Technology is a catalyst for business change, but that change doesn't always sit well with departments that have their own sovereignty to look after. David Braue asks whether IT can be centralised and distributed at the same time.
It may have sounded like a relatively straightforward project, but the creation of an intranet portal for Victoria's newly created Department for Victorian Communities (DVC) -- which bundled 15 core government functions into a single new department with 560 staff and an $848 million budget -- turned out to be a period of significant introspection.
As often the case, the challenge lay not in rolling out the technology but in understanding the business -- or the businesses. Many IT executives may have gone through the pain of consolidating after a merger or acquisition, but that's nothing compared to the challenge facing DVC which had to consolidate infrastructure and provide a unified interface capable of addressing the needs of eight government ministers, six separate departments and hundreds of public servants used to doing things their way.
Structural differences between the departments soon became apparent as the intranet team took stock of the departments' existing intranet efforts and began the process of user consultation and system design. Against a backdrop of technical upgrades, including the consolidation of human resources and finance systems and networks, the intranet was the most visible face of the DVC's progress in functionally integrating the various departments.
Meigan Geileskey, project development manager for employment programs and head of the intranet development project, quickly learned that a historical lack of introspection had left the departments to solve the same problems in many ways, yet often those departments were hard pressed to explain what they were doing.
"This made it a situation of 'where do we start?'" she recalls. "We had no policies, no one really understood what [DVC] was and what it meant, who were their colleagues, and what they do. It was interesting that one term means something completely different in a different department. We used the merger as an opportunity to learn from other Victorian Government intranets."
Even minor semantic inconsistencies became examples of why it was important to clarify each department's role in the new organisation. For example, one department's Web site had a section entitled "Our Knowledge" that was no longer relevant when "our" referred to not one but six different agencies. Such details may seem insignificant, but they reflect the difficulties of reconciling six different worldviews into a single unified front.
The project wasn't about changing the departments' internal perspective on the world, but it did require them to explain it in a way that let the intranet become a single voice for all. This required the organisations to hand over some measure of their IT independence to DVC -- a concession that can be difficult to extract in heavily politicised environments, particularly in the midst of such a massive organisational change as that introduced with the formation of DVC.
Extensive user consultation, intranet review, and departmental navel-gazing helped Geileskey's project team not only develop a consistent interface across all member departments, but to do it so the intranet was named one of the world's 2004 10 best government intranets by usability consultancy Nielsen Norman Group.
