Digital modernization. PMO stand-ups. Enterprise risk management. Shared services. AI and CX. All the “solutions” to government’s problems promise to speed, streamline, standardize and modernize, but they rarely address the organizational changes required to actually make them effective, or the organizational changes that result. That is a big mistake.
Let’s say your agency needs a new website to serve as your primary system for communicating with users across the country. Your consultants help you analyze existing structures and begin to envision requirements for the new site. The process reveals, however, that what makes navigating your website so problematic for users actually mirrors problems with your organization’s business model: content is siloed and scattered, production is uncoordinated, and people don’t talk with each other across departments. So, while your consultants want to meet about developing a unified enterprisewide taxonomy to get planning underway, your leadership team is stalled because they cannot unmoor themselves from their respective spans of control. This isn’t a website issue—this is an organizational issue.
Or let’s say you want to implement an enterprise approach to risk management (ERM). You begin with the essentials: identify and rank risks; create a risk register and risk reporting tools; establish risk governance; and develop risk mitigation strategies. But what quickly emerges is that people don’t necessarily want to identify their risks because to do so might result in more work for them, or it could uncover a team weakness or even threaten one’s standing with a supervisor. Resolving risk at an enterprise level could mean years of managing risk a certain way at the local level is replaced by standardized agencywide protocols. Resistance to change can impede ERM implementation and itself become a risk to the organization.
These projects often ..
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