Bill's Notebook

First, a quick disclaimer: I am currently on a six-month detail for OPM’s Open Government Team. Yes, I am bragging but I also want to stress that anything I write on my blog is just my personal opinion and does not reflect the opinions of OPM, the Open Government Team, or anyone connected with the OPM Open Government effort.

Now on to the topic. There is a lot of cynicism both in and outside of government concerning Gov 2.0 and Open Gov. I believe most of this comes past government reform efforts which had, at best, mixed results. In my first round as a Federal employee I was involved with Gore’s Reinventing Government effort. Reagan had a blue-ribbon commission on reform as did Nixon. Government reform has been a continuing effort since Wilson and Taylorism. I believe they even found evidence of government reform efforts in Ancient Egypt (I wonder how you tell a god-emperor he or she needs to go “lean”).

So, with this long history of government reform which has some brought some innovation but disappointment what makes Gov 2.0 and Open Gov different? And is this difference enough to make a real impact? To me there are three major reasons why Gov 2.0 and Open Gov will succeed and succeed big:

1) Government is re-engaging their citizens. Public agencies can no longer operate as vending machines where citizens put in tax dollars and out pops government services. Agencies are becoming transparent and accountable for how they spend tax money and are encouraging citizens to become part of providing government services. Think of Dr. Noveck’s Peer-to-Patent program and the recent SeeClickFix programs.

2) Democracy is changing. I have written before about the emergence of monitory democracy and the recent events in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and other Middle Eastern countries just demonstrates the desire for democracy and how media-rich nations empower citizens to grow democracy. Even in well-established democracies citizens are no longer content to vote for a representative and then trust that the government will operate in their interest. People want to speak directly to agencies that affect their lives and are demanding the right to monitor even the inner workings of the Federal, state, and local governments.

3) Balance of Information Power has shifted. Before the Open Data movement, government essentially held all the cards when it came to information about what government did and how it operated. Yes, there were investigative journalism articles, legislative hearings, and the occasional FOIA request but obtaining government information that wasn’t selectively released by agencies was difficult to obtain for the average citizen. Now, thanks to the Internet and Social Media technologies it is easier to gain access and to aggregate data sources to give a more complete picture of what government is doing. The Balance of Information Power is shifting in favor for the citizen and will continue to shift that way as government engages citizens and as monitory democracy evolves.

In Gov 2.0 and Open Gov the citizen is no longer a customer who passively receives government services. Past reform movements were built upon the vending machine model and that is why they didn’t deliver as promised. Gov 2.0 and Open Gov are built upon engagement and collaboration and that is why they will prove to be more successful.

What do you think? Are these three reasons valid? Are there better reasons for why Gov 2.0 and Open Gov will succeed? Or is Gov 2.0 and Open Gov just like previous government reform efforts?

I started my government career as a street-level bureaucrat. In the summer of 1990 I was a paralegal intern for the Richmond, Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. This was a public defenders office that covered four counties and my job was to interview the clients that had been arrested and jailed. I would spend the morning in the jail interviewing clients and the afternoons writing up reports and doing legal research. Even for a small college town we were quite busy. The average caseload for our attorneys was between 200 to 250 cases a year. It was this experience that led to my lifelong interest in street-level bureaucracies (SLB).

What makes a SLB different from other government agencies is that SLBs have immediate and direct contact with the public while most employees in other agencies deal almost exclusively with other government employees. SLBs are where policy is realized and implemented. The bulk of government employment are street-level bureaucrats such as police officers, teachers, social workers, and so on. As Michael Lipsky observed these government employees are charged with implementing and administering an ever-increasing set of policies and laws to an ever-growing population while facing shrinking budgets and resources. It may not be as bad as being consigned to Hades and tasked with eternally rolling a boulder up a hill but there are some days that it is close.

Street-level bureaucrats (SLB) have devised a number of methods to cope with their job as Jeffrey Prottas details in his book People-Processing. The SLB picks the rules that they will follow because to follow every rule that comes down would immobilize the agency. The SLB trains the citizens it meets into becoming good clients who make life easier for the SLB by being compliant and not making extra work. The biggest advantage that the SLB has is their superior knowledge of the rules and processes through which the SLB can punish or reward clients by withholding or supplying information. Even though the SLB is required to exercise as little discretion as possible in fulfilling the agency’s objectives, they manage to carve out a good deal of autonomy.

The studies that established the characteristics of the street-level bureaucrats (SLB) and their practices were done in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. You will see an occasional paper on SLBs but nothing yet as to the impact of social networking technologies and how they affect the work and practices of the SLB. I think that social networking will have a profound impact on SLBs because it will destroy the information advantage SLBs have while better performance measurement tools will reduce the autonomy of SLBs.

Let’s discuss the performance management tools first. When dashboard cameras were installed in police cars the police officer’s actions in the field were now more easily observed and monitored by their managers back at the station. Dashboard cameras were first resisted by police officers but then they realized that this was objective proof of why they had to deal with someone the way they did and now most police officers welcome the scrutiny. Another related technology, GPS “tattlers” that record the routes taken by public service workers is not so well accepted but has helped cut down on abuse by some workers.

But where the most profound impact of the social networking technologies is in erasing the information advantage the street-level bureaucrat has over clients. Just think of how car buying, medicine, law, and so many other areas have been influenced when consumers can go to a website and research the history of a car, the symptoms of a disease, or create their own will with freely-available information and the advice of a community who had similar experiences. There is a large market out there for the person who writes a Dummies guide to the local welfare office or releases an app to help a citizen negotiate the process of applying for aid. I remember how empowered I felt when I first gained online access to my bank account and could see the same information the bank clerk saw as we spoke on the phone. The SLBs will lose a great deal of discretion when faced with a group of empowered clients who know the process and their rights even better than the SLB.

But these same social networking technologies can greatly benefit the SLB as well. A large part of the work is screening the client which could be done through an automated process thus freeing the SLB to deal with the exceptional cases (you can see this already in some jurisdictions). Another benefit is for SLBs to form online communities where they can receive guidance from their peers at their desk ans while working with clients. I also believe that the performance management tools will provide an objective view of the burdens SLBs work under and may discourage management to stop producing so many rules and erasing existing rules. We will not know the full impact of the new social technologies on the street-level bureaucracies for several years as the innovations diffuse through the agencies but I am hopeful the impact will create a better future for both Client 2.0 and SLB 2.0.

References:

Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Prottas, J.M. (1979). People-processing: The street-level bureaucrat in public service bureaucracies. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

A book that I constantly recommend is Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth for two reasons. First, Beinhocker demonstrates how traditional economics is inadequate for explaining today’s economic systems. Second, he introduces complexity economics which is still developing but does a much better job in describing how real-world economies work and how people behave economically. To illustrate, let me give a simplified description of his core theory.

You start with a business plan. A business plan is a description of how you will meld physical technologies and social technologies to create a business that competes in an economy. Physical technologies (PT) are “methods and designs for transforming matter, energy, and information from one state into another in pursuit of a goal or goals.” Social technologies (ST) are the “methods and designs for organizing people in pursuit of a goal or goals.” Your business then competes with other businesses on the economic fitness landscape.

The best way to think of a fitness landscape is to imagine a square piece of land with hills and valleys. Businesses want to climb as high as they can on the highest hills because the higher you are up on a fitness landscape the more successful you are. Conversely, if you are in a deep valley you are failing in being fit on that landscape. Various factors determine fitness such as profitability, customer relations, and so on.

So, what does this have to do with Gov 2.0 or government in general? Replace business plan with plan and business with either project or program. You still have PT and ST but instead of building a business to compete on an economic fitness landscape, you are building a project or program to compete in government agency fitness landscape or policy area fitness landscape. This may seem rather abstract but this new perspective helps to consider fundamental questions about your Gov 2.0 project.

1. What are the factors that determine fitness in your landscape? Is it citizen engagement, cost-efficiency, and ease of implementation? Or is it increased collaboration and knowledge generation? Understanding what constitutes success will help to determine what the goal or goals should be for your Gov 2.0 project.
2. What PT an ST will the project need? How will these technologies blend together? Are there barriers to a good blending? Will the proposed blend fulfill the fitness factors more effectively than other blends?
3. How do I know if the Gov 2.0 project is climbing hills in the fitness landscape? How do I find the highest peaks in the fitness landscape and keep the Gov 2.0 project from being stranded on a smaller peak? How do I keep the Gov 2.0 project out of the valleys?
4. What do I do if the fitness landscape shifts? How do I determine when the fitness landscape shifts and what can I do to move the Gov 2.0 project so it stays on the peaks?

Another concept from Beinhocker that is also useful to government agencies is the idea of social architecture. Social architecture determines how adaptable an organization is and is composed of three factors:
1. Behaviors of individuals in the organization (Mental Models)
2. Structures and processes that align people and resources in pursuit of the organization’s goals.
3. The emergent culture that arises from people’s interactions with each other and their environment.
A robust social architecture gives the organization better abilities to determine the shifts in the fitness landscape and to better adapt to the shifts.

The advantages of the fitness landscape perspective is that it starts the dialogue on what the goals of the the Gov 2.0 project are and how the current environment will help or hinder reaching those goals. It also requires an honest assessment of the agency’s abilities to understand their current environment and to adapt when the environment changes. Beinhocker’s book is dense with ideas but he writes in a approachable style and his last chapter is especially vital in understanding government’s role in complexity economics.

Reference:

Beinhocker, E.D. (2006). The origin of wealth: The radical remaking of economics and what it means for business and society. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

Two interesting articles about organizational culture in the latest issue of the “Journal of Organizational Change Management.”  The first article is a cultural analysis of organizational memory and its role in organizational change while the second article describes how organizational memory can hinder learning a new technology.

In the first article, McCabe gives a more detailed description of organizational culture as a collection of shared memories.  These memories can contradict each other or just be ambiguous about past organizational events but, woven together, these memories form a dynamic and conflicting culture for the organization.  McCabe disputes the common belief of many management theorists that the past can be erased in favor of the new reality because the past always blocks change.  Organizational memory is more complex than that because some memories can help facilitate change while other aspects resist change.  McCabe concludes by stating that organizational memory cannot be managed as part of the change process but must be accounted for.

McCabe’s article illuminates the findings in the second article by Becker.  The second article deals with the process of acquiring new technology in an organization.  As Becker explains, for employees to adopt a new technology they must unlearn the old technology.  They do this through releasing mental models of the workings of the old technology and create mental models of how the new technology works.  Memories of past change efforts can hinder the process of unlearning if it promotes fear and anxiety among the employees.  Becker does not have any specific remedies for dealing with organizational memory and unlearning but she does argue that further research is necessary to fully understand the unlearning process.

The relevance to Gov 2.0 is clear.  Many agencies have long and painful memories of past change efforts that have been woven into the current culture.  Gov 2.0 advocates must understand and acknowledge the past while developing strategies to alleviate the fear that will prevent government employees from unlearning the current way things are done in favor of making government transparent, open, and engaging.  Gov 2.0 advocates must take the positive aspects of the past and use those events to counter the negative past events while realizing that culture cannot be fully controlled.

References:

Becker, K. (2010). Facilitating unlearning during implementation of new technology. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 23:3. 251-268.

McCabe, D. (2010). Taking the long view: A cultural analysis of memory as resisting and facilitating organizational change. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 23:3. 230-250.

According to Mark Drapeau of O’Reilly.

I’ve been saying in various posts on GovLoop how important apps are to Gov 2.0 (not a unique insight as plenty of others have come to the same conclusion).  What is great is the idea of crowdsourcing the development of government apps.