Top government CIO just showed the channel its future

Steve Hodgkinson is one of Australia’s most prominent CIOs, and yesterday he delivered a presentation that should make the channel sit up and take notice.

Hodgkinson was once an Ovum analyst but proved he could walk the talk by scoring the job of CIO of the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services. When he arrived four years ago the place was a mess: weighed down by technical debt and apps in all-but-legacy platforms like IBM Notes, grumpy users, low trust from management, little ability to change. The full IT nightmare.

Four years on and the Department isn’t perfect (it’s only just started tearing up Notes), but Hodgkinson pointed to success like introducing 35 entirely new projects without significant time or cost overruns.

Speaking at the Gartner IT Symposium, being held this week on the Gold Coast, he described the strategy that delivered those successes “Platform+Agile”.

“This is founded on the simple and common sense idea that we should use a standardised and well proven platform to build a new application. The platform is reusable from one application to another. It enables us to become more efficient and productive. It makes us faster and reduces the number of variables and unknowns ... and hence reduces risk and cost," he said.

“Starting with a platform also enable us to be more agile because we can get started quickly (often using in-house teams without doing any procurement because we have already procured the platform) and then implement a solution that we know is secure and will scale. We can quickly implement a minimum viable (I like to say visible) product and then iterate the solution based on user feedback.”

The Platform+Agile approach means picking platform vendors – in this case Microsoft Azure/Dynamics/365 and Salesforce, with a little ServiceNow, SuccessFactors and Oracle.

Hodgkinson added that his preferred platform was "also the bundle of procurement arrangements, contracts, vendor and partner relationships, development frameworks, methodologies, micro services, security templates, operational processes etc. that enable us to 'get stuff' done using the platform.”

Why is this important for the channel?

For starters, Hodgkinson said it just didn't make sense for the department to do any integrations any more. He instead advocated that any new functionality required for an app be sourced by tapping a platform’s services. Citing the example of a new app requiring AI, he advised using Azure or Salesforce AI services, and never trying to build custom integrations.

With integration a very common service for channel players, his warning against doing more of it is therefore important.

His call for partners to become part of a platform also seems worth considering.

And if you doubt me, know this: Hodgkinson filled a 500-seat room today, held the C-level audience’s attention for a solid 30 minutes and had a dozen people hovering around him afterwards asking questions.

I expect that those dozen, and more than a few others, will get back to their desks and try to replicate his strategies, helped by the fact he popped his presentation on LinkedIn.

CRN readers will do worse than reading it too!

Simon Sharwood attended the Gartner IT Symposium as a guest of Gartner.