C(2004)146
7
C(2004)146
Table of contents
Meeting Information and Communications Technology Challenge
A Medium-Term Strategy for the OECD 2004-2007
I. Introduction: Why an ICT Strategy? 3
II. Organisation Challenges 4
III. Medium-Term Strategic Goals and Anticipated Outcomes 6
IV. The Technology Foundations: Infrastructure and Client Support 17
V. Security and Safety of Information 20
VI. OECD Committees 22
VII. Substantive Activity of the Secretariat 23
VIII. Communications and Outreach 27
IX. Management of the Secretariat 29
X. ICT Governance 33
Table 1: A Snapshot of ICT at the OECD …3
Table 2: An OECD Medium-Term ICT Strategy: Objectives, Outputs and Target Dates …9
Figure 1: Spending on ICT Security 21
Figure 2: Workflow Diagram for the New Statistical Information Systems 24
Figure 3: OECD Information Systems To Serve Management Needs 33
Annex 1: Outsourced ICT Activities ..…36
I. Introduction: Why an ICT Strategy?
. Information and communications technology (ICT) investment over the past 10-15 years has helped to transform how the OECD operates. ICT supports and enhances the Organisation’s roles of building knowledge, communicating with the world and interacting with governments to inform and influence policy making. It also underpins the management of OECD resources.
. Keep the trains running; build a better railroad. If ICT at the OECD could have a motto, such words could capture it. They reflect the principal elements of demand to which ICT services must respond, namely the seamless, trouble-free operation of what is furnished today and the steady escalation of demand for new and better services tomorrow. These two elements work in constant tension and competition for ICT resources. Rapid technological change deeply affects them both, which makes simply keeping up with progress a major investment requirement and forces forward-looking planning to pay close attention to the main directions of such change. The OECD would be ill advised to sail along content to purchase all the latest gadgetry and software, even if resources permitted; it must take a more considered view in order to maximise the return on its ICT investment and the added value of its ICT services.
. The cumulative effects of ICT investment cut two ways. First, they enable the Organisation to do its job with a modern infrastructure of technology and the skills needed to use it. Without that infrastructure, the old ways of doing that job might well have induced an operational sclerosis, seriously compromising the Organisation’s effectiveness. At the same time, ICT solutions generate an appetite for more and better ones. That appetite must receive nourishment within the limits of available resources. Second, and again in comparison with not too long ago, the Organisation has become dependent on ICT. From statistical databases, econometric modelling, policy development and document production to business processes that arrange travel, hiring of experts, meeting organisation and communications both within the Secretariat and with the wider world, the technologies and their use have become irrevocably embedded within the broad OECD system (Table 1). There is no turning back.
Table 1. A Snapshot of ICT at the OECD
Indicator / 2002 / 2003*OECD committees and interaction with national administrations
National officials registered in OLISnet (OECD extranet) / 9600 / 11600
Ministries and agencies with LAN-wide access to OLISnet / 90 / 130
Delegates registered for committee meetings / 35 200 / 44 400
Delegate and contact database / 108 600 / 169 800
OECD Web site
Visits per day / 15 000 / 32 000
Pages viewed per day / 132 000 / 375 000
Secretariat use of ICT
E-mails per month (incoming and outgoing) / 1.1 million / 1.5 million
Official documents produced per year / 11 600 / 11,000
Primary statistical databases / >100 / >100
Central data storage (bytes) / 1 300 million / 1 900 million
Telephone calls made (minutes) / 5.8 million / 5.7 million
* Some data relate to March 2003-March 2004
. In such an environment, strategic planning — with wide consultation so that the entire OECD, in its broadest sense including capitals, delegations, delegates and the Secretariat, can agree on where constrained resources will be spent — becomes a necessity rather than a luxury and an essential tool rather than a bureaucratic exercise. This document sets out the Organisation’s anticipated ICT requirements over the coming three years and proposes a programme for meeting those requirements. It focuses on new challenges and changing business objectives over this medium-term horizon, and it defines viable ICT development scenarios to help attain those objectives, as they have been identified in a series of review meetings with Directorates and Services. It deals also with the ongoing work of the Organisation, identifying ways to:
· Enhance the quality and timeliness of information flows and interaction with national administrations to support the work of committees and help the OECD to communicate more effectively;
· Enable the Secretariat to work more efficiently; and
· Ensure that the information network and communications foundation remain healthy, up to date and protected from security threats.
. This ICT strategy limits itself by assuming that current (2004) levels of funding remain the norm. It thus sketches a reasonable baseline scenario around which discussion can take place of priorities for husbanding fewer resources or what could be done faster if extra funding were available. At the current spending levels that govern this baseline scenario, the Organisation can take some pride in what it has been able to accomplish. Other international organisations spend a great deal more. The OECD spends about €5700 per staff member on ICT each year, and it has no ICT capital fund. The IMF and the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) disburse about twice as much per person and the World Bank three times as much. All three organisations have ICT capital investment programmes in excess of US$20million annually. Currently, the OECD spends about 70 per cent of its ICT resources on maintenance and support activities and about 30 per cent on new investment. The trend is for the former to crowd out the latter. The ratio was closer to 50 per cent/50 per cent in the late 1980s. The wide spread of technology across the House, continued reductions in ICT budgets and increased fragmentation of the secretariat’s offices all have tended to skew it in a direction that could become perilous to essential new investment if the trend continues.
. ICT can be seen as an input or simply a means to facilitate work. By taking a more pro-active approach however, ICT has the capacity to “transform” an organisation. That is the spirit of this strategy: it presents the best approach that OECD's management can imagine to use ICT to help the Organisation move forward in a chosen direction (without however making the Organisation ICT-driven). The strategy tries to answer the question: “What can we do with what we have?”. The time horizon chosen is three years - detailed planning beyond this period is difficult due to the rapid pace of change in ICT. This proposal is relatively straightforward and does not deal with questions of possible tradeoffs, prioritisation of tasks, detailed costing or an elaboration of what cannot be done with current ICT resources. Those important matters need to be dealt with in other contexts, including the Programme of Work and Budget (PWB) exercise. In short, this is not a PWB document, although it and the feedback that results from its wide discussion within the House will provide a foundation for clearheaded PWB thinking
II. Organisation Challenges
. The medium-term ICT strategy takes it as given that the Organisation will face new challenges as it has in the past. ICT has to play its proper role in this process. The needs of Member governments will continue to evolve, and the OECD will continue to adapt to them. Interaction with and between member countries and non-member economies, other international organisations and civil society will intensify, and the number of meetings held externally will continue to increase (22 per cent of all OECD meetings in the last 12months were held in 75 other countries). Broadening participation in OECD activities as well as their wider scope will lead to still greater complexity and still more acceleration of data flows. Likely increases in OECD membership will render even more acute questions surrounding the decision-making process, budget contributions and work-programme prioritisation. As multidisciplinary and cross-regional work increase, requirements will emerge for greater and easier availability of information, more horizontal collaboration and a whole-of-OECD communications strategy. The Organisation may well evolve even further in the direction of developing nuclei of competences, with more projects carried out by working clusters of experts drawn from those nuclei. This implies better, faster and easier communications, new ways of handling data and information and better ways of sharing and combining analytical tasks. ICT can smooth these processes and make them seamless.
. In such a nexus, ICT policy must effectively address both a source of tension and an opportunity. The tension lies in the deepening conflict between the continued opening of the Organisation to the outer world and the imperative to make its information and communications facilities more secure. Both are good things, but the problems they present cannot be hidden. The opportunity arises from the changing nature of the OECD’s work, towards both a more dispersed business model and more co-operative, “horizontal” operations involving organisationally and sometimes physically dispersed staff. Proper ICT policy and services can provide much value added by making this inherently inefficient structure more efficient and easier to manage. They also can act together as a unifying force. A dispersed staff will have greater unity working with common ICT tools — provided that those tools have been chosen with attention to staff needs — while the tools themselves will promote better horizontal co-operation and thus a more unified approach to the analytical problems with which the Organisation deals.
. The special problems related to the spreading of staff across many annexes, exacerbated by the moves and other arrangements consequent upon the site renovation project at La Muette present a sort of special case of the foregoing general point. Among other things, they involve heavy extra costs. This far-reaching headquarters renovation project will continue to generate strong pressures on all staff, particularly within EXD, until its likely completion towards the end of the decade. Moreover, within the horizon of this medium-term ICT strategy, it is not too soon to start thinking about and planning the eventual “re-assembly” of the House, even if the preferred OECD business model remains dispersed in concept.
. The Organisation’s management objectives will present challenges as well. The growing complexity of activities and their funding demand new approaches to accountability and transparency throughout the work-programme cycle. It is hard to imagine how such approaches could not have big ICT components. The major institutional reforms already under way — changes in committee structures and funding, statistical systems and resource management — all have implications for ICT policy. In all of these situations ICT will contribute substantially.
. Another challenge involves the ongoing debate about the extent to which the Organisation should shift its primary reliance from Microsoft products to Open-Source Software (OSS). The question will become more critical towards the end of 2006 when the Microsoft licence will need to be renewed and the present desktop environment upgraded. The main strategic factors to consider involve balancing the risks and opportunities in integrating new OSS technologies, evaluating their fitness for OECD purposes, ensuring interoperability and manageability, estimating potential efficiencies and, of course, a look at costs — including potential return on investment (ROI) and transition, training and support costs. This large topic lies outside the scope of the ICT strategy presented here. Provisionally and only as a convenience, the strategy assumes no change from Microsoft. Late in 2004, the OECD will host a workshop for ICT experts from Member governments to discuss the OSS issue. In 2005, the topic will require exhaustive study, discussion, recommendations and decisions.
. A significant number of ICT activities are outsourced (Annex 1). The Organisation will continue to monitor the market and adjust its sourcing strategy periodically (either insourcing or outsourcing) to ensure that ICT services are provided in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible, in line with the strategic importance of each service.
III. Medium-Term Strategic Goals and Anticipated Outcomes
. A successful ICT strategy must stay oriented towards the institutions and people that it serves. These include three main constituencies, and the ICT strategy has a goal for each of them:
· National Administrations. Notwithstanding developments like OLISnet, delegates and national officials should have still better OECD network support, to exchange information, to interact effectively and securely with one another and the Secretariat and to stay up to date on committee work. Such a network of enhanced, secure communications and associated information systems can boost the efficiency of committee operations and ultimately the Organisation’s influence on policies in capitals, in both member and non-member economies.
· The Secretariat. All staff should have secure access to the combined knowledge and expertise of the entire Organisation. This includes attention to the means to work effectively together within and across Directorates, wherever staff happen to be located, as well as ICT support for the management of all aspects of executing the work programme with maximum efficiency and maximum transparency.
· External Constituencies. ICT should enable the Organisation to disseminate the results of its work through effective communication with external audiences such as parliamentarians, the media, civil society and the general public. These constituencies are now very often included in OECD events.
. From the viewpoint of ICT operations, the main goals can be restated in a way that applies them jointly to all these constituencies. Keep the trains running. Build a better railroad. These notions capture the objectives of operating, maintaining and improving interconnected systems that help managers to manage, let staff focus on content to produce output of high quality, integrate national administrations more closely with the Organisation’s work and raise the OECD’s profile among external constituencies. Thus the strategy aims to: