Qeiteri Armelle

• A general lack of education and information about both technology and programs. Technology has rapidly permeated our society and most of our institutions, but government organizations often lag behind others. Government staff are often ill-informed and poorly trained in how to use information technology effectively. This is particularly true of the newest technical tools and platforms. Public employees, both users and technicians, seldom have ready access to skills training or professional development that continuously upgrades their knowledge and skills. Conversely, technical staff typically have few opportunities or incentives to learn the goals and operational realities of service programs and therefore tend to focus too sharply on the technical tools and too little on the programmatic reasons for new systems.
• Lack of a shared, reliable computing and network infrastructure. Existing state-local systems suffer from the lack of a ubiquitous, consistent computing and communications infrastructure. This makes it difficult or impossible to operate technology supported programs in a consistent way from place to place and organization to organization. It also slows and complicates communication among state and local staff involved in joint programs. New York State is currently embarking on a statewide networking strategy called the NYT that will help solve this problem for future systems.
• Goals that are too ambitious for the resources available to achieve them. Project goals are often laudably comprehensive, but the staff, equipment, and dollars allotted to achieve them are often underestimated. Projects that could succeed on a smaller or incremental scale, fail to achieve success when their goals and resources are played out on different scales.
• Human and organizational resistance to change. In some cases, new state-local initiatives threaten a comfortable status quo. They promise big changes that not every participant is eager to see. Fear and resistance to change exist even in the best planned and managed projects. A new way of doing business threatens existing personal, organizational, programmatic, and political conditions by rearranging authority, influence, power, resources, and information. This natural resistance is exacerbated when new programs arrive with too little advance information, weak leadership support, inadequate user participation, too little funding, and less than comprehensive training and orientation.
• Unrealistic time frames. Many information systems projects take considerably longer than originally planned. State-local projects, with their added layers of legal and organizational complexity are especially vulnerable to this problem. Since so many different organizations are affected by them, time delays lead to serious difficulties in planning for and adjusting to changes in operations.
• Organizational, programmatic, technological, and legal complexity. The state-local environment is extraordinarily complex on a number of dimensions: organizational size, number of organizations, number and skills of staff, size of budget, financial practices, legal authority, programmatic focus, and geographic dispersion. Existing systems are an important complicating factor.Only so much change is possible in an environment that depends on information systems already in place — especially ones that were designed and implemented using older technologies. There is little that can be done to simplify this environment, making it essential that project participants have a good understanding of how it will affect their activities.
• Changing priorities. Any project that lasts more than a few months is subject to changing priorities for time, money, and attention. This problem is multiplied in state-local projects since each participating organization is likely to be working in circumstances and with responsibilities and priorities that are unique to its own situation.
• Overlapping or conflicting missions among the participating organizations. Government organizations at both the state and local level have public service and public accountability goals that can overlap or conflict, even when they are engaged in a joint project. For example, a state agency manager may have the role of project leader which implies facilitation, collaboration, and support for other participants. At the same time, that person’s agency may have oversight responsibility and financial and other regulatory means of compelling local compliance with state requirements. In other projects, non-profit service providers may be project participants sitting at the same table with state or local officials who license and inspect their programs.These roles are all legitimate but can conflict and become a source of difficulty in sorting out the working relationships within the project team.