The Ministry of Education (MOE) is one of the largest government bodies in Singapore. Besides directing the formulation and implementation of education policies, it runs more than 350 schools from primary to post-secondary levels.
With more than half a million students enrolled and a 30,000-strong teaching force, the MOE’s IT team has an intimidating network of screens to manage, 140,000 according to the 2008 edition of MIS Asia’s MIS 100 index.
Since the advent of IT adoption in the civil service in the 1980s, the MOE has invested substantially in the computerisation of administrative services as well as adopting IT to enrich the teaching and learning experience. Resulting today, in a very diverse technology landscape with varying degrees of adoption and expertise, ranging from legacy mainframe to Web-based systems.
Muddied waters
While IT was recognised as an important enabler by the ministry, its alignment and support to organisational strategies were not well-articulated and returns on investments were uncertain. Rising recurrent expenditure on IT had been a cause for closer scrutiny by the management.
Also, the ministry recognised that the multifarious technology landscape resulted from IT resources being developed and maintained in a silo approach by the numerous divisions and departments. There were no common definitions, structures nor mechanisms in place to enable greater interoperability of the various IT systems.
Lim Teck Soon, IT director, for the MOE’s organisation development division, said the previous IT investment framework “did not have a very structured approach. If a business unit has a project in mind, they would submit the project paper, develop the system independently, conduct a post-project implementation review, and that’s all. Systems are developed in silos without any corporate IT governance. ”
Following a review in 2006, MOE management decided that it was necessary to improve how it planned and funded its information technology. There was a need to establish a clearer overall direction and a more deliberate, concerted approach towards choosing business solutions and technology adoption.
Cleaning up
After a major review of IT processes, Lim and his team embarked on a roadmap to reorganise IT governance in the MOE.
One key aspect was the strategic IT planning exercise which would be done annually. Conducted by the IT department, the exercise involves all the business units to jointly plan for the systems to be implemented in the next two to three years to support the ministry and individual divisions.
Instead of building silo systems to react to different needs, the approach is to proactively examine the ministry’s needs holistically. The IT plan articulates the strategic business directions and how the IT initiatives would support them. If there were similar needs among the divisions, integrated systems would be developed to meet them.
“This exercise not only brought greater optimisation of IT resources but also ensured that IT was able to respond to the changing needs of the ministry better. Capacity planning would be done for the next three years based on the business needs and new technology would be exploited,” says Lim.
Another important element introduced was portfolio management. “So now you have got an IT plan with maybe 25 new initiatives, you would need to prioritise these new ICT initiatives and come up with what we call IT portfolio, and we will then decide how much funds to be allocated.”
Attention to detail
Lim and his team also put in place the MOE IT Investment Framework, a cornerstone of IT governance in the ministry. The framework sets out key checkpoints according to the major stages of an IT project lifecycle, ensuring a disciplined and structured approach in planning and managing IT investments.
During the conceptualisation and funding phase of projects, the focus is on business alignment, overall return on investments and the fit into the MOE’s IT landscape. Worthy projects are supported and any adverse business impact or project risk are identified early.
Project teams are required to provide detailed write-ups, including comprehensive information about the project’s key performance indicator in relation to the ministry’s strategic objectives. The funding justification also requires detailed cost breakdowns and targeted savings, how the various aspects of risks would be mitigated and how changes brought about by the systems would be managed.
One important checkpoint in the whole process is the review of how new IT projects would affect the MOE’s IT landscape, and ensuring that the existing infrastructure and common application modules/services are reused as far as possible.
“This is to ensure that you can optimally utilise your money, rather than continue to build silo-ed systems, then the components within the silo systems are repeated, duplicated, and it causes a lot of wastage of resources,” explains Lim.
To address the high numbers of disparate systems found in the ministry, Lim came up with the MOE enterprise architecture (EA) to govern IT development and implementation. The key effect is to allow for IT resources to be reused as and when necessary.
Development phase
During development phase, all IT systems were required to align with the MOE EA. The designs of the new IT systems had to be reviewed by a team of managers and the architects for approval. Through this process of review, common services that other applications could reuse were identified. Existing infrastructure and application services that could be reused or enhanced were also highlighted. The design review also ensured that the IT systems would not incur unnecessary recurrent cost for the maintenance of additional new software or hardware.
An example of reusable services implemented in the ministry is the Application Authentication Service. Users of any IT applications are authenticated against the same user database through this service.
The reuse of the existing infrastructure and common service helps to reduce system development cost and users are only required to remember one user-identification and one password. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach has also been adopted so that databases such as students’ information and business services such as computation of results can be shared and reused.
This approach helps the ministry to respond with agility to the regularly evolving education policies.
For example, when new schools were introduced with new syllabus, the systems affected were able to change within shorter timeframe.
One of the challenges in setting the governance framework, according to Lim, was to convince users to change their strategies and approaches to implementation.
“Because they are looking at a silo-ed perspective, they are not looking at the enterprise perspective,” said Lim. “To me, as an IT director, I am governing the entire ministry’s ICT portfolio. Therefore I have to make sure that every part works together in a very holistic manner, without duplication.”
Lim also had to convince his own IT team members, who are working as consultants with various schools and education divisions, to bear in mind the EA concept. “….We have to convince them, and whenever they do a design of a system or the implementation of a system or development of a system, they always have to bear in mind the EA concept, all these are actually components available for their re-use,” he says.
Constant improvements
Currently the whole framework programme has completed a major review. “So now it is really to ensure compliance, as well as to see what difficulties and gaps are present, and to ensure the development is carried out,” says Lim.
While a cost-benefit analysis of the entire framework is only due by 2010, Lim believes the programme is on the road to success.
“More importantly, every project that comes our way will have to show tangible benefits. There must be a return on investment.
“So if you ask me, today, I can largely tell you that all the projects provide tangible, positive benefits to MOE as an organisation.”
