Legacy Permits System: Replace or Stabilize Under a Budget Freeze
State Infrastructure Agency runs a 14-year-old permits system used by 5,000 staff and 40,000 external applicants. Annual run-and-maintain cost is €22 million, of which 62% is vendor support; the system has had four unplanned outages in six months. A budget freeze blocks new capital until the next fiscal year. The board’s IT dashboard reports only uptime (99.2%) and ticket closure (87%). The CIO proposes a €60 million replacement over four years; the finance director proposes a two-year “stabilize and extend” program at €9 million. The minister has publicly promised “digital permits in 18 months.” The board IT committee meets next week and has not agreed a risk appetite for service interruption. Customer complaints have doubled, and the agency’s audit committee has flagged unresolved access-control findings for two consecutive years.
1. How should the board respond to the competing replacement and stabilization proposals using Evaluate and Direct?
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The board should not simply choose the CIO’s €60 million replacement or the CFO’s €9 million stabilization. That would be a management decision made without an agreed risk appetite. Evaluate: compare options against service risk, the ministerial commitment, whole-life cost, delivery capability, and exit from the legacy vendor. The 18-month promise is a constraint, not a plan. Direct: set a risk appetite for service interruption, require a staged decision, and define who owns benefits and continuity.
A two-year stabilization can be a bridge only if it includes exit-ready data and vendor transition clauses; a four-year replacement may not meet the minister’s promise. The board can approve a bounded stabilization tranche with conditions while commissioning an independent options appraisal. It should also correct the false choice: the question is not replace or stabilize, but what sequence reduces risk while preserving credibility. The board directs the decision framework; management executes it.
2. What should the board’s monitoring dashboard include to satisfy the Performance and Conformance principles, and why are uptime and ticket closure insufficient?
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Monitor should cover four dimensions, not just uptime and ticket closure. Performance: service availability by critical process, outage duration and citizen impact, backlog age, cost per transaction, and benefit realization. Conformance: unresolved access-control findings, audit remediation, contract compliance, and security incidents. Risk: single-vendor concentration, end-of-support dates, disaster-recovery test results, and budget variance. Strategy: progress against the ministerial commitment and stage gates.
The dashboard should use thresholds and trend arrows, not only green/red. For example, 99.2% uptime can hide four outages that each blocked permit applications; 87% ticket closure can hide aged severity-one tickets. The board should direct management to define data-quality rules and to report leading indicators such as change-failure rate and patch latency. Monitoring is not report receipt; it requires challenge, follow-up, and escalation when thresholds are breached.