I have some broken/stuck record tendencies so I'm sure
those closer to me have heard me wax a little lyrically about this one scene
from the Devil's Advocate. Forgive me if I get it a little wrong but Al Pacino
says to Keanu Reeves: "the problem with you is that you're too slick,
people see you coming from a mile away and they know what to expect, but look
at me on the other hand". The reason that I like it is because it has
elements of going in under the radar.
Now to the purpose of this blog. It has become the way of
the world that you do everything with a big bang, lots of fanfare, streamers,
media coverage and the obligatory social media barrage. I think that this
approach has lots of merit if you're in the private sector. You're first to
market (I now hate this phrase) and you want to shout it from the roof tops and
point out how much better you are than your competitors. Also you want to
create the awareness necessary to create some momentum that you can then
maintain when you're in full campaign mode. But what if you're not in the
private sector?
Traditional wisdom will have you take the same route, but
that is where I want to differ. My problems with the big bang approach are the
scale and also the fact that it puts you firmly on the nation’s radar. That way
if you drop the ball, everyone has a grandstand seat.
First lets have a look at the scale. It makes sense to
tackle the whole country at one go since there are a number of economies of
scale that make the argument for you. The problem is that its, just so big and
the site variables make it very, very difficult to manage. You have to make
sure that each site with its different dynamics is ready to work, perfect and
then go live with a particular solution. Managing multiple sites with different
skills sets, infrastructure, leadership and of course politics can prove to be
a very hairy experience. Take the enatus example of allowing booking for
learners and drivers licenses on-line. The system was launched amidst lots of
pomp and ceremony and it crashes more times than Julius Malema is in the news.
Gauteng on-line which was designed to allow learners access to the internet
from schools should change the name to Gauteng off-line since there are very
few venues if any where it is operational. It too was a big bang operation,
looking to achieve too much to quickly and with the incorrect scale.
Second, when everyone is aware, especially in a politically
driven environment, when you fail it gives everyone ammunition to crucify you.
I know I’m sounding dramatic but its for a reason, when you fail in this case
because of the scale and related big budget spend the fail will be epic.
“Hundreds of millions of tax payers money wasted and still we don’t have a
working revenue collection system”, sound familiar City of Johannesburg?
This is my solution to the problem, design and plan big but
implement small. When I say design and plan big, I mean design the entire
solution and plan the roll out to finally cover the entire country. But, UNDER
THE RADAR start to roll out, test and debug the system. Test spectacularly by
running simulations that mimic full roll out and then once you have it working
in pockets, allow it to grow embryonically until it covers the whole nation. So
for e-health or IT driven facility and patient management systems, start small
to create a group or network that you can manage and then start to plug in
additional facilities, regions and then provinces. Everything about the IT
environment is about portability and plug and play, we need to take a look at
this for national rollouts of any kind.
We’re busy with a project at the moment where we’re
piloting a patient management system. We’re starting really small, one
facility, and then the aim is to roll it out to the rest of the facilities that
fall under this chains portfolio. We’ve found that managing the smaller scale
is easier and because we planned for the up-scaling initially it won’t (fingers
crossed) throw us any curveballs later. Even though the system that we’re using
here won’t have the volumes that the rolled out version will, all testing
protocols are designed to allow us to simulate implementation as closely as
possible.
This blog has given me a bit of head ache, so I’m going to
take two panados and call myself in the morning.
