Next-gen government — rethinking the paradigm

A revaluation of social capital will be critical as governments leverage technology to redefine public good.

Australian government organisations need to work smarter, not harder, to leverage the country’s natural innovation base into a new ‘Public Good 3.0’ framework. Only this way will it ensure it steps away from the traditional tax-and-spend mentality to embrace a more equitable model of generating and distributing wealth, an organisational dynamics expert has warned.

Despite advances in translating existing concepts of service delivery into the digital realm, the habit of using those advances as new entry points into existing channels had prevented many in government from looking outside of existing structures, Monica Bradley, director of strategic consultancy Purposeful Capital, told GTR in the lead-up to her presentation at the AC Events Technology in Government conference in Canberra in August.

“We’re going from the economy of operations — the industrial age — to the economy of people,” she explained, “and this provides some unique advantages to Australia because many disadvantages that we had in the old economy, like scale and location, are now dissipated.”

Although the government’s ongoing digital transformation work was putting increasing momentum behind that transformation, Bradley said, its continuing reliance on established concepts around funding and return on investment meant that government organisations were continuing to struggle with tapping into the country’s reservoirs of innovation.

Resolving this struggle was a key part of the Public Good 3.0 framework, which Bradley described as “public good as a platform rather than a public good as a big, bureaucratic thing”. The existing bureaucracy continued to impede efforts to tap into human capital and innovation, she said, and existing government structures perpetuate these obstacles.

“Instead of government assuming like in the industrial age that it knows how to solve every problem — and then putting out an RFT that costs $1m to even get involved in — it should put out open innovation challenge questions. Australia is never going to win the scale battle against capital markets like the US; all we can win is that we do focused innovation better.”

Designing better services

Innovation offers tremendous potential to reform the delivery of government services around a people-based model rather than one in which the government acts like a large, dominant corporation.

According to Bradley, that focus on people would grow over time as governments progressively broke their functions — “a lot of clutter” — down into smaller and smaller pieces that can be progressively outsourced to allow them to direct their energies into capitalising on their intrinsic reservoirs of innovation.

New technologies would play a significant role in helping this innovation instantiate across government, with big data and analytics helping government bodies keep up with changing requirements and to match their activities to the expectations of their constituents.

One project Bradley is currently working with has seen a state government adopting a more proactive stance by “creating services using data signalled from constituents”, she said. “They’re delivering services before you know you need them. And if you do proactive servicing, in most cases you effectively halve the cost of delivery and you can increase the outcomes by anywhere between 20 and 40%.”

Bradley and her project team had run around a dozen experiments based around this idea — which required service-delivery experts to work laterally across a range of departments, agencies and locations. They found great traction within agencies that recognised the importance of driving change using human-centric design at the front end, rather than organisation-centric change at the back end.

Monica Bradley.

Centralised agencies such as the state treasury already had the key to driving major change in the way projects are executed, given that all existing projects eventually draw on Treasury resources in one way or another. By applying big-data conceits to this information, Bradley said, governments can draw out common themes and identify areas where proactive efforts at service consolidation might help foster whole-of-government culture.

“At the moment, the way the government works is that people make promises, decide on an amount of money to fund them, then go through and design the programs,” Bradley explained. “Then they go to the state treasury and say ‘now you need to pay for it’.”

“But Treasury has all this data about what other programs are doing, and it sees a joined-up view across the entire government. So we’re looking into how the combination of data analytics and design thinking can help by using financial literacy, and the big-data numbers they have already gotten from use cases about how to design services better.”

Federal government models, which are similarly built around directing government bodies to spend taxation revenues collected from all across the country, were equally due for a shake-up, Bradley said.

“We pay for public goods — health care, education, social security, retirement, wellbeing — through an economic lens that has taxation at its root,” she explained, arguing that current models of government don’t recognise the non-financial resources that may be available for harnessing in the delivery of more proactive models of government.

“That’s like using a stone tablet to [read] a novel,” Bradley added. “If we think more broadly that there is a lot of value being exchanged in the new economy, what we don’t have is a model or way of thinking about how we exchange that value — and how we should fund those public-good things that need to be done. That’s the biggest question, and then technology becomes an enabler.”

Thinking more broadly

If public good is seen as the endgame for government activities and investments, Bradley reasons, government must logically find a way to convert social capital — giving someone a ride to work or cleaning someone’s house — into credit for public services in what she called “one big loyalty program for governments”.

This type of new thinking would allow governments to harness social, ecological and other forms of capital in the same way that financial capital is harnessed today. This is the core conceit of the Public Good 3.0 model, she said — and the conceptual basis on which future governments will need to expand their conceptual frame when designing models of value exchange.

“We are a systems economy and we are about making processes, putting them into special areas and costing them together,” Bradley said. “We have chosen to view the world through an economic lens and we have just incrementally done below-the-line innovation for a long time, which means we made processes faster, more efficient and automated so they require less people to operate.

“What we haven’t done is to dramatically rethink the next paradigm,” she added. “There are a bunch of things that we could band together and fix if we think more broadly.

“People are very clever but I want to inspire them to not only be effective and efficient, but to be imaginative in what technology enables us to do. It’s all about increasing the circumference of ‘normal’.”

You can catch Monica Bradley’s presentation at the Technology in Government conference and expo in Canberra, 2–3 August. She will be speaking on the first day of the event, Tuesday, 2 August, at 11.35 am. Check out the Technology in Government website for the full line-up of dozens of public sector, academic and industry speakers who outline their experiences and insights into government ICT.

Image courtesy Jorge Láscar under CC BY 2.0