Assignments are a highly specific form of written communication. They are often set by one person who may also be the primary audience. There will be concomitant constraints such as word limits, prescribed structures and writing styles.
Part 1 of the Technical and Digital Leadership Assignment asks us to produce a 'Business Case' for our organisation.
The implicit underlying requirement is to demonstrate an understanding of the material covered in the course. For this the ideal might be to recognise and promote a disruptive digital technology or platform which would yield competitive advantage to the organisation.
The type of organisation we work for, its level of digital maturity, the nature of its products and services, its regulatory context, and other factors will have a major impact on the ease with which a suitable digital business case can be defined. So there is an element of 'luck of the draw' in how well the organisation we work for fits.
Similarly, our individual job roles and hierarchical positions will greatly affect our ability to produce a substantive business case. We may have the intellectual understanding and knowledge to produce such a business case. But that does not mean that it would ever be asked of us in our normal jobs. In our normal jobs, we may well have to argue a 'case'. Such bids and negotiations are probably quite frequent. But the form of these transactions and their subject area are usually going to make them a poor choice for demonstrating the range of features that will dazzle in an assignment.
One of the by-products of doing a course is to create opportunities to break out of the perceived constraints of our current job roles. This allows us to be creative in opening up opportunities. The same possibilities might be also be able to be negotiated in our work personal development plans.
How far we might be allowed to stretch will depend on the perceived size of the leap we are proposing and whether there is a shared, and agreed, vision for our future career direction.
For example, if I were to propose that as part of a course in leadership, I would like to take on the role of Acting Chief Executive for a trial period, it would be greeted with little more than mild amusement, and perhaps a referral to occupational health. But if an Executive Director colleague asked to gain comparable experience for personal development, there might be a good chance of success, perhaps tempered by the extent to which this posed a potential threat.
There is an inverse relationship between how useful the proposal is to us and how likely we would be allowed to do it
There is also an element of the catch-22 type paradox
'How can I get any experience until I get a job that gives me experience?'
(a line spoken by the character Brantley Foster in the 1987 film 'The Secret of My Success').
One of the main purposes in enrolling on the course of which the assignment forms a part of is to gain the experience and qualification that would lead us step closer to being likely to be able to do these things.
If we already produced our organisation's Digital Strategy as part of our normal job role, we would quite likely be a lot less interested in enrolling on this particular course.
I work for the NHS, which is a very large, complex public sector service organisation lagging somewhat behind in digital infrastructure investment and innovation. The part of the NHS I work in, North Cumbria suffers from a similar long term lack of investment and has a legacy of old applications supporting pre-digital ways of working. For example, when I joined my current organisation in 2014, it was still using as its main patient administration system (PAS) a system implemented in 1993. In a previous NHS organisation, we had replaced this same system in 1997, regarding it as inadequate.
The NHS nationally has a succession of digital plans and strategies together with emergent strategy, almost Agile strategy production, being announced by Health Ministers and gradually assimilated into subsequent plan documents. COVID has injected fresh momentum into this.
My employing organisation, North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust has very recently (March 2021) produced a Digital Strategy covering the period to 2024. The existence of this document makes it almost impossible for anybody, let alone me, to produce any kind of digital strategy for the organisation for several years.
One of my observations of NHS culture is that process is regularly mistaken for product. So having a document, or a committee, or a designated individual can often be seen as an end point in its own right. The familiar elements of paraphernalia have structures which can be followed without too much thought. Achieving the goal takes a lot more imagination. The journey, wherever it eventually leads, is accompanied by documents.
Usually such documents are very light on analysis and reflection. So, if in 2016 the NHS announces that it will be 'paperless' by 2020, what happens when limited progress has been made? The answer seems to be that in 2020 the NHS simply announces that it will be 'paperless' by 2024. It is staggering. What is needed is some deep reflection around why limited progress has been made. Surely this is essential to prevent the same thing happening - or in this case not happening - all over again? Instead we simply reset the clock. This pattern can be tracked right back to the early 1990s where NHS Trusts were asked to define their progress to achieving EPR Level 6 - electronic patient records which would have dispensed with paper.
It seems there is already a significant issue with the balance of fantasy and reality in 'real life' even before we look at this dynamic in writing in assignments.
The hard reality, for me, is that I am not the person who will be asked to write the Business Case for implementing a full Electronic Patient Record (EPR) in the place I work. I can have all the passion, belief and vision - I do - but I will not be asked to write the business case. In fact, it seems nobody from my organisation is going to be entrusted with writing this important document. I am told we will be paying £250,000 to a consultancy to produce the document!
So if I produce a 'business case' for an EPR as part of my assignment, what is the status of this? At best it can be seen as a kind of role playing exercise. But if I want to take my own 'business case' into any real work forum, it risks being simply dismissed as irrelevant fantasy. I may be lucky in getting constructive feedback from one or two colleagues. But in doing this they would be consciously joining in the role play. Yes, I would hope to have some influence on the real life business case, whenever that turns out to be, but that is no use to me in producing an assignment for 12th April 2021
My dilemma is that those horizons in which I currently have influence provide relatively weak opportunities for demonstrating all the requisite features covered in the course. Those horizons where areas where the best impact could be seen are the ones where I have negligible impact.
It seems the main intention - to set out a plan for the next two years in which I propose and propel a case which could actually be adopted where I work - is pretty nigh impossible in reality. The question then becomes about the value of fantasy.
Edgar Bolton.
31/03/2021
Any views expressed above are purely mine and should not be mistaken for those of any organisations or individuals I have been associated with
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