Last month in Phuket I had the honour of being asked to join a small panel and give an award for excellence in Technology Leadership. This is an awards process run by Alphabet Media’s Public Sector Technology & Management magazine that specifically recognizes leaders in the Asia Pacific region.
Government leaders and members of our civil service are, in my opinion, some of the unsung heroes of society today. Having asked many of my friends in these positions what the rewards are for doing these jobs I’m often told very personal stories about how a difference can be made that truly changes society as a whole.
Working in government can be tough for a number of reasons. In business you can quickly make decisions about shutting down or starting up business processes, moving staff into new roles, selecting particular technologies to solve ICT issues and or your customer will be for a service that you are building. In government these choices are just harder, the number of stakeholders involved is phenomenal compared to the business world and choices like who you want to serve and who you don’t is just not an option for many government employees.
Still, with all of these challenges government people just quietly get on with the job solving problems that business people would define as colossal in nature on a daily basis.
When Alphabet Media approached Microsoft and asked us if we would like to be involved in an awards program for excellence in Government we jumped at the chance. Awards, specifically in the area of technology use in government, seemed like a minor but worthwhile way of recognizing some of the great work that we encounter in government every working day as we work with customers and partners in the Asia Pacific Region.
Personally I have only been working in Asia for a little over a year, so being new to the region I am still learning a great deal on a daily basis. When I first arrived our local team gave me a copy of Public Sector Technology and Management as part of the reading involved in my induction process. Since then I’ve been reading the magazine on a regular basis, and it was obvious that this was the right organization for us to partner with for this type of award given the reach that they have around Asia and the way that they cover a broad range of projects, public sector issues and the focus that the publication has on influential people in our region.
As I mentioned, the specific award that I was invited to help judge was the “Technology Leadership” award; this had two meanings for me.
The first is around leadership itself. Making real change in the public sector can be a real challenge, and to get around the issues that any project will face takes real leadership. It takes a clear vision of where you want the project to end up and it takes strength of character to share your vision with others and expect them to support and follow you in whatever direction you are heading.
The second meaning involves kick starting the use of new technologies in the public sector.
A couple of decades ago a visionary technologist and marketer by the name of Geoffrey Moore wrote a book that many people in the industry still read today called “Crossing the Chasm”.
The premise of the book was a pretty simple one. Moore introduced something that he called the technology adoption curve, breaking down the time it took to adopt new technology down by five audiences. The five groups are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and finally a group that he called laggards. His book talks about how support and skills grow up around each of the audiences, the innovators having little or no support, through to a peek for the early/late majority when you would find the highest number of partners and other experts being available to support the adoption of the technology in question.
In the Public Sector it is sometimes hard to find innovators who will kick start this curve, showing the world how new technology can be used to help serve citizens and businesses better. Very often technology adoption in Government tries to begin somewhere around that early majority part of the curve, unfortunately the market has not been given the chance to grow the services partners and experts that are needed to make the technology work, so we sometimes see higher numbers of early failures than we would see in the commercial sector.
When evaluating the award for “Technology Leadership” we were looking for both leadership in terms of driving significant change through an organization, and an example of an organization that had done something truly innovative with technology in today’s market.
The choice was hard to make, as they often are in these situations. The reach of PSTM meant that the organizers had collected some very powerful examples of Technology Leadership.
We finally settled on the work that had been done by the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore. Their project goes by the name of the “Inland Revenue Interactive Network (IRIN)” which has been a multiyear project for IRAS.
At this point I have to admit to having a personal passion for the business of taxation, having worked at one point with the Inland Revenue in my home country of the United Kingdom. This personal passion means that I have been watching the truly innovative work that has been taking place in Singapore for a few years now.
The project kicked off a few years ago with the senior leaders at IRAS looking very carefully at the way that tax was collected in Singapore, and how those business processes affected local citizens and business. The decision at the end was to drive an almost complete redesign of the business process that managed tax in the country, and of course refresh the technology that supported those business processes.
The end result is the Inland Revenue Interactive Network that is designed to make it very simple for citizens and businesses to interact with IRAS and manage their own tax affairs. A number of studies over the last ten years have shown that simplicity of working with Government for mandatory filings makes for a better place to live and a better place to do to business.
IRIN was clearly demonstrating technology leadership by both of my measurement criteria, and at the same time continues to make Singapore a more competitive environment within our overall Asian economy.
On a personal note, given my passion for this area of Government business I will reiterate what I said on the night when the award was handed to IRAS. Having lived in Singapore for less than a year, I am genuinely looking forward to using IRIN early next year as I file my own tax return for the first time!