10 hacks for governments to survive the digital revolution

We are at the beginning of a new technological revolution that is generating dramatic changes. There is a broad consensus about this among experts. We have to deal with a rapidly changing world, and the ones that work in government are suffering a lot of anxiety. Our public organizations are not prepared for facing all these new challenges: we are not flexible, not agile, and we hate change.

If governments do not adapt, there is a significant risk that the public sector may lose a lot of power and influence in society, as the distance between citizen expectations and public services provided increases. We are already seeing examples where private incumbents have started to replace governments (for instance, cryptocurrencies) as they are more efficient and innovative. The big issue is that weaker governments will struggle (much more than now) to guarantee the values and principles of the common good: solidarity, equality, basic public services for all (education, health, security), etc.

It is essential and urgent that public administrations rethink the way they work, organize, provide services and manage employees to keep its fundamental role in society. And one of the best areas to learn from is looking at how the start-ups work. They are agile, user-centric, and innovative: they must, because if they don’t, they die quickly.

This is my desideratum about ten essential hacks that I believe a government, especially a local one, should adopt to “survive” the tsunami of the current digital revolution. It is a list of actions that can be taken on its own, without relying on the state/federal government policies or the Parliament Acts. I am sure there are many other important hacks, but this is my contribution from my personal experience:

We are living in a VUCA world: more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous than ever. The question of having a clear purpose is essential. Governments think that they already know it: essentially, it is to provide good public services to citizens, but, in reality, it is about doing the same things in the same way, as always, but using the new technologies. That is absolutely insufficient now.

One of the central traits of successful organizations is that they have stated a clear, simple, and ambitious purpose: they express the impact they want to make in society (vision) and their role to achieve it (mission). The greatness of having a compelling vision is that it becomes the lighthouse of your strategies, action plans, and tasks. It provides direction to define priorities and to be consistent with the mission to align resources and talent. It is tough to be coherent: on a daily basis, management is easier without an ultimate goal.

It is not a matter of wishful thinking. It is about defining an ambitious but achievable purpose, taking into consideration the passion, strengths, capabilities, and reality of your organization. To be credible, it must incorporate what makes your organization authentic and unique.

At the very end, everything is about people. There are no transformation and innovation without the talent, passion, and leadership of the public employees. Attracting the right people to the government is essential. People who desire to be a civil servant that think that working in government is not just another job: it is a privilege, and they are truly passionate about it. People who are eager to change, transform, and provide excellent public services. Bold people who dare to make the key and disturbing questions that challenge the status quo because understanding the essence of the problem is more than 50% of the solution. And also people who sincerely care about the citizens.

Talent attracts talent and mediocrity generates mediocrity. Without talented public servants, we have no chance. We must hire talent and passionate employees and invest in long-life training to develop their skills in change management and leadership.

We also need public officials that understand that leading is to serve; it is not the organization serving them. So, they have to be humble and understand that changing the government is a long-term project and there are no shortcuts. They do not start from scratch; they have to take advantage of all the good work done by previous administrations, and they should leave a worthy legacy to the following. Everybody has personal ambitions, but officials who prioritize, above all, their personal agenda and egos to achieve short-term vanity wins, take selfish decisions that are not aligned with the mission, and they end wasting a lot of time and resources. This kind of egocentric officials is a big issue: they transform nothing, and they generate a great deal of frustration and demotivation in the public servants.

Governments have no other option than to adapt to the new world and moving forward towards the new social demands. But managing the change is about creating the right culture, and that is very tough and complex. There is no general roadmap for all: it is a craft work, and it is unique for each organization.

However, here you have some basic guidelines:

To provide excellent public services, a citizen-centric approach is essential to understanding the real needs, expectations, motivations, and capacities of the users. To do this, government employees have to be humble: they know a lot about the existing public services, but they do not know what the best services for citizens are in a context of rapid changes, and they have to be open to involve them in developing collaborative design projects participating in all the phases. And here lies the difficulty: governments know little about how to engage with citizens and how to co-design and to co-create services. At the very end, they are considered a nuisance because they require spending a lot of time and learning completely new methodologies like design thinking and lean start-up.

Placing the citizen at the center is the best way to avoid auto-complacency and mediocrity. It implies changing your organization to better serve the citizens and avoid making an organization structure based on internal politics and self-interests. It fosters creating a culture of innovation, challenge, debate, learning, and citizen service. A citizen-centric focus is not an action or a plan; it is a continuous process, an attitude, and it should form part of your culture. It is not easy, and it is tough.

A citizen-centric outlook makes us never forget that we are humans after all. We all want efficient, simple, and 24x7 services. We love digital services, but whenever there is an important issue, we do not want to fight with an electronic form or a bot. We want human empathy, somebody assertive who supports us. We have to provide hybrid models of assistance that combine the best of the digital world with the human touch when necessary.

Data is the new oil of the 21st century, and governments have lots of information, but they are not taking real advantage of it to make smarter decisions. Judgments should be based on evidence and on the “brutal” facts, not on intuition because “without data, you are just another person with an opinion” (W. Edwards Deming).

Governments should define a data-driven strategy to make it possible. They need to ensure that they have available the right data, well organized. They have to break the information silos and enforce processes that guarantee good quality data. They need to define what are the key indicators aligned to the mission (as Kaplan and Norton state), build smartly balanced scorecards, and avoid the vanity metrics. They have to collect the information that helps us understand citizens’ needs and satisfaction, and gather all the information with public value, which is spread between government departments, service providers, and private companies. Advanced data analytics open excellent opportunities to public bodies and, at the same time, huge risks. Governments will need data science analysts and chief data officers to make sure that the results of the data-driven strategy are aligned with the purpose of the organization. And they will have to invest in cybersecurity and ethical managers to minimize the new threats and the dilemmas of the digital revolution we are living.

With a proper data-driven strategy in place, governments will be able to measure the outcomes and public value of their policies effectively. Moreover, they will be able to develop advanced algorithms to improve planning, make predictions, and develop customized and proactive services to citizens, as some private services are already doing.

In a rapidly changing world, agility is key to the successful execution of a strategy. But the reality is that the public authorities are not flexible and have great difficulties in adapting; that is why they struggle to meet the demands of the citizens. In this context, governments have to rethink the way they work. First, they should be “lean,” radically anti-red tape to get rid of the tasks that do not provide a value to the citizens and, hence, to free resources. Second, they have to change the way they design and develop public services and adopt agile methodologies. We need more strategy (aligned with the mission) and fewer plans that are not flexible to reality. We have to work on shorter projects, starting with what is called a minimum viable product (that fits the top requirement), in an iterative and incremental process, with high interaction with users to validate or modify the product, who are engaged from the start and throughout all the projects. The lean start-up methodology by Eric Ries is an excellent example of this way of working, and it is widely used by innovative companies to design new services.

In the public sector, bureaucracy eats the agility for breakfast. And bureaucracy and hierarchies kill innovation. Being agile implies organizations based on horizontal structures, decentralization, empowerment, autonomy, trust, accountability, quick decisions and meritocracy. In the end, it means new public management.

“Keep it simple, stupid” should be a mantra for governments. In some industries, the leader’s main value proposition is having an excellent user experience. Governments are, by nature, very complex organizations with highly complicated procedures. That is not an excuse to invest in user experience (UX) to make public services as simple as possible. Right now, many citizens try to submit electronic forms, but they are not able to finish them online. We waste their time twice, first online and then on-site. UX makes a significant impact on the adoption rate of digital services and user satisfaction. There should always be UX experts involved during the design and evolution of digital services.

Currently, the public sector is facing many new challenges about rising expectations from citizens, shrinking budgets and fragile trust in the political system. There is only one answer to this dilemma: governments must do things differently to deliver effective solutions, they must innovate and rethink public services to improve citizen satisfaction through smarter use of people, data, and technology. In a complex world, the answers to the new challenges are very often outside the department in charge. The government has to promote open innovation initiatives that arise brilliant ideas from citizens, companies, or public employees from other areas.

But the great ideas are often uncertain, and they have to be validated that are feasible, realistic, and provide real value. Innovating means understanding that there is no learning without fails. The government should be open to explore, experiment, and assume controlled risks. They can do so, creating sandbox areas for experimentation where there is fail tolerance, and we can fail cheap, quick, and often, to finally succeed. Innovation is, at the very end, a sum of failures and successes with positive global return on investment. It requires a culture in favor of creativity, risk, motivation, empowerment, and trust.

The most critical defies that governments are facing cannot be solved by only one public authority; even if it is a big one. We are living a global and very interdependent world, and the new problems are highly complex, interconnected, and require the ability to approach them from multiple perspectives, with a multidisciplinary team, with fresh and innovative ideas, gathering the collective intelligence. In the digital arena, we are talking about digital identity, trust, cybersecurity, sustainable digital services, applying emerging technologies, etc.

Public administrations should embrace collaboration enthusiastically to face common purposes. This implies that government officials must have the skills required by working on collaborative projects. They need a well-defined mission, building trust, governance of the team, transparency of the information and processes, clear communication, engagement, and consensus decisions. It is very different from the ordinary leadership in a hierarchical organization where decisions are taken top-down. As the African proverb says, “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Technology is very cool, and we easily fell in love with the latest disruptive technology. That is why, too often, we get confused, and we forget that it is just a mean, not the end goal. We adopt it without thinking about what the social objective is, and then we try hard to find a problem that fits in. These kinds of projects tend to be a complete failure.

First of all, we have to decide the social challenge, and then we chose the right technology to solve it. The key factors are all the ones mentioned before: mission, people, managing change, citizen-centric, etc. Many studies show us that technology is not the key factor to succeed, but it is a great accelerator if you have the right focus.

Moreover, technology evolves extremely fast: for many public authorities, it is impossible to be up-to-date as it requires large investments and dedication. For most of them, the best strategy is to consider technology as a commodity and use, as much as possible, shared platforms from state/federal governments or specialized cloud services.

Governments have scarce resources, so they should focus on where they make a meaningful impact on citizens, and that is not investing time and resources in the latest technology. Using shared platforms as a service has many advantages: the use of (almost) state-of-the-art technology, continuous improvements fostered by the collective intelligence from all the users, to apply consistent standards, to have in place great cybersecurity measures and to enjoy a high quality of service that is easy to scale. And all of that for a fair price and much cheaper if you want to do it on your own.

We are living a digital revolution and governments are facing the major risk of disruption in history. There are real threats that they may become irrelevant if they do not adapt. At the same time, governments have considerable opportunities to provide much better public services through smarter use of the organization, data, and technology.

There is no alternative. Some industries have already learned the digital revolution the hard way because they do not exist anymore: encyclopedias, rental videos, etc. The public sector challenge is how it manages the change to expand gradually (but non-stop) the daily agenda with a transformation program to create governments with talented public servants, a clear mission, and a citizen-centric passion. Organizations that take decisions based on evidence do evaluate their results and are obsessed with agility, user experience, and citizen satisfaction, reducing red-tape. Administrations that embrace innovation and collaboration to deliver the best public services.

We must be realistic. Transforming government is a gigantic task,x it will take a long time and energies, and there are no shortcuts. But if we have a clear road-map, we will make sure that every step forward, it gets us closer to our goal.

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