I genuinely appreciated this article as it included the "people" work that consumes the majority of time behind any new strategy. In this case, it appears a turnover in staff via layoff/rehire coincided with the changes.
When I've seen successful strategic change - especially when changing risk management practices - it's been much less of about any "Martin Luther-esque" document and much more about countless hours spent in:
1. Negotiating with HR and Unions about rewriting every position description
2. Negotiating with vendors on changing their staffing model
3. Negotiating with IG auditors who have their own opinions on how staff should make risk based decisions
Vendors, unions, and auditors may not operate shadow IT, but they can engage in shadow commentary. It takes a significant investment by organization leadership to anticipate their push/feedback.
Love this. Especially this part resonates so much with my own observations and experience in the Canadian federal government:
Soon you’re way out of the IT lane, changing job descriptions, hiring and management protocols, and funding structures, right-sizing and redesigning process and procedure, educating a wide swath of stakeholders about what you’re doing and why. It’s a team sport — leadership cannot expect the digital service team to do this without enormous, ongoing, dedicated support from above and around.
————————
Modernization requires so much more than procuring software, and as long as organizations lack the appetite for the system change required, we won’t see meaningful improvement to public service delivery.
This is gold, thank you for the share, Jen. Reflecting out loud in response, from a place along attempted adjacent pathways, there are two elements in the North Star doc that stand out as relatively unique, and critical: the “what capable [individual team members] look like” articulation, and the “stop doing” commitment, both for their specificity. The key, from my experience of the contrary, will be lifting these (and the rest) from the page and into required, consistent, celebrated practice. Bravo to all involved, and good speed to you.
To me, the narrative from OIT is a lot more concise than the article. It is refreshing to see a government IT department that is self-aware, that doesn't believe that it must be the expert for every technical function that exists and that isn't trying to consolidate ever more power over business processes (e.g., compliance) about which it has no expertise.
Colorado’s story highlights the foundational components that enable a product operating model transformation to succeed at scale. The OIT North Star document opens with describing the alignment problem they diagnosed: how work is structured, how teams are organized, and how governance assigns authority and accountability to empowered teams. This diagnosis and their solution design apply what Gene Kim and Steven Spear call isomorphism in Wiring the Winning Organization: the principle that business domains, organizational authority structures, and technical architecture need to have similar structures. When they do, value flows to deliver outcomes. When they don’t, the friction is structural and no amount of talent or effort fully compensates for it.
The OIT North Star calls for two other foundational conditions: measuring what matters and accountable leadership. Their measures approach rests on a shared definition of good and uses leading indicators to quantify both flow and outcomes. Flow measures identify constraints to fix; outcome measures confirm whether public value is actually reaching customers. And leaders who will “set a direction and hold a line” are what allow empowered teams to navigate the conflicts and obstacles that every transformation surfaces.
You call out those conflicts and obstacles as a factor any transformation effort faces. The harder question is whether the federal government has the time to follow the same path. Colorado had six years and a willing governor. Federal agencies are operating under compressed timelines, fragmented authorities, and oversight structures that can reward compliance over delivery. The resistance CDS faced was real. The resistance at federal scale is structural in additional ways that state governments aren’t subject to in the same form.
That suggests the H3 federal operating model needs to build resistance reduction into its system design from the start, rather than accumulating the credibility to overcome it over time. A few conditions seem foundational: leadership teams held jointly accountable for delivery outcomes across the business and technology boundary, not just for their own function; mission domains defined at both the agency level and the whole-of-government level, so shared capabilities aren’t rebuilt from scratch inside every agency; and measures of flow and outcomes that make both progress and performance visible to oversight bodies, not just internal teams. Making the right path the easy path, as your OIT document puts it, requires those conditions to be present before the delivery work begins.
I’m working through these questions in more depth for an H3 operating model vision and would welcome the chance to share it when it’s ready.
The important shift is not just project to product, but completion as evidence to usefulness as evidence. Institutions change when their definition of done stops protecting the internal process.
So if you had to pick just one tangible, measurable improvement to the quality of state government services in Colorado produced by these reforms, what would you pick?
This is meant as an honest, non-hostile, non-rhetorical question. I want this to work, I'm just curious about how to sell it to the plausibly-large fraction of the public who will ask "ok sounds great, but what does this actually do for me as a taxpaying citizen?"
What a great choice to highlight Colorado here. I’ve watched from a distance and been truly impressed.
I genuinely appreciated this article as it included the "people" work that consumes the majority of time behind any new strategy. In this case, it appears a turnover in staff via layoff/rehire coincided with the changes.
When I've seen successful strategic change - especially when changing risk management practices - it's been much less of about any "Martin Luther-esque" document and much more about countless hours spent in:
1. Negotiating with HR and Unions about rewriting every position description
2. Negotiating with vendors on changing their staffing model
3. Negotiating with IG auditors who have their own opinions on how staff should make risk based decisions
Vendors, unions, and auditors may not operate shadow IT, but they can engage in shadow commentary. It takes a significant investment by organization leadership to anticipate their push/feedback.
Love this. Especially this part resonates so much with my own observations and experience in the Canadian federal government:
Soon you’re way out of the IT lane, changing job descriptions, hiring and management protocols, and funding structures, right-sizing and redesigning process and procedure, educating a wide swath of stakeholders about what you’re doing and why. It’s a team sport — leadership cannot expect the digital service team to do this without enormous, ongoing, dedicated support from above and around.
————————
Modernization requires so much more than procuring software, and as long as organizations lack the appetite for the system change required, we won’t see meaningful improvement to public service delivery.
This is gold, thank you for the share, Jen. Reflecting out loud in response, from a place along attempted adjacent pathways, there are two elements in the North Star doc that stand out as relatively unique, and critical: the “what capable [individual team members] look like” articulation, and the “stop doing” commitment, both for their specificity. The key, from my experience of the contrary, will be lifting these (and the rest) from the page and into required, consistent, celebrated practice. Bravo to all involved, and good speed to you.
To me, the narrative from OIT is a lot more concise than the article. It is refreshing to see a government IT department that is self-aware, that doesn't believe that it must be the expert for every technical function that exists and that isn't trying to consolidate ever more power over business processes (e.g., compliance) about which it has no expertise.
Colorado’s story highlights the foundational components that enable a product operating model transformation to succeed at scale. The OIT North Star document opens with describing the alignment problem they diagnosed: how work is structured, how teams are organized, and how governance assigns authority and accountability to empowered teams. This diagnosis and their solution design apply what Gene Kim and Steven Spear call isomorphism in Wiring the Winning Organization: the principle that business domains, organizational authority structures, and technical architecture need to have similar structures. When they do, value flows to deliver outcomes. When they don’t, the friction is structural and no amount of talent or effort fully compensates for it.
The OIT North Star calls for two other foundational conditions: measuring what matters and accountable leadership. Their measures approach rests on a shared definition of good and uses leading indicators to quantify both flow and outcomes. Flow measures identify constraints to fix; outcome measures confirm whether public value is actually reaching customers. And leaders who will “set a direction and hold a line” are what allow empowered teams to navigate the conflicts and obstacles that every transformation surfaces.
You call out those conflicts and obstacles as a factor any transformation effort faces. The harder question is whether the federal government has the time to follow the same path. Colorado had six years and a willing governor. Federal agencies are operating under compressed timelines, fragmented authorities, and oversight structures that can reward compliance over delivery. The resistance CDS faced was real. The resistance at federal scale is structural in additional ways that state governments aren’t subject to in the same form.
That suggests the H3 federal operating model needs to build resistance reduction into its system design from the start, rather than accumulating the credibility to overcome it over time. A few conditions seem foundational: leadership teams held jointly accountable for delivery outcomes across the business and technology boundary, not just for their own function; mission domains defined at both the agency level and the whole-of-government level, so shared capabilities aren’t rebuilt from scratch inside every agency; and measures of flow and outcomes that make both progress and performance visible to oversight bodies, not just internal teams. Making the right path the easy path, as your OIT document puts it, requires those conditions to be present before the delivery work begins.
I’m working through these questions in more depth for an H3 operating model vision and would welcome the chance to share it when it’s ready.
The important shift is not just project to product, but completion as evidence to usefulness as evidence. Institutions change when their definition of done stops protecting the internal process.
So if you had to pick just one tangible, measurable improvement to the quality of state government services in Colorado produced by these reforms, what would you pick?
This is meant as an honest, non-hostile, non-rhetorical question. I want this to work, I'm just curious about how to sell it to the plausibly-large fraction of the public who will ask "ok sounds great, but what does this actually do for me as a taxpaying citizen?"