How do we think about retiring or decommissioning products in agile digital transformation? This is a question that CDW member Assistant Professor Jessamy Perriam has been thinking with for some years now. As a member of the CDW’s Agile State working group, she is part of a collective of researchers investigating the impacts of agile project management on public sector workers and citizens.
Jessamy’s interest in this question was spurred by her years working in and with the UK public sector as a user researcher. In many projects that she was a part of, the smooth implementation of a new system was not a given – there was much work to be done untangling the parts of the (mostly) back-end infrastructure to enable a new, agile product to take its place. This is not a surprise when we consider just how long public sectors have been digitalizing for! Recent digitialisation efforts are merely putting a citizen-facing front-end onto systems that have been supporting our government processes for decades.
Sometimes we get glimpses of the infrastructure supporting our digital services. For instance, in the UK some of the vehicle registration services are running on (virtual) mainframe computers that process data in batches. In practice this means that despite this being a digitalized service, citizens can only use this transaction between 7am and 7pm. Sometimes digital services need a rest too!
Agile project management has undoubtedly accelerated building or upgrading digital services for citizens, however we haven’t quite come to grips with how we work with our technical debt and legacy tech. In the past years, Jessamy has been speaking with UK digital transformation practitioners to better understand approaches to legacy tech in the public sector.
Jessamy is keen to speak with anyone in other national contexts about this too. You can get in touch with her via
jper@itu.dk
