In my professional work as a management consultant, I consider myself as an agent of change.

A consultant’s job is to add a fresh, unbiased external view to a corporate problem, to propose solutions free from the legacy limitations to which most internal management willingly or sub-consciously subject themselves, remove the barriers to change that could stifle the proposed solutions – no matter how well thought out – aid management to deliver the solutions with effectiveness, efficiency and determination and make himself/herself redundant so that the company can enjoy the benefits of change in a period of relative stability and consolidation after the metamorphosis of change that consultants often bring to the organisation.

One of the organisations to which I brought substantial changes is MITTS, the former MSU. Soon after the Labour government of 1996 was voted into office, the Prime Minister asked me, in my capacity as a management consultant, to undertake an urgent study of the organisation and issue a report detailing its strengths and weaknesses and make recommendations as to how the company could go forward.

MSU was a hot topic in the election campaign of 1996, with Labour accusing the incumbent government of hubris and waste in the way in which it was managed. The opposition-appointed chairman of the Public Accounts Committee had resigned his position in protest at the reluctance by the then chairman of MSU to give a full and detailed account of the salaries paid by the company, on the pretext that this was sensitive, commercial information. Little did it bother the then chairman of MSU that, in fact, the company had a monopoly over the government’s IT services, was not subject to any commercial competitive pressures and was, in fact, a commercial company only in name, since the company operated as if it were a government department but without the bureaucratic control of public spending.

Suffice it to say that the funds that the company considered as revenue in its published accounts were voted directly to it by a specific budgetary vote under the Office of the Prime Minister’s budgetary allocations, and that this revenue was claimed irrespective of what the company actually delivered in return. In fact, the commercial accounts published by the company at the time could not reflect a true commercial profit as there was the paradox that the less the company delivered, the fewer variable expenses it incurred and with revenue taken in irrespective of performance, the less the company delivered, the higher the profit it registered. By the same yardstick, the Drydocks would have been a money-spinner!

The change I brought about at MSU was not simply its new name – MITTS (Malta Information Technology and Training Services) – but, more importantly, the adoption of a strict focus on IT proficiency, with its management consultancy division migrating back to central government.

The management consultancy was renamed Management Efficiency Unit (MEU) and was integrated within the OPM, where it is still effectively churning out very professional consultancy reports on how the government might bring about the necessary restructuring change to the economy – if it really had the will power and the political courage to do so rather than simply hiding behind such reports and appearing to be trying to do something, without actually biting the bullet which, though necessary, would be unpleasant in electoral popularity terms.

MITTS, on the other hand, was made to sign full commercial agreements with government users, detailing what it is meant to deliver, on what terms and at what price. The budgetary allocations from the central government budget were made to the departments concerned, who then had to spend the funds in terms of public sector financial regulations.

The changes I proposed were broadly accepted and have endured nine years so far. I had successfully saved all that was worth saving and drained away the dirty water without endangering the baby. MITTS was freed from the illusion that it could reform the public service by throwing computers, consultant reports and other expensive systems at the central government, and instead turned itself into a competent, efficient and reliable IT service provider for the public sector. The problem is that the change that was started was not continued. Today, MITTS is still stalled where I left it in 1998. This leads me to the myths of what it might have been.

After dealing with the 1996 structural changes, I was asked to serve as a director on the board and was working on the next step, following a period of stability. My dream was to have the company privatised through an employee buy-out of a majority stake through a purposely created structure (commercial company, cooperative or foundation). After all, as an IT company the best assets of MITTS is the brain power of its employees and I can vouch that, at least at the time, the organisation hosted the best and the brainiest. The challenge was to energise these human resources and liberalise their creativity to lead them to model a tiny “Silicon Valley” in our midst.

While signing a long-term agreement to continue servicing the government on existent systems where government depended on MITTS for continuity, I had envisioned liberalising supply of new systems with part of MITTS migrating to the government to ensure it could control quality and inter-operability while MITTS operated in a free market to supply the government, but preferably found international niches in which to market its expertise. With Y2K two years down the road, I was certain that demand for their services from international orders would have established the company on a recognised international platform.

One could easily write off these visions as fantasies. But the problem with this country and its stagnation is that we have stopped dreaming, we have stifled creativity with bureaucracy and have built systems to ensure that finger pointing for failure will be suffered by the system, not by individuals.

We have messed up quite a few privatisations. Sins of commission are easier to prove. Sins of omission, as in case of the non-privatisation of MITTS, are harder to pin down and anyone who dares to do so could easily be written off as a dreamer or writer of myths. But this does not make the sins of omission any less serious.

www.alfredmifsud.com