By Rishabh Srivastava, Founder of Loki.ai
This summary was largely done for my own note-taking, sharing it just in case it adds more value to other people.
I have no affiliation whatsoever with either the presenters or the organisers. This is a summary largely taken for my own reference, and may contain errors :)
Context
Source URL:
Why is it important: Post Covid, temporary culture changes are likely to lead to permanent changes in how government works
Keywords
Digital Transformation, Government
Summary
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Highlights
A. Decentralized teams as the building unit of government
By Andrew Greenway, Founding Partner of Public Digital
There aren't that many new stories under the sun when it comes to government. New technologies and new politicians – maybe. But it's often the same skeleton of government underneath. Any "new model" of government worthy of that name has to go quite deep. Not something you can just buy off the shelf. But at the moment, we have a window of opportunity for thinking quite differently about the structure of government.
In Covid-19, we have seen some anti-patterns of how governments mess up that have been quite familiar for some time:
- Technology embarrassment
- Drawn in by "solutions"
- Consultancy co-dependency
Fundamentally, governments still default to a siloed, departmentalised structure. Consultancies cannot and should not be responsible for creating new models for governments, they have no idea what's at stake and are outside the core of public service
The industry ecosystem that supports government is often quite keen on protecting their own turf rather than working collegiately behind the collective vision and sense of accountability. The model is decades old, and works on a hierarchical architecture that moves at the speed of process, rather than the speed of trust.
The thing that moved the needle in government wasn't technology, or incredibly smart individuals, or process. It was teams.
Teams that are:
- agile
- diverse
- empowered by their leaders to make decisions without the leaders in the room
- outcome focused
- centred on user need, not organisation need
Empowered, multidisciplinary, user-centered teams have to the the main unit of the new model of governance. Not ministries.
They may be a blend of public service and contractors, but they'll be high-performing, cross-cutting, cross-disciplinary. They'll be created in normal times, rather than emerging in times of exception and driven by crisis.
These autonomous teams will be bound by common patterns, platforms, data, and knowledge
Future model of government is a kind of coordinated decentralization. Won't be coordinated by traditional methods (rules, process, scriptures). Instead, will be bound together by common components (design schemes to make sure there's a consistent look, identity apps, platforms, trusted data sources representing a single source of truth for others to draw form). Accountability will also be spread more widely to more people.
Distributed accountability can only happen if there's the right set of norms and incentives in place. New models of funding, procurement, and public sector careers. No country has cracked all of these things yet. There's a great price for the government that gets there first.
B. Co-creating solutions with new players with challenges
By Arune Matelyte of GovTech Lab Lithuania
The traditional approach is that the public sector defines the challenge and the solution it needs. It the contracts the private sector to deliver it. This is based on the assumption that the public sector has a monopoly on knowledge and that the "problem" defined is unchanging.
This can lead to the situation where the main quality desired in a supplier is stability, and not innovative ideas/out-of-the-box solutions
What we need is not the contracting out of solutions, but co-creation. 2 main conditions have to be met to make sure this happens:
- Empower public sector officials to experiment and look for out-of-the-box solutions
- Ensure that there is someone to co-create with. We need to diversify the players in the private sector
To do this, GovTech Lithuania focused on 3 key areas:
- Matching GovTech challenges and ideas
- Accelerating GovTech collaborations with the private sector
- Building Govtech communities
"GovTech Challenge Series" —> competition for teams to compete and co-create solutions with governments, given challenges that are issued. Currently, this is at a "pre-procurement" stage where governments can figure out what to buy. Eventually, want to move this to a procurement stage
C. Improving Procurement for Government with Design Contests
By Antoni Rytel of GovTech Poland
Half of the Polish budget every year is spent on procurement. This can be radically reduced if smaller companies competed on public tenders. Right now, they aren't able to do this because of:
- Excessive bureaucracy
- Tenders that are too large
- Lack of understanding of the tender's subject by those who issue it
- Only the price matters when deciding who to go with
- The criteria is too steep
To solve this, creates design contests to get more startups to big and access unique challenges. There are 3 components to this:
- Smaller projects
- No prerequisites
- Access to unique data
The approach is fairly analogous to the one used by Lithuania
D. Capacity, Efficiency, and Averages
By Rainer Kattel of UCL IIP
"The last reform of government – atleast in the US – happened in the era of black-and-white TV" - Obama in 2011 State of the Union
The debate is between centralization and decentralization. We have to think about 3 things to resolve this debate:
- Capacity: Decentralized responses have been agile, but rely on resilient, long-term infrastructure that was built through centralization. We need to figure out what to centralize and what to decentralize
- Digital (what do we mean by Digital): There's a misunderstanding around digital. Right now, the focus is only on how to reduce costs with digital. There's a lot of additional value that we can also create that is currently being missed when thinking in terms of efficiency (centralization is more efficient, decentralization can unlock a ton of new value)
- Who is the user: If we think of the mass production of services (like healthcare and education), we look at the citizen through the lens of averages. Nobody is average. Decentralization can help us look beyond this lens
Panel Discussion
How do you measure and train people to work in government?
Digital & Digital Transformation has been a huge topic in government. You want to bring in IT and technology out of the plumbing layer of government and into more strategic positions. You have to evaluate people based on their ability to do that, not just traditional metrics.
Typically, the deal with working in government is that you get more job security and better work-life balance in lieu of slightly lower pay. That doesn't work for everybody. To attract people that are happy to do innovative things and work a little harder but want more money, figure out how you can incentivize them
How do you leverage the pool of very wise, older public servants who are still keen and eager to work
Make roles open in terms of people and ideas coming in and out. Need to have less of a focus on tenure
How do you shake up government without ruffling too many feathers and maintaining stability
People are very often happy to try new ideas. Not too many feathers were ruffled. In general, as long as you connect with people on an individual level and not try to force change, you'll have more success than trying to enforce top-down change. Showing "success stories" and case studies from other departments in your country or from other countries really helps, too
To the Antoni from GovTech Poland: in some of your projects, you have no tendering requirements. That sounds fantastic. What risks do you see in tearing up all of the rules and how do you overcome then?
Haven't really been able to tear up the rulebook, only make some minor changes to allow for innovation. Try to separate out the actual requirements of procurement from tendering within the usual legal framework. As long as the amount is relatively smaller and the project is well scoped out, there aren't that many risks