Plato's Republic Redux (cont.)

Public-sector organizations find new tools for quantifying the benefits of their IT investments

As the T-Government program pushes Luton to rely more on electronic data, some business units are demanding that recoveries from any system problems be achieved in 30 minutes or less.

"We have to have robust and reliable software for managing this," Kadwill says, adding Symantec NetBackup and Backup Exec are central to these efforts.

The project may take another five years to complete to assure smooth integration between the Web pages used by citizens and the city's behind-the-scenes databases and servers.

Luton decided the project was worthwhile by building a business case that identified benefits, including service improvements, efficiency savings, and legislative compliance.

"It's all about saving money by reducing the total cost of service delivery and reducing the cost of back-end support and operation," Kadwill says.

The process for creating that model starts with a business proposal. The city's business consultancy group works with the sponsoring department to evaluate current business processes and available physical and financial resources. "Then they undertake a business process re-engineering exercise to see how we could streamline or change that end-to-end process," Kadwill explains.

Project sponsors use these analyses to write a business proposal for the council's executive board and other senior managers, who make final decisions about which projects move forward. Those that get the nod receive a multi-year work schedule, with finish-date deadlines, intermediary milestones, and estimates of financial benefits all monitored by a project review board. The city also conducts a post-completion review of how actual benefits compare with the original estimates.

UAMS's De Haes says, regarding the long-term approach, that best practices, like business proposals and ongoing reviews, are important, but organizations shouldn't lose sight of the added costs they represent. Nevertheless, he advocates the long-term approach. "If you build a valuation framework, you have less risk of doing the wrong things and confronting a problem that costs even more money to solve after the fact."

Alan Joch is a business and technology writer whose work has appeared in Federal Computer Week and FedTech.