humanitarian.info

If I don’t think that a bottom-up approach is going to work in the humanitarian community, I must think that a top-down approach is the best bet, right? Wrong. And here’s why:

Worst of all, though, the [additional and novel layers] mainly exist because the Government wanted to have the job done by the Big Consultancies – Accenture, EDS, and friends – that it was used to dealing with. Assuming that they wouldn’t be interested in small contracts, the Government invented a completely new organisational level in order to sweeten the deal. They further insisted on the contracts being covered by intense secrecy, which cut off any possibility of talking to the users. And the Big Consultants proceeded to move the actual development to the US and India to save money, thus avoiding any institutional knowledge that might somehow have seeped in.

Top-down approaches to data management don’t work in the public sector, full stop. This is because organisational politics usually over-determines a process that fails to include the users¹, and that’ll always defeat your technology no matter how shweet you think it is. So what do I think works? The Yorkshire Ranter actually provides that as well:

Part of the original plan involved using a common data exchange standard for the whole NHS; if this exists, there’s no need for much of the rest, especially not the regions and possibly not the Spine. We could define some goals and a set of data formats, then break out the cash to the individual hospitals, trusts etc to use themselves. … I think a cross-government requirement for common data standards, as much open source as possible, and perhaps even building everything with a sensible API for further development would do nothing but good.

That’s the starting point. Establish a minimum data standard using an agile process, use existing practice based on the experience of participating users, make the process as open (and open-ended) as possible, get the sign-off from the participants at the highest possible level, and then let go. Then it’s out there and organisations can use it – or not, but if they don’t, they no longer have the excuse that such standards don’t exist and can be held accountable against that. It also allows entry into the market for organisations and individuals that are new to the sector or weren’t involved in the original process – and then they might become part of the next iteration of development.

The key thing to remember is that the development needs to take place in the heart of the user community, and anything else is unlikely to yield useful results. The humanitarian community needs exactly this, and I’ve been saying exactly the same this for ten years, and as far as I can tell we’re still nowhere near even getting such a process off the ground in most of clusters / sectors. If anybody knows anything different, please feel free to let me know and make my week brighter. And if anybody thinks this process wouldn’t work, I’d be interested to hear why – especially in light of the persistent failure of IT projects in the public sector.

1. Note: the actual users, not the people who manage the actual users. [↩]