Contributor of the Month March 2008
Russell Craig
Career Background:
Russell originally studied accountancy but recognised the error of his ways and left university to set up his own landscape gardening business. His interest in sustainability led him to return to Victoria University in Wellington. After graduating in economic history, he joined New Zealand’s State Services Commission and worked on performance assessment of government departments and on a wide array of policy issues. This led onto work on the design of the public management system and specifically on the issue of government information management. At the time there was a recognition that public sector reform in New Zealand had led to excessive decentralisation with a lack of capacity to coordinate and manage change and no over-arching framework or strategy. E-government and a more enterprise-wide approach was seen as a the solution and Russell ended up taking a leading role in the formulating of New Zealand’s e-government strategy. In 2004 he moved to the OECD in Paris for a two-year secondment where his two biggest projects were leading a review of Denmark’s e-government programme and writing parts of an OECD publication entitled “e-Government for Better Government”. In late 2005 he returned to New Zealand to lead the Health Information Strategy and Policy team in the Health Ministry. Here he helped set up the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation, which is an inter-governmental organisation that governs and operates a medical terminology called SNOMED CT – a key enabler of electronic health records. In 2007 he joined Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group and moved to Hong Kong to work on public sector transformation with Asia Pacific governments. He has two children – a five-and-a-half year old son and an eight-month daughter.
Motivation:
Russell joined the public sector to make government work better for people. He is interested in how government can do what it does in new and better ways. He is not a great analyser of processes, but likes to help people develop a new vision of how things could be and then bring people together to translate this into real change on the ground. He is passionate about helping people see the potential for change, but once a programme is settling down, he likes to move on to a new area of innovation.
Frustrations:
Russell hates seeing vested interests inside the public sector stand in the way of the higher goal everyone is supposedly serving. Unelected politicians drive him bonkers and he is angered by expert power being used in dysfunctional ways. Fortunately in his last public sector job pushing forward transformation in the healthcare area he never encountered any of these issues (well, perhaps never is not quite the right word).
Favourite sites:
Russell is becoming a great fan of http://del.icio.us/ (having come across it on this site) and thinks it is a fascinating way of getting to information in a different way. He likes to read The Register www.theregister.co.uk/ – a site that is great for keeping up with developments in ICT. To keep in touch with home he likes to look at www.publicaddress.net/ – a group blog with great insights into the world of NZ politics, culture and media. He also enjoys Arts and Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com/) – a website edited by Dennis Dutton who is a Professor of Philosophy at Canterbury University.
Pet Passions:
work, family, sailing, all things green and
sustainable, gardening, architecture (he wants one day to build his own
eco-friendly house),
Pet Hates:
people who cannot get onboard with positive change, people who take themselves too seriously, people who say “what’s the government going to do about it”, people who shift responsibility onto others, advertising, consumer profiling
Magic Wand:
If Russell had a magic wand, he would abolish digital rights management since he hates the idea that a technology could be used to subvert the freedom of information in the public domain.
Personal Motto:
“Move on before they find you out”. Well, it’s not really his motto, but he likes the story about the seasoned bureaucrat who left his successor three notes with advice on what to do when he inevitably ended up in a desperate situation. The note for the first emergency read: “Blame me”. The note for the second emergency read: “Blame a subordinate”, while the final note said simply “Get a new job”.