Interview: Joe Harley

Government chief information officer (CIO) Joe Harley (pictured above) is a man who loves a challenge. He joined the civil service in 2004 as CIO for the Department for Work and Pensions – and at the time, he said it was the size and scope of the organisation’s ICT needs which attracted him to the job. Earlier in his career he spent three years managing all of BP’s ICT systems in Anchorage, Alaska, a role he took on because he thought it would be “good to have something distinctive to do”.

Speaking in 2009 to Computer Weekly magazine, Harley said the years in Anchorage were a big turning point for him. “There I was, miles from anywhere, with a big job to do,” he said. “It made me feel that if I could be successful in Alaska, the final frontier, I could be successful anywhere.” And Harley was successful, setting up new infrastructure and support systems while cutting IT costs in half for his business unit.

Efficiencies and reforming infrastructure were also the name of the game at DWP where, working with former permanent secretary Leigh Lewis, Harley reduced the ICT budget (by around a third since 2006), introduced a shared ICT support service, reduced the number of ICT staff, and introduced a number of modernisation and standardisation programmes for the department and its agencies. Work at DWP is far from over, however: like all other departments, it must find large administration savings even while the ICT team delivers the technology needed to support the flagship Universal Credit policy. As his new role is a joint one, Harley will continue to manage this work while he oversees delivery of the government’s new ICT strategy.

CSWmet Harley to discuss his new role in the Treasury’s pleasant garden on an unseasonably warm April afternoon (as government CIO, he spends much of his time at the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG) – itself now based in the Treasury’s building on Whitehall). It’s a long way from the icy plains of Anchorage, but we have to ask: is this new role harder than Alaska? Yes, he replies, it is “probably the most challenging job I’ve ever had in my career. ICT in government isn’t easy, and rightly it’s under great scrutiny as well – it’s spending public money.”

The strategy
Harley is undaunted by the scale of the challenge – indeed, he seems to relish the new strategy’s ambition. “It’s very exciting,” he says. “Worth getting out of bed in the morning for.” The strategy aims to save money – of course – but also to change the way in which policy is developed and services delivered. In future, policy will be developed to fit existing ICT assets, or at least with a clear understanding of what ICT can do at a sensible price; more services will be offered through online channels; and departments will be smarter in the way they buy and develop ICT, making better use of standardised technology (open source where possible).

If this sounds familiar, it’s because many aims were also present in the previous government’s ICT strategy, published in 2009. The pace of change, however, has been stepped up. Shortly after the strategy was published, deputy government CIO Bill McCluggage said in an interview with the Guardian: “We believe that it can all be delivered in two years, while for previous [strategies] it has usually been four to five years.”

Meanwhile, as Harley points out to CSW: “There isn’t any new money”. The biggest challenge, he says, will be “how to execute a strategy as challenging and demanding as this in a world of no money”. Because of this lack of cash, the strategy will “demand a level of collaboration and cooperation which is probably unprecedented in government,” he says. “We’re all going to have to pull together to get it done.” This will require better co-operation across departments, as well as with local government, suppliers and the wider ICT industry.

Sharing skills and software
The need for collaboration, and to ensure that all departments are on board with the strategy, is reflected in the delivery model. Seven lead departments will each take on responsibility for an area of work which matches their existing skills and experience (see news, p3).
Although these big beasts of government ICT will have the main delivery responsibility, Harley is clear that there must also be a role for smaller departments. “There’s too much to be getting on with, too much to accomplish [for big departments to do this alone]; it will require everybody’s contribution,” he says. “I’m expecting that all the departments that feel that they can contribute and have something to offer will be part of the delivery of it: we need people’s talents.”

As well as sharing talents and skills, the new landscape of government will require departments to increasingly share software and technology – buying open-source solutions and re-using existing capabilities wherever possible.

Harley has already successfully introduced standardisation in DWP – rolling out a standardised desktop computer, for example, and telling ICT website Silicon in 2009 that a strong set of protocols and procedures have made it “very, very difficult for anyone in the department to step out of those standards”. So he knows standardisation can be enforced, and appreciates the importance of well-enforced governance arrangements to achieve that standardisation.

When I ask him why these attempts at reform are different from previous attempts to reform cross-government ICT use (particularly a deal he brokered with large suppliers in 2006 to reduce costs in return for government departments streamlining procurement, increasing standardisation and learning from each other), he returns to the game-changing fact that there is no cash: “There’s the ‘no money’ aspect, so there’s really an incentive for people to share,” he says; but he adds that departments will also “have to comply with a common infrastructure environment”. In layman’s terms, this means adhering to a set of mandatory standards when buying or developing new software – a rule enforced by the ERG, using its centralisation of procurement of commodity ICT goods and its oversight of any major ICT spending.

An agile culture
Any strategy focusing on technology will, of course, bring up technical challenges – the aim of increasing the use of cloud computing will dredge up security and data-sharing concerns, for example – but Harley doesn’t appear too fazed by concerns around the hardware. The required cultural changes, he suggests, present a bigger barrier. “In all my experience of change and new ways to go about business, I’ve found that it tends not to be the technology that’s the main problem,” says Harley. “The technology usually will do what it’s asked to do.”

Much of the government’s ICT strategy, therefore, focuses not on technology per se but on the way in which departments use, buy and manage technology to achieve their aims. As well as shifting the culture towards re-use and standardisation wherever possible, the strategy sets out a commitment that government will make more use of ‘agile’ development techniques which will “deliver things faster and cheaper,” says Harley.

“It’s about designing, building and testing, and getting products delivered in weeks rather than waiting two years for a design to emerge,” he explains. In the past, government IT projects moved sequentially through various stages of design, development and testing. But under the agile model, projects are broken up into much smaller components; the various stages of design and delivery happen iteratively rather than sequentially; and there is a much greater focus on customer engagement – often, customer or business champions will work directly with development teams to ensure that the final product meets their needs.

DWP is employing both re-use of existing technology and agile techniques to deliver its work on Universal Credits, Harley recently told a Commons select committee, and all departments will start a pilot project using agile techniques within the next year.

“It is a culture shift,” acknowledges Harley, and “you do have to get educated, you do need to learn and you do need support.” To boost understanding of Agile techniques while training is being redeveloped , the Cabinet Office plans to develop a “virtual centre of excellence”, he says, to “share the knowledge and the learning” of civil service experts and bring in the knowledge of private sector partners.

While work on this centre of excellence will be led by his Cabinet Office team, Harley is again adamant that the skills of all departments will be important. The centre will need to have learning “coming in from all around the place, particularly from Universal Credit”, he says. However, he adds that it is too early to start sharing any details of the lessons being learned by the Universal Credit project: “We’ll need to wait and see”.

SME problems
Splitting projects into smaller, agile-friendly units will also help to achieve another aim of the ICT strategy – encouraging more procurement from small companies, and ending what the strategy calls ‘the oligopoly of large suppliers that monopolise ICT provision’.

This “won’t happen overnight, that’s for sure,” says Harley. He reiterates points made in the ICT strategy about the need to streamline procurement to reduce the cost of bidding, so that small companies can bid directly for government contracts, and says government will also engage with smaller companies through a new team in the Cabinet Office – the Skunkworks – which will be continually looking for new ways to provide digital services. It will act, says Harley, as a “refreshing” source of “provocation and challenge to existing thinking” within departments, but will also provide new ways for small businesses to interact more easily with government. The Skunkworks is already using a cross-government collaboration tool called DotGovLabs, which allows departments to suggest and discuss new technology ideas. The tool is also open to businesses, and therefore provides “a great opportunity [for SMEs] to make a pitch”, says Harley.

Existing contracts and large legacy systems of technology remain a barrier to SME involvement. Though Harley believes suppliers will increasingly work with smaller companies as departments ask them to deliver more efficient and innovative solutions, “ultimately these big legacy systems need to be supported, and they don’t lend themselves to smaller companies taking on these giant systems.” Still, he adds, you can always renegotiate these long contracts. “You have to do it with care and weigh up [risks of fees incurred by changing the contract], but just because there is a long date on it doesn’t meant to say you’re stuck. You can have a mature conversation.”

Executive conversations
This links to the change which Harley would like to see in ICT teams across government. “We’ve got to be the intelligent customer and be able to deal with suppliers at an executive level,” he says. Partly, this means building capabilities and skills across departments so that government has better access to the pool of talent needed to manage and let IT contracts successfully: “We can’t continue to just go to recruit every time we need something,” says Harley. “We’ve got to grow within as well.” He describes this growth as “a key priority, fundamental for the success of IT in government”; the Cabinet Office will produce an ICT capability strategy later this year outlining how this will be achieved.

In addition to this skills-building, Harley would like to see IT teams taking part in “more boardroom-type discussions, rather than backroom-type discussions” within their departments. A recent NAO report on ICT in government raised concerns that not all departments have their CIO on their board; but it isn’t exactly the make-up of meetings which concerns Harley. “Even if they’re not physically on the board of a department, [CIOs] can have board-like conversations,” he says – for example, by suggesting better ways to deliver services and improve business operations in the department.

While it’s important that board members are receptive to these conversations, Harley says: “I think it starts with the profession saying: ‘ICT can make a difference to the way services are provided to the public – let’s discuss how we might go about that’.”

In a previous interview, Harley said that any CIO “worth his salt” must be “a business executive, understanding the business issues of the day”. Does the IT profession across government have this understanding of business issues, and the confidence to carry out these executive discussions? “At certain levels, they do have the knowledge of the business,” says Harley, “especially where colleagues have been around for a few years and developed good business knowledge and business acumen. The trick is converting that into business propositions about how services, in particular public services, can be improved. Because that’s what it’s about – public service improvement, at less cost. We should be having big ideas about that.”

Partners in delivery
One of the big ideas which enthuses Harley is the drive to move more services online – he describes the shift of some services to online delivery as the biggest change he’s seen in government ICT since he joined DWP, and adds that that he’d like to pick up the pace. This is an aim also set out in the government’s ICT strategy, but one in which Harley will likely play a supportive, rather than a leading role. His role will be to oversee the infrastructure and capability needed to deliver that shift, while the yet-to-be-recruited Cabinet Office digital director will be in charge of driving services online.

Unlike in Alaska, Harley is not on his own when it comes to delivering on the challenges he now faces. As well as the digital director, Harley will soon be working with a director of ICT futures, who will be looking for new technologies which government can exploit, and helping to ensure that government projects are ‘future-proofed’ against changes in technology. Deputy CIO McCluggage retains his job, working full-time at the Cabinet Office to help deliver the cross-government changes; and Harley’s DWP team will carry on pursuing reform in the department. For the senior leaders of government ICT, as for departmental CIOs, “collaboration is the name of the game”.

Partnership between different disciplines and leaders is aided by the fact that Harley’s Cabinet Office CIO team is now based in the Treasury – along with the procurement team which is centralising spend on ICT, and the Major Projects Authority which will be monitoring (and, sometimes, intervening in) significant IT projects to ensure they are managed effectively.
This concentration of expertise and power also illustrates the fact that while Harley may talk again and again about collaboration as the key factor in success, he is supported by processes and influential allies who can bring pressure to bear over delivery on the strategy. Nonetheless, he prefers to focus on carrots rather than sticks: “Everybody knows that collaboration is the way forward,” he says. “You ultimately don’t want to use big sticks. You want to use incentives – and at the end of the day, in a world of no money, you’ve got to share.”

CV highlights

1974    Graduates from Paisley University with a degree in IT and Operational Research
1977    Joins British National Oil Company, privatised as Britoil in 1982, and works in a succession of technical and managerial roles
1987    Britoil is bought by BP: Harley becomes regional IT manager, Europe, for BP Exploration
1993    Moves to Alaska
1996    Returns to Europe as CIO for BP’s exploration business
1998    Becomes global IT vice president for BP
2000    Moves to ICI Paints as CIO
2004    Joins DWP as CIO
2011    Becomes government CIO, retaining his role with DWP