NWO subsidy for TPM research
Government services need clever, flexible IT if they are to respond swiftly to fast-changing legislation. At present, this is proving difficult. Their IT infrastructure is often too rigid or works on a step-by-step basis. There must be another way. Faster, better. But how? Over the next few years, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) section of the Faculty of TPM will be carrying out fundamental scientific research into this area, together with the University of Amsterdam. The Immigration and Naturalisation Service will also be taking part. The collaboration between the two universities and the ‘field’ was the most important reason for NWO (the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) to honour the research proposal with subsidy.
NWO research is a good source of income and good for the Faculty’s reputation. In the last edition of TPM Quarterly, Dean Theo Toonen said: “Indirect funding is becoming increasingly important to the Faculty now that more money is being transferred from the universities to NWO. Furthermore, research honoured with funding automatically has a quality hallmark.” But this token of recognition is not the only reason that assistant professors Arre Zuurmond and Marijn Janssen are delighted with the research. “It touches the very heart of TPM. Our research has been designated ‘excellent’, it is being conducted in a multi-actor system and is socially relevant. It focuses on ground that is internationally almost unchartered, right on the cutting edge of existing scientific insight.”
‘Old world’
Roughly speaking, the subject of the research is ‘Government and IT’. More specifically, it is about how IT will help government organisations to cope with new legislation and regulations in the future. In the ‘old world’ government services (Tax and Customs Administration, Employee Insurance Agency, Information Beheer Groep, SIB, Immigration and Naturalisation Service, etc.) were given time to prepare for new laws and amendments to legislation. “They were issued on paper. The business operations department translated them into new processes, procedures and working instructions and the IT department then took care of the computerisation. It was usually up and running within a year”, explained Zuurmond and Janssen. “Nowadays, the Dutch Lower House makes a decision about a new law halfway through December, and two weeks later, on 1 January, it comes into force. This leads to mistakes and massive problems for the administration services. We have seen countless examples over the past few years. Municipal authorities that didn’t know where to send people who wanted to take part in civic integration programmes, tens of thousands of tax returns that suddenly went missing …”
Nowadays, policy is revised at a fast pace and relatively more new laws are being introduced. The environment in which government organisations of the future (say in ten to fifteen years) will find themselves operating, is becoming increasingly dynamic and complex. Janssen: “The basic idea behind our research is that the government is in a fundamental transformation phase. A number of people from our section are exploring the question of how this government intends to change, and the demands this will make on the IT infrastructure. How will it affect services for citizens? How will the coordination between government organisations change?” These are reasonably concrete questions; the NWO research is focusing on the abstract fundamental issue. Arre Zuurmond continues.
Three regimes
“The law is always at the forefront. If tax laws change, for example, the Tax Administration will adjust its organisation in line. The IT infrastructure will also be modified to suit the new situation. For the purposes of our research, we have isolated three levels: the legal/judicial regime, the organisational regime and the technological regime. All three have their own technological infrastructure. In our research, we will be searching for a manageable control complex between these three infrastructures, which will quicken the passage through the above-mentioned three regimes. Storing laws in a knowledge management system in a particular way will automatically generate the correct procedures and instructions for the organisation concerned. And in turn, these will be automatically translated into serviceoriented systems.”
In answer to the question of whether IT architecture could be designed to cope with the required dynamism and flexibility, Zuurmond and Janssen give a resounding ‘yes’. “Of course it’s not that simple. IT designed in the past, for example, was not able to cope. It was too rigid. But it has enabled people to make huge advances over the past thirty years, so they are not just going to push it aside now. And of course it would be too risky to dispense with old systems altogether. They are often kept up-and running so that parts can be integrated into the new architecture. But we do need to move away from these monolithic information systems towards sets of smaller IT components, to which individual components can easily be added or changed. Whatever else, we need to work on a more modular basis at all three levels.”
Collaboration
In the NWO research project, the ICT section of the Faculty of TPM is focusing all its attention on the socio-technical side of the matter. The Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam (an important party in the field of legal research) is examining the legal aspects. The Immigration and Naturalisation Service is a perfect example of an organisation where everything is regulated by laws. There are ten to fifteen of them, all emanating from different Ministries. Sometimes all this legislation even contradicts itself. This is why the Immigration and Naturalisation Service is such a good ‘field’ partner for the research. “The Immigration and Naturalisation Service is experimenting with legal knowledge management systems and service-oriented technology. We are looking over their shoulders and helping them come up with ideas. The good thing about the Immigration and Naturalisation Service is that it is so well-organised, which is helpful when you’re conducting difficult research like this. We can’t really do much in an organisation where chaos reigns”, according to Janssen.
Zuurmond: “The Immigration and Naturalisation Service is also an organisation that is under almost permanent political pressure. Organisations like this are always looking for a way out and therefore receptive to the latest developments. Other large-scale implementing bodies also benefit in the long run, as they all face much the same problems. One of the reasons that the NWO honoured our proposal was that three disciplines are working on the project together, while it also satisfies a need within society. Although the research is still in its initial stages, we are already noticing how much we complement and augment each other. We know exactly what everyone can and will do. The partnership is generating a lot of added value.”
Idols
Zuurmond looks back with pleasure on the day that the proposal had to be defended in front of a committee of twelve international scientists in a smart hotel in Amsterdam. “It was nerve-wracking”, is what they said after their first experience of this ‘Pop Idols-like’ event. Almost two months later, they received the news that they had been awarded the subsidy, a sum that would pay for them to appoint a fourth researcher. The next step was to find and select a suitable candidate. “Good PhD students don’t grow on trees and we needed one to start by 1 September, otherwise we would lose the subsidy.”
“We were lucky”, says Zuurmond about Yiwei Gong. He was one of the most outstanding students in Information Architecture, he was familiar with the backgrounds of NWO research and very keen to get started. Janssen: “NWO needs good candidates with the conceptual capacity to understand complex questions. Other companies are queuing up to employ people like this. Yiwei could have opted for a high salary and a lease car, but he sees this PhD research as a sound investment in his own future. It took a great deal of effort to get this research off the ground, but now it’s up and running we are definitely getting a lot out of it.” In the meantime, their latest research proposal has also reached the second round of the NWO selection process. “We’re really getting a taste for it.”
