Michael T. Thieme, Assistant Director for Decennial Census Programs, Systems and Contracts, U.S. Census Bureau

Like the style of the clothes in your closet, the conventional wisdom on what works and how business or government organizations should acquire and use technology repeats in cycles.If you don’t think it will be effective to buy an off-the shelf solution from an external vendorin the current environment, just wait awhile,and building homegrown systems will again be the way to go. The same applies to the perennial question of which technologyapproach is best for your enterprise. If generalized, one-size-fits-all platforms providing shared services don’t work for you today, a new era of purpose-built applications tailored to the needs of separate internal business units may be right around the corner. Of course, none of us has time to wait for the cycle to come around to our way of thinking. We buy or build, generalize or tailor, as current circumstances require. To help avoid getting caught up in popular trends that may not serve your organization well, this article suggests a structured, data-driven approach to IT planning.

The information technology cycle has a significant influence on how organizations innovate, and the U.S. Census Bureau has a long history of innovation, both in statistics and in technology. We at Census have also grappled with the cyclical nature of technology, having delivered the Decennial Census every ten-years since Thomas Jefferson ran the first one in 1790.

Some examples: A Census employee, Herman Hollerith, invented the cardpunch machine to tabulate the 1890 Census. He went on to be one of the founders of IBM. Continuing into the twentieth century, the Census Bureau built innovations that led the government and private sector in computerization, statistical sampling, interviewing techniques, data processing, quality control, and geographic information systems. We pioneered the first large-scale use of the computer with UNIVAC 1 after the 1950 Census, and developed (in-house) optical character recognition to digitize data for the 1960 Census. We developed the first “wall-to-wall” digital street map of the United States, which gave rise to the many private sector Geographic Information System (GIS) innovations that brought us Google Maps and Waze. This long history of change and innovation provides the backdrop for many of us here at the U.S. Census Bureau, who have had the opportunity to watch and learn in recent decades as the IT cycle repeats.

The Spectrum

The figure below suggests a spectrum of IT approaches that organizations face in our changing times, along with some high-level characteristics at each end of the spectrum. For simplicity, I use the terms Centralized and Business-Driven to describe each end of the spectrum.

Further characteristics of the Centralized orientation include things like a shared resource pool, a standards-driven approach, a high level of repeatability, a high level of structure, and processes oriented toward effective use of technology. In contrast, theBusiness-Driven approachemphasizesdedicated resource pools, mission/purpose-driven strategies, a high level of flexibility and responsiveness, and processes geared toward specific business goals.