Enterprise IT and the Big Mac

For several months I have been using Twitter at work, and solely in the form of RSS delivery of information. There are about 60 Twitter accounts I follow on my work account, all of which do nothing but run headlines. This includes several trade magazines, drudge, and a few IT centric Twitter accounts of folks who do a good job tracking information around the technology blogosphere. It wasn't until about a month ago I decided to give Twitter a try as an actual social media tool and incorporate it into the function of the blog.

It is useful? Sure, I certainly appreciate the folks who post links to useful information. As a social media tool, Twitter is useful for connecting with people I don't know. In particular I find myself following the people who are involved in Government 2.0, what essentially represents an umbrella project for the incorporation of Web 2.0 technologies into government to assist with transparency. One of the more active elements of the Government 2.0 network is the informal but well connected Government 2.0 Club. The two are not directly associated, but I'm finding more and more that the informal network works better than the formal one does, something that should surprise nobody with any experience in government.

There are a number of thought leaders and evangelists in social media that are part of the evolution towards the incorporation of Web 2.0 tools. While I admit I have not been exposed to all of them, I am finding there are two categories to describe these thought leaders:

• Academics
• IT Specialists

My impression is these are very smart people with big ideas and a broad depth and understanding of the utility of social media and Web 2.0 for information exchange. My impression is that most of these people have very little practical experience in large IT enterprises or large project implementations of software in either the public or private sector.

Dr. Mark Drapeau recently wrote an article on ReadWriteWeb titled Government 2.0: The Midlife Crisis. Ignore the flashy title, its distracting to the larger point.

Government 2.0 has reached its midlife crisis. Despite some leadership from influential individuals on using social software in government, there is still in many cases a disconnect between authorities issuing directives and ground troops carrying them out. In some corridors of Washington, this impervious middle section of government is jokingly referred to as "the clay layer," the layer through which no light shall pass. Resistant to change and adhering strictly to doctrine even when nonsensical, people in the clay layer can halt progress. Despite their intentions and being in a strategic position, they often stop the progress being called for.

This midlife crisis was pointed out by one of Government 2.0's most outspoken evangelists, Chris Rasmussen, of the U.S. intelligence community, at a well-attended event held recently in the Washington area. As covered in a widely read trade press article, Rasmussen lamented the impossibly high standards that social tools are held to, even within government firewalls. Furthermore, many tools, such as Intellipedia, are used as supplements to (rather than substitutes for) legacy systems. As Clay Shirky once quipped, this is like putting an engine on a rowboat to make the oars go faster.

At this crossroads, "creative destruction" will require hard decisions about shutting down certain systems and processes and focusing employees on new ones. Employees at the grassroots level need to be given true executive empowerment, rather than dictatorial directives. But how to achieve this?

I'm 33 years old, and after reading about the work both of these gentleman have done, I'm going to take a WAG that Dr. Drapeau is a few years older than I am, and Chris Rasmussen is around my age. I would guess both have considerably more education than I do (easy one with Dr. Drapeau) since I never went to college. I'm also going to guess that my nearly 19 years of IT experience, with 14 years in large enterprises, trumps both of their resumes in Enterprise IT experience. When I read Dr. Drapeau's article, I honestly felt really good about the direction of Web 2.0 and government, because while I have no idea what is happening behind the scenes if the descriptions in this article are accurate, it looks very familiar.

Dr. Drapeau describes what he calls the "the clay layer" which he describes as part of the crisis. I believe Dr. Drapeau is misreading the situation; this isn't a crisis, this is what progress looks like. The analogy goes like this:

Dr. Drapeau has lifted the bun off the top of the Big Mac and has discovered the special sauce in all large IT organizations, private and public sector. The special sauce has turned out to be an ugly orange goo, chunky and not very appealing. When he shakes his Big Mac, the orange goo wiggles like a gross jelly, and as he attempts to pour the special sauce off his Big Mac he discovers with horror that it doesn't slide, but it oozes until it flops off his burger in a chunk. Even if he was to use a napkin to remove the special sauce, he would discover it only makes a bigger mess and he never really gets it off his Big Mac. The special sauce has already soaked up into the bun, and it has embedded itself into the cheese. If Government 2.0 is going to enjoy their Big Mac, they are unfortunately going to have to eat the special sauce. In the process, they will likely learn why it is called special.

As you probably realize by now, the special sauce is the bureaucracy one finds in large technology projects in all large enterprise environments, and government has plenty of special sauce. These layers come in the form of people resistant to change, programs that lack the flexibility to utilize additional technologies without adding more ugly layers, and restrictions that are inherent to the large organizations as a function of business.

One example might be a career officer who has been doing it the same way for many years, and it is the most efficient way there is; just ask him/her. Another example might be a work flow process for government projects where the addition of Web 2.0 has limited if any benefit. A third example will be any social media or public Web 2.0 activity that lacks a network other than the existing secure backbone to operate from. Quite frankly, public transparency with social media and the security standards of the DoD are incompatible, and alternatives will take time and money to implement.

I understand the frustration that comes with the perspective of Chris Rasmussen regarding the slow adoption of Intellipedia as a standard, and favoritism towards legacy systems. The evidence suggests that Chris Rasmussen is a real evangelist, thought leader, and pioneer when it comes to using Web 2.0 to connect information horizontally. However, his comments suggest a bit of inexperience in large enterprise IT project implementations.

For years most hospitals required paper trails with their electronic medical records, or what IT folks call "doing everything twice" as part of EMR implementations. Some Government health agencies still require paper trails today. Even Wal-Mart required their store fronts to maintain paper trails on inventory, sales, and payroll data for years despite efficient utilization of databases and modern technology. What these thought leaders are seeing are not new IT problems, they simply lack the experience to realize it. The problem isn't the ideas and implementations specifically, it is the ideas and implementations in context of the existing environment. In the end, Intellipedia may not win over the legacy crowd until the legacy software ends up going away due to factors not related to Intellipedia. In dozens of government agencies, Windows NT and 2000 are still in use (despite lack of vender support) supporting legacy Visual Basic applications, and what makes these legacy applications eventually go away isn't the presence of better software that was implemented years ago, rather that the hardware is finally giving way and the legacy software doesn't work on the latest versions of Windows OS.

As bitter a pill it may be, that is what the special sauce can taste like in large Enterprise IT environments.

The purpose of Dr. Drapeau's article is to suggest the crossroads for government and Web 2.0 is on the horizon, and it is time to plan for the road ahead. For the Navy and Coast Guard, I have some suggestions.

Both the Navy and the Coast Guard have moved beyond the point where they need convincing Web 2.0 technologies have something to offer, and both services are leveraging public Web 2.0 efforts with top down leadership models that easily fit into the chain of command rigid models of the military services. By definition social media technologies are multi-dimensional networking tools, but military services are hierarchical organizations with a rigid command structure. This environmental condition will create challenges in adopting Web 2.0 technologies.

I get the impression through news reports covering Web 2.0 in the Navy and Coast Guard that the process is currently working on development of business strategy models, understanding value in and out, addressing data security concerns, and evaluating training costs. It is important to note that the private sector is not demonstrating significant or widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, so the slow adoption of Web 2.0 is not unique to Government or the military services. Large public and private IT enterprises both have the special sauce, and both sectors appear to be at around the same point of evolution with these new technologies.

Any change of software is hard, and those changes always require training. In the case of the Navy and Coast Guard, network infrastructure limitations today prevent to a large extent any sort of public connectivity with Web 2.0, so internal collaboration technologies are obviously the best place to start to overcome IT infrastructure and security concerns (and save costs in implementation). The necessity to get ROI is also important, so utilization of these technologies should be along a broad but consistent sector of the organization. As I work through the business processes of the Navy and the Coast Guard and evaluate Web 2.0 technologies, it seems to me the way ahead would be to utilize Wiki technology for collaboration, and allow the social media aspect of Web 2.0 develop at the pace of IT infrastructure upgrades.

So applying Wiki technology specifically to the Navy, if it was me, I would look at it like this:

The Littoral Combat Ship maintenance model is something I admit being more than a little nervous about. This shore based maintenance reliance means more ships than crews, and as crews rotate lessons could be lost. It seems to me that a fleet maintenance Wiki for the Littoral Combat Ship would be a very useful and appropriate way to utilize collaboration technologies, particularly as the Littoral Combat Ship ends up distributed to forward ports globally. The LCS comes with a lot of moving parts, it isn't just the hulls but the modules as well, and because the fleet maintenance implementation is going to be both new and unique anyway, it seems to me that utilizing Web 2.0 technologies from the beginning will increase the likelihood of successful utilization. By beginning new programs with Web 2.0 tools as opposed to evolving traditional/existing/legacy tiered applications to use 2.0 tools, the potential for success increases greatly because the tools become part of the process.

The Coast Guard has fleet maintenance too, and Web 2.0 collaboration technologies may be useful for maintenance plans for the Deepwater platforms coming online.

In my experience implementing Web 2.0 tools into large organizations, I have found efforts to replace existing tiered applications with Web 2.0 software in large departments to mostly be a non-starter, at least initially. Web 2.0 technologies are better fits in new projects, where training costs are budgeted and expected anyway, and the expectations from the users perspective is that change will occur anyway as the users move to new software. When security is a primary consideration, connectivity is inside-in, not inside-out or outside-in.

Both the Navy and the Coast Guard are large IT shops, and even in places where Web 2.0 technologies make a lot of sense, resistance to change will exist. When the Web 2.0 technology revolution runs into "the clay layer" or special sauce as I call it; don't panic. This challenge is not a crisis, these are the challenges every major IT implementation has fought in the information age since at least 1993. We sometimes forget it was W2K that shifted the IT industry away from mainframes. Windows and Unix may have been better, lower cost long term alternative, but many IT shops had no intention to change until the W2K issue forced them to.

Welcome Web 2.0 technologies to the ugly process of progress.