It is time for Danish politicians to form an opinion on IT projects in the public sector

As in most other countries, public IT projects have a bad reputation in Denmark. It seems that most people think that the public sector is horrible at doing IT projects (much worse than the private sector), and that the majority of public sector IT projects fail.

This perception is caused by a number of very big IT projects failing, causing not only the loss of the money put into them, but also the loss of state revenue, due to necessary IT infrastructure not being in place in order to e.g. ensure that tax refunds are paid correctly.

In my opinion, the public perception is wrong on two areas:

1. The public sector is no worse than the private sector at doing IT projects.
2. The majority of public sector IT projects go well.

The reason for both of these misperceptions is that people don't hear about projects that fail in the private sector, nor about IT projects in the public sector that does well.

But even with this caveat, there is no doubt that there is uncomfortable large number of IT projects that fail in the public sector, having a negative impact on the Danish economy.

Given this, I think it is remarkable how little the Danish political parties seem to care about IT projects in the public sector.

The politicians generally seem to care only on the most superficial level, saying that the public sector need to get better at doing IT. If they go beyond that, they generally focus on ensuring that laws are not getting in the way of implementing new IT systems and work rutines.

I think it is great that they are willing to take a look at how the laws in a given area might get in the way of eg. digitalization, but this is not enough. The head of the Danish Business Authority, which has just gone through a fairly succesful five year modernization program, has stated that it is frequently not laws that gets in the way, just interpretations and existing workflows.

It is often not clear that the interpretations and workflows will get in the way of development of the new systems, before the actual development work starts.

So, in other words, it is not enough that politicians look at the laws, they also have look at fostering an environment, where it is not only OK, but pretty much required, for public servants to reevaluate interpretations and workflows. For this to be possible, it is necessary to get them directly involved in the IT projects, not only as end-users, but also as sparring partners for the developers. This requires that resources are put aside for this.

Another area where I'd like politicians to focus, is creating an environment where different ministries, departments, and agencies learn from one another. There are some great attempts at this on the local level (eg. some departments look around at other departments to see what works before they start up), but it has to be structured better, and the responsibility anchored in one place.

There are a lot of experience spread across the different ministries, departments and agencies, but all too often it cannot be easily located, and each IT project is cause of re-learning everything from scratch.

A good attempt of drawing on the experiences of others, is the use of IT-projektrådet to evaluate the risks of IT projects larger than 10 million kroner and to follow up on high risk projects.

This is only done to federal projects however, and not on projects on the municipality level or regional level, even when they are much larger than 10 million kroner.

Obviously there are other areas where politicians could, and should, form an opinion on IT projects in the public sector, but I think that the areas mentioned above are some of the more important ones.

What I want to see at GOTO Copenhagen 2016

I have taken a look at the schedule of GOTO Copenhagen 2016, trying to figure out what I want to see.

On Monday the 3rd, there are a few interesting tracks for me.

First of all, the description of the Effective Delivery track sounds very intriguing:

Anyone with less than 15 years in IT has never known a time when there wasn’t Scrum or XP, or cross-functional teams or automated tests. They take these things for granted, but they also believe this is the state-of-the-art. Mainstream agile methods are around 20 years old now, and the world has moved on. Planning every 2 weeks makes sense if you have a 3 month release window, but what about if you are releasing every week, or even several times a day? Servers are now an inexpensive commodity, and cloud infrastructure means my expensive data center is now someone else’s pay-per-use model. How are modern practitioners taking advantage of this? What about challenges like large-scale delivery, regulated government departments, or heavyweight corporates? And how can you navigate a career when half the companies on your CV no longer exist? This track passes a critical eye over the current delivery landscape, and hopefully gives you some tools and techniques for navigating the modern world of Effective Delivery.

I like that the track takes for granted that we understand the basics of Agile development, as most of us have worked with it our whole career, and build upon this.

It is highly likely that I will spend most of the day at this track, and there are a couple of talks I definitely won't want to miss. One of these is Jez Humble's When DevOps Meets Regulation: Integrating 'Continuous' with 'Government'. As someone that works primarily with projects related to the public sector, this certainly sounds like something that I can use in my daily work. The same is probably true for Stephen Foreshew-Cain's talk Shepherding Government towards Effective Delivery, but there is no description of this talk yet.

If I am not at the Effective Delivery track, I'll probably be at the Deep Learning Analytics track, where there are several interesting talks, including Michael Hunger's How the Investigative Journalists of the ICIJ used modern Open Source Technologies to unearth the stories of the Panama Papers, where Neo4j will play a major part of the talk. Neo4j is a technology I have followed for years, and I would love to hear about how it was utilized by news organizations, so they could map the data.

On Tuesday the 4th, there is no doubt that I will be spending my day at the Tactics for better Teams track. The track is described thus:

Let's get practical. Often small simple changes have a huge positive effect on team performance and work-life satisfaction. This track presents a set of simple tactics that you can bring home to your team and start using today to make a better team. The track will present both technical ideas like software visualisation as well as more process oriented initiatives.  

The reason I'll be spending my day at this track, is partly that it is the track that is most related to my daily work, but mostly because of the speakers on the track. Of the speakers, the only one I don't know if I have seen before is Corey Haines. The rest of the speakers of the tracks are people that I don't only know I have seen before, but also know that I love - especially Linda Rising, who is a brilliant speaker.

Hadn't that been the case, I'd probably have spent some time on the Microservices track, trying to figure out what all the hype is about.

 

The Dangers of Conferences

In just under a month, it is time for GOTO Copenhagen 2016, which is the 20th anniversary of the GOTO conferences (which started out as JAOO). I am looking forward to listening to some great speakers and network with other participants and the vendors.

When talking with other people in the field of IT, I often come across people whose employers won't pay for conferences, and sometimes even won't let them take time of to go there.

I have in the past tried to make the case for allowing employees to go to conferences, but I think it is time to also acknowledge and address the dangers of allowing employees to go to conferences.

The rest of this post will list the major explanations I've heard, and try to address them.

1. The company only work with legacy systems, and all the new stuff mentioned at the conferences is irrelevant for us.

A conference like GOTO doesn't only present new languages and technology, but also have sessions on methods, architecture and many other things that are several layers of abstraction away from actually systems development.

Even if your company doesn't make use of the newest technology, conferences present a rich source for re-evaluating current practices, and address inefficiencies in the current setup. Many, if not all, of the speakers have not only worked on cutting edge greenfield projects, but also on brown-field projects, that have turned into big balls of mud, so they understand the need for taking such projects into account.

2. When my employee go to a conference, they will met people from other companies, and be tempted to go there.

There is an old anecdote about a the leaders of a company talking to a consultant, and asking "what if we train our employees, and they all leave?" To which the consultant answers, "what if you don't train them, and they stay?".

If you are afraid that the employees will leave if they hear about conditions at other companies, maybe you should address the conditions at your company, rather than letting them get worse, by not allowing people to go to conferences.

Also, have you considered the idea that the employee might convince other people to check out your place as a potential workplace?

3. If I allow one employee to go to a conference, everyone wants to go.

First of all, I don't think that is true. In most companies, there is a large group of employees who don't particularly like going to conferences, and thus won't ask for it.

But even if that's the case, then I don't really think it is a problem. There might be an economic limit to how many can go, but that can probably be solved by creating a turnus, where employees get to go on alternate years.

If a large group of employees go, then they can either use the conference as a team event (if they work together), or as a way to get to know people in other parts of the organization better (if they don't work together). Either way, it makes for a closer knit mass of employees.

4. Conferences are expensive

"Expensive" is relative.  IT employees are usually highly paid, and hard to recruit. For many good IT people, conferences are a factor when considering whether to stay or change jobs.

If someone changes jobs, the cost of replacing that person is much, much higher than the cost of allowing them to go to a conference.

5. My employees will get frustrated over hearing about new tech that they can't use

Yes, this is a real risk, but there are ways around that. Maybe allowing them to slowly introduce new tech in their current projects, or by allowing them some "play time" to build tools and other programs that can help them in their daily life.

Trying to keep them away from learning new tech is only going to work for the most incurious of employees. If you are fine with your employees not wanting to keep up to date on their field, that is fine, but if that's not the case, then you have to find a different solution than keeping them from konferences.

6. My employees will try to implement the newest fad after the conference

Somewhat related to point 5. Yes, this is a risk, but you can limit the risk by ensuring that the employee get an outlet for their creativity.

Is microservices the new SOA?

Within the last couple of years, Microservices has become all the rage of systems development.

Microservices, like many other terms in systems development, doesn't have an exact definition, but I found a good working description at an article by Martin Fowler and James Lewis:

The term "Microservice Architecture" has sprung up over the last few years to describe a particular way of designing software applications as suites of independently deployable services. While there is no precise definition of this architectural style, there are certain common characteristics around organization around business capability, automated deployment, intelligence in the endpoints, and decentralized control of languages and data.  

Looking at the description, there is nothing that doesn't reasonable, and reading the article linked above, it becomes clear that Microservice Architecture is a valid way of building systems, and one that should be taken into consideration when designing a system.

Unfortunately, it seems like people don't really consider it, but rather just choose it by default.

A decade ago Service Oriented Architecture was all the rage, and all systems had to be based on SOA. Unfortunately a lot of people didn't understand SOA and thought it was all about having a servicebus as the central component through which all communication went through. This was so widespread that I and many others started to say that SOA stood for Servicebus Oriented Architecture.

It seems like Microservice Architecture is moving down a similar path.

Many systems supposedly based on Microservice Architecture are not really based upon it, but rather on a misunderstanding of what Microservices are all about, creating systems which mimics the properties of Microservice Architecture, but don't implement the actual characteristics of Microservices.

Some symptoms of this misunderstanding of Microservices, could be:

• Code dependencies between services. If code changes to one services means that you also have to change the code of other services, then the architecture doesn't fulfill the concept of independently deployable services.
• Functionality dependencies between services. If the system always have to call service A before service B, and only call service A when service B needs to be called, then it seems like the lines of the system hasn't been drawn the right place.
• The need for a service portal (or even a servicebus).

There could be good reasons for each of these symptoms (though I am hard pressed to think of one for the first one), but they are definitely something that should make you consider whether you have really created a Microservice Architecture, or if you have just peppered your system with services.