Hear from Peter Hutchinson, Wendy Korthuis-Smith and David Bray as they discuss highlights and insights from the 2015 Public Sector for the Future Summit at Harvard University.
[On screen text: Transforming government]
The problem here in the 21st century is our whole society is moving faster, is changing faster. And the distance between what our society expects and what our governments are able to deliver is widening and that creates a legitimacy gap. And I think one of the fundamental issues that governments have to deal with is how do we close that gap? How do we get closer to delivering not just the services, but the way we deliver services in a way that our citizens have come to expect, innovation, invention, that’s really the way to get there and that won’t happen without leadership.
[On screen text: The digital opportunity]
If you can have government in your pocket, and you pretty much can, and if you can individually interact with your government and get the kind of services you want, so think 311, I can call, I can talk to somebody or I can communicate online individually and I can individually get a response. This is totally changing the way we understand how citizens interact with these public sector organizations. And that’s only going to accelerate as time goes on. I now see governments catching up, actually starting to think about how can they make social media part of how I deliver service? How can I use these tools and techniques to bring citizens in and make them part of, not just part of consuming the services, but actually part of creating the services? This is radically altering in how we think about government. And it’s taking us back to a really old idea which was government was really us. And I think in many, many ways, we’re headed back toward sort of the 18th century model, that sort of that town meeting model that said, you know it’s us. We do this work together and the technology is now going to make it possible when there’s millions or hundreds of millions of us, when it was only possible in the old days when there were a few.
[On screen text: Overcoming obstacles]
I think one of the toughest challenges or barriers in beginning this journey is trying to make sure that we allow the commitment and participation from the employees and directors and agencies to evolve and that takes some time. And so it’s somewhat easy to say, well, here’s the strategic planning pieces of it and this is what we have to do, but trying to get the engagement and the participation, call it the messy participation in state government because you want to hear those voices and challenges that people might have with that and that takes time. And so I think for us starting out in 2013, it took about six months for a lot of that to kick in at the highest level with the directors and the deputy directors. And certainly could we have gone faster? Absolutely, but it took time to get that commitment and we’re at a good place now where they’re very committed to the work we’re doing.
[On screen text: Digital citizen engagement]
So I could think of several ways how we’ve changed the way we do business with governments from a citizen perspective and one of those areas is just simply about transparency. Entering our department of licensing, our driver’s license offices and being able to see as you’re driving there that there’s – you’re going to have about a 20 minute wait. And so you can make a decision to go then or come back or go get your number and come back and so the wait time’s decreasing, but also that transparency about expectation management with that. I think, you know, the direction we’re headed is really powerful because it’s getting citizens interested in the work that we’re doing. It’s making it real for them and so anytime we can do that and share the data, share the information and bring them in as partners. That will help us and help them.
[On screen text: Blurring boundaries]
So I think what’s really happening right now is the lines between organizations are getting blurred. Not just within any sector, whether it be a public sector or private sector, but things that traditionally government had to do just because there were no competing resources outside of government to do it, can now be done either by public/private partnerships or by the public directly. So if you look at the example of in your pocket, your smartphone has as much computing power as President Reagan had in the early 1980s that the Pentagon had. That’s now available to the public. And so the public can now do things traditionally government had to do, if they want to.
[On screen text: Digital dividends for FCC]
…we’ve already had some early wins with our release of new consumer help desk effort that demonstrated that we could take something that even asking the private sector, private sector quoted it would take between eighteen and twenty four months and 3.2 million dollars to do it on site. We choose not to do it on site, we went straight to a public cloud offering, software as a service and we were able to get done in less than six months. And instead of it being 3.2 million it was only 450,000, so one sixth the price. So that demonstrates that we can now go forward with this approach and do it for the other systems as well.