Professionalism may be summarised as 'doing things right and doing the right things'.
Professional organisations create confidence and trust among their customers. They attract the best people and have loyal and dedicated workforces. Professionalism is an essential component of any organisation enjoying long-term success.
Professional companies do not 'trust to luck', 'manage by the seat of their pants' or 'wing it'. Such unprofessional practices are likely to result in inefficiency (reflected in low profits), a bad reputation (resulting eventually in going out of business) and even prosecution of directors (resulting in fines and jail).
Professionalism is essential in any supply chain. The objective of delivering key outcomes to time and budget requires users, customer-facing staff, buyers, suppliers and subcontractors to work professionally. That requires each part of the chain and all staff to be knowledgeable and to operate professionally.
In the IT industry, we are beginning to see customers, suppliers and individuals working together to develop a strategy that will disperse professionalism throughout the supply chain and beyond. Professional IT staff are an essential prerequisite of a professional IT organisation.
The Cabinet Office has initiated a programme to improve the professionalism of the civil service. As part of that programme the Cabinet Office eGovernment Unit is managing an IT professionalism programme in the public sector.
The BCS is running a programme to increase the professionalism of UK IT staff. And Intellect is developing an environment in which IT firms will continue to ensure that their staff behave professionally.
IT supplier professionalism is not an end in itself. It exists to deliver key outcomes, including improved services and better value for money, to time and to budget for customers. A key measure of professionalism is compliance with the Intellect IT Supplier Code of Best Practice.
IT has long been seen as a necessary overhead rather than a value-adding service. There is a need to demonstrate more effectively that IT does not just support business change, but underpins the delivery of key objectives, improved service to the citizen, innovation, and value for money to the taxpayer.
Training and business development programmes play a key role in expanding the technical skills base. But an area of concern is the ability and aptitude of administrative and operations staff in government departments to use more advanced systems and to provide broader, joined-up services.
Not enough consideration is given to the impact of new technology on employees, users and members of the public. Any IT-enabled business change project requires, where applicable, consultation with citizens, preparation for staff, analysis of the impact on service deployment and pre-emptive action to deal with any expected increases in demand.
Overcoming cultural barriers and silo mentalities across the public sector will be critical. IT has often worked in isolation from the business and other back-office functions. If the nature of change is to be better understood, both as a profession and as a solution, IT needs to work collaboratively in and across organisations to support better-integrated solutions that will address the increasingly joined-up nature of government.
To this end, non-IT professionals in the senior civil service should be aware of IT and IT programme delivery, in much the same way as senior managers are encouraged to have a basic commercial awareness and understanding of financial management.
While parliamentarians and sections of the media remain hostile, at best sceptical, about government IT, creating a confident and skilled cadre of government IT professionals will be a considerable challenge. It will therefore be necessary to link this programme to activity which addresses the root causes of failure.
This is crucial to the delivery of business-enabled IT projects in the public sector, although success will only be achieved if all parties recognise the importance of this issue and invest accordingly.
John Higgins is director general of IT industry trade association Intellect. www.intellectuk.org
