infrastructure through which modernity is stitched together.
The recent weeks have set that tapestry ablaze both in the form of the experts who weave it being enticed or forced from their jobs and in the sudden evaporation of funds upon which these organizations rely to maintain, repair, and strengthen its fibers.
Leaders of these organizations now face a moment of reckoning and—in the chaos of that moment—an opportunity to craft the modern, technologically nimble institutions resilient enough to continue delivering the crucial services upon which their publics so desperately depend. They must use technology to drive out cost, with the core thesis being that to emerge stronger, they must become more modern organizations that use technology to reduce cost and improve services, rather than viewing technology as an ever-expanding cost center.
Those that seize the opportunity may survive. Those who let it slip away will fail.
Get apps, data, and AI components into users' hands very quickly
The age of the multi-year technology project was already in its twilight. Now these humanitarian and public sector agencies must nearly entirely divest themselves of that weight (not that most of them were particularly good at executing those types of projects, anyway).
Through platform technologies like Microsoft's Fabric and Power Platform, these organizations now have the ability to turn solutions around to their users in a matter of weeks. These solutions may not be as beautiful or contain every imaginable bell and whistle, but the priority needs be knocking down challenges to the mission and creating value very quickly. Many humanitarian and public sector organizations won't be able to pay technology consultancies and software implementers to build much of this, so their focus ought to be on enabling the workforces they can retain to do more with less, and to augment knowledge gaps with "guided engineering", essentially providing colleagues who remain with the technical and architectural guidance they need to build capabilities themselves.
The best architects and expert engineers will be called on to cover orders of magnitude more ground with less support, a chasm that can only be closed by enabling colleagues with the expertise in the technologies that make rapid turnaround possible.
Focus the most complex efforts on the highest strategic priorities
The mind of every executive leader I know is racing as they realign their strategic priorities for this new era. Much of the technology to enable these changing priorities should follow the same rapid-time-to-value pattern I've outlined above, but some of it will be too ambitious, too untested, to far-reaching to quite achieve that kind of rapid turnaround. These are efforts on which organizations need to place their complexity chips. This year (or next) is probably not the year for business-as-usual modernization of your ERP. This is go-big-or-go-home year. To the extent that an organization has the budget to invest in complex technologies, its leaders must be ruthless in their investment in truly game changing technologies that will alter their long-term trajectory. They need to focus their big development bets on their strategic priorities rather than frittering limited resources away on things that can be achieved at lighter weight and lower cost.
Maximize the investments that you've already made
Organizations that are some combination of lucky and forward-thinking may already have technologies in place that will help them weather the storm. The aforementioned Fabric and Power Platform are excellent examples, for they are notoriously good at squeezing more from less. Some organizations may have also, smartly, begun to transition away from point solutions towards a more ecosystem-oriented architecture upon which they can build without reinventing the proverbial wheel. Others may have made investments that are very domain-specific to their particular mission and purpose.
They now need to load as much functionality and realize as much value possible from what they already have today. They must therefor prioritize meeting the above two goals (rapid value and strategic priorities) by leveraging investments already made. A big part of this will be channeling the efforts of technology projects that do get funded into using technology products that already exist, rather than inventing the wheel every time as I have seen again and again in the many organizations that seem to have (and pay for) twelve different departmental-specific solutions to the same problem. The latter is what we call "technical debt", which almost nobody can any longer afford.
Eliminate duplicative investments to reduce costs
On which note...
As time and budget permit, these organizations need to shrink their cost basis and eliminate the technical debt that drives those costs ever skyward. This will come in, over time, phasing out the one-off point solutions that consume budget to duplicate functionality. I can think of hundreds of examples across dozens of organizations just as I write this sentence, so I'll leave the reader to ponder your own.
Get paused initiatives back on track when budget permits
...but don't do it the old-fashioned way.
I have found that estimates to build critical technologies always come in much higher than they should because (a) every team and field office demand bells, whistles, and customizations to suit their particular way of doing things, and (b) these technologies must integrate with those that came before it, or have the data from its predecessor systems migrated in.
But, as CIO I worked with many years ago once told me, "Data migration and integration is always the long pole in the tent".
As budget allows paused initiatives to get back on track, these initiatives must be scrutinized in accordance with the principles I've outlined above:
Is there a "rapid time to value" approach that would suffice, here?
Does this initiative really offer an outsized impact to our strategic priorities?
Are we fully maximizing investments we've already made?
Are we reducing or spawning new duplicative technology and technical debt?
Some of these paused initiatives will get a second life in another time, because many are critical to the fabric of the modern world. But most will have their shot at redemption on a leaner budget than what the bygone era might have allowed. Here we need to take a bit of a "rapid value" approach, guiding colleagues to build as much of the functionality as possible, admitting that we can't customize for every whim, and then separately costing "the long pole in the tent" such that tradeoffs can be made as we decide what's truly important, and what is not.
Above all, this moment must serve as a clean break from the old ways, not as an interregnum after which we'll return to business as usual. There can be no going back.
