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    Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies That Are Transforming Government
    Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies That Are Transforming Government
    Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies That Are Transforming Government
    Ebook328 pages2 hours

    Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies That Are Transforming Government

    By William D. Eggers

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    About this ebook

    The government reform expert and acclaimed author of The Solution Revolution presents a roadmap for navigating the digital government era.
     
    In October 2013, HealthCare.gov went live—and promptly crashed. Poor website design was getting in the way of government operations, and the need for digital excellence in public institutions was suddenly crystal clear. Hundreds of the tech industry’s best and brightest dedicated themselves to redesigning the government’s industrial-era frameworks as fully digital systems. But to take Washington into the 21st century, we have to start by imagining a new kind of government. 
     
    Imagine prison systems that use digital technology to return nonviolent offenders promptly and securely into society. Imagine a veteran’s health care system built around delivering a personalized customer experience for every Vet. We now have the digital tools—such as cloud computing, mobile devices, and analytics—to stage a real transformation. 
     
    Delivering on Digital provides the handbook to make it happen. A leading authority on government reform, William D. Eggers knows how we can use tech-savvy teams, strong leadership, and innovative practices to reduce the risks and truly achieve a digitally transformed government.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJun 7, 2016
    ISBN9780795347573
    Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies That Are Transforming Government

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      Book preview

      Delivering on Digital - William D. Eggers

      Part I

      The Digital Way of Thinking

      Chapter 1

      The Digital Mindset

      Hello, I’m Mike Bracken. I’m from the Internet. That’s how the former chief digital officer for the United Kingdom opened his speech on civil service reform at the Institute for Government in London.

      Over the next hour, Bracken, the co-founder of the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) unit, launched a frontal assault on many of the traditions and beliefs that formed the foundation of Her Majesty’s Civil Service.

      The UK’s venerated Whitehall model is predicated on the notion of a civil service driven by generalist policymakers trained to understand ambiguity, see an issue from all sides, and provide detailed policy options to ministers. Bracken believes instead in flooding government with digital innovators and letting them lead. They’re the ones who run successful organizations now, because they’re the ones who know how to, he argues.

      Traditionalists advocate the interest and desire to get things right the first time.¹ Bracken pushes back arguing that, It’s much better to fail fast, fail cheap, and then put things right at a fraction of the cost.

      The most coveted jobs in the civil service have long been the senior policy advisors who get to whisper into the ears of ministers. Bracken believes ministers should instead take their counsel from others. Advice must come from the doers—the people at the coal face that understand the shortcomings of their services and who are brimming with ideas for how to make them better, he says.

      And while Whitehall hails policy as paramount, Bracken wants delivery, not policy, to be the fundamental organizing principle of civil service.² He calls current policymaking slow, inflexible, unnecessarily complicated, adverse to technology, and afraid of change.

      The service should speak for itself, so policy can usually be articulated as one page of strategic outcomes that you’re trying to achieve: get more people to use a benefit or less to use a benefit, something like that, Bracken says. You don’t need these sort of highly intellectual, flowery white papers behind them.³

      Many senior British civil servants will—and did—strongly disagree with Bracken’s pointed critique. One could argue about who’s right or wrong. For our purposes, what matters is that Bracken, who has a superstar following among the digital cognoscenti, represents a radically different worldview, more akin to the Silicon Valley mindset than the typical attitudes of senior public officials. Let’s call this worldview the digital mindset, one shared by a large cadre of new digital leaders in governments from Washington to London, from Tallinn to Seoul.

      As governments embark on their digital journeys, it’s important to recognize that being digital is about far more than technology—it’s a changed mindset. Digital transformation requires seeing old problems and old processes through new eyes.

      A digital mindset is simply different from the attitudes driving most organizations, especially in the public sector. It’s a different way of thinking about customers; a different way of launching products and services; a different way of working.

      Bracken exemplifies this mindset. He’s a digital guy through and through. Before launching the UK’s Government Digital Service effort, he led the digital transformation of the Guardian newspaper, and earlier co-founded an e-democracy site called My Society. He holds a firm set of beliefs about how technology can transform business, society and government, and has devoted his career to making his vision a reality.

      I’ve worked in five industries in 15 countries, and I’ve experienced the process of digital transformation many, many times, he says. "Digital is the technological enabler of this century. And, in any sector you care to name, it’s been the lifeblood of organizations that have embraced it, and a death sentence for those that haven’t."⁴

      Bracken’s sentiments are shared by many luminaries across the world, from presidents to princes. New technologies, changing power relationships, failing jurisdictions, and disrupted economic sectors (i.e., the Uberization of everything) are challenging the status quo, says the Netherlands’ Prince Constantijn van Oranje-Nassau, a senior advisor to the European Commission. If government is not able to reform and apply new technology, I have very strong doubts that it will be able to effectively manage the challenges posed by pervasive technology developments.⁵

      In Asia, more and more government leaders from Singapore to Vietnam to South Korea now hold the digital mindset. Governments of the past used to work as ‘vending machine–like’ service purveyors, which offered the public standardized public services in a monopolistic manner, says Park Chan-woo, South Korea’s deputy minister for the Ministry of Public Administration. Now, governments are evolving into platform-like ones, on which the public and companies can directly participate in the provision of services and express their opinions on government policies.⁶

      So what ideas and worldview do these leaders share? There’s no agreed-upon definition of a digital mindset, but five characteristics tend to be common among individuals and organizations that understand the opportunities inherent in digital transformation: a belief in openness, user-centricity, co-creation, simplicity, and agility.

      Openness

      Openness is at the very core of today’s digital mindset. Digital innovators tend to share data, open-source their code and embrace the self-governing nature of the Internet. It’s akin to a code for how they do their work and lead their lives, an ethos that can be traced back decades to digital pioneers such as Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist who wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

      Traditionally, this tribe of open-source, open-data tech evangelists agitated outside the confines of the public sector, pushing and prodding governments to open up. But more and more of them are venturing into government, drawn by the opportunity to open it up from the inside.

      A case in point: Eric Mill, a 30-year-old federal employee at the US General Services Administration’s 18F, a digital consultancy of more than 150 engineers, designers, and technology consultants.

      With a big curly head of hair and a uniform of T-shirt and jeans, Mill began working on open government at the Sunlight Foundation, a scrappy Washington, DC, nonprofit focused on making government more transparent and accountable. Sunlight’s relentless advocacy and its technical chops have played a big role in opening up federal data. I gave the best years of my life to open government and transparency, says Mill.

      While at Sunlight, Mill worked on a variety of projects aimed at helping regular citizens access government information: an Android app that makes congressional information more accessible and a search engine that looks across local, state, and federal governments to help citizens find what they need without having to figure out which government agency is in charge of what.

      Sunlight was a huge learning experience for me, and also a place where technology was the first priority and the ethos and values of the Internet and technology community could lead, Mill says. I was able to get more of an imagination for what could be. It was a lot of fun, and even a little intoxicating, to be able to push the government forward that way.

      Mill and his colleagues have taken their passion for what they call a default to open into the heart of the federal government, putting their code online under an open-source license so other agencies can use it, and engaging in very public discussions about their projects on open collaboration platforms such as

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