Business models are intended to provide a framework for strategic planning, promoting the alignment of the agency’s IT plans with its overall mission and encouraging clarification of roles and responsibilities for achieving desired results. Such results typically are to improve the availability, cost, and quality of public services, and to implement common IT standards in the hope of additional cost savings. As a form of results-oriented management, such public-sector business plans are intended to promote accountability at the individual and organizational levels. This chapter focuses on the various components of an information technology business model and the common pitfalls organizations may encounter in the development of their IT plans.
TopThe Rise Of Cios
The implementation of ICT regardless of whether they have been directed externally towards the citizen or internally to improve operations, has less than a stellar track record. The failure rates have remained stable and unacceptably high over the past 25 years. As a consequence, the issue of planning has been given great attention. Purportedly, if we could improve our planning activities, then we could improve our success rate. As a result, a number of planning paradigms have evolved through the years. As identified, ICT bubbled up from a bottom up model. As a consequence, government agencies have wrestled, and thus vary, over how much to centralize activities.
At the federal level, the Clinger-Cohen Act was the first piece of major legislation that sought to address directly the organization issue. At the dawn of federal computing in the 1960s and 1970s, information technology planning was seen primarily as a matter of procurement and was handled as such by the General Services Administration. Later, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy played this role. It was not until the National Performance Review under President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, in the 1990s, that new concepts like ‘reinventing government,’ ‘information resource management,’ and ‘re-engineering’ came to the forefront, defining a new role for the heads of IT departments. Within IT as a profession, following the lead of the private sector, many called for the transformation of the support service role of the IT department head into the new role of Chief Information Officer (CIO).