By Nico Maffey
Are your efforts meeting your expectations of success? If you said no, you’re not alone. A recent survey by the McKinsey Center of Government showed that 80% of government efforts to transform performance using technology don’t meet established objectives. In this article, I’ll share four practical ways in which technological transformation can help you achieve your goals.
When effort doesn’t translate into results
Although governments at all levels actively encourage the adoption of technologies to improve transparency, efficiency, and public trust, success rates tend to be very low. A recent survey of almost 3,000 public officials conducted by the McKinsey Center for Government found that across 18 countries, 80% of government agency efforts to transform performance using technology don’t meet established objectives. According to the report: “The failure rate of government transformations is far too high. It represents a huge missed opportunity to tackle society’s greatest challenges more effectively, to give citizens better experiences with government, and to make more productive use of limited public resources. If governments around the world matched their most improved counterparts, they could save as much as $3.5 trillion a year by 2021 while maintaining today’s levels of service quality.”
As governments feel mounting pressure to deliver new services seamlessly, fast, and conveniently, public sector leaders will play an increasingly pivotal role in catalyzing the required technological transformations to meet citizens’ demands. These are four benefits that technology can bring to the government.
1. Forge collaborative and efficient workflows
Technology can improve the efficiency of collaborative workflows by simplifying information sharing and updating, minimizing version-control issues, and improving transparency and accountability. Technology also saves time and resources as people can respond to changes in real-time and update project information in the field. It also ensures everyone is operating with the most up-to-date information.
Highlighting the benefits of technology for collaboration and cooperation can help you gather support to foster and lead a technological transformation. In that sense, try to quantify the already-gained benefits from recent technological developments (new platforms, use of databases or online docs that were recently implemented, etc.) to bolster your case.
2. Reduce costs while optimizing use of resources
Low digitization comes at a cost. Several surveys have identified longer waiting times, less efficient agencies, loss of important documents, and so on. Inefficiencies that put even more pressure on overburdened government officials, who are already short of resources.
It’s no wonder that a survey by Governing explains that more than half of local government officials struggle to complete their work in 40 hours per week. When asked which activities take up too much of their time, respondents cite meetings, paperwork, email, data collection, and reporting as the largest inhibitors to more important tasks such as strategic planning, analysis, and collaboration.
Technology has the power to automate previously manual processes thus saving time and leaving more stimulating and challenging tasks for employees to take up. For example, in that same survey, 59% of respondents say they could save six or more hours a week if the repetitive aspects of their job were automated, 66% indicate they could eliminate human error and 72% note that the time saved through automation would allow them to perform higher-value work.
3. Improve and expedite real-time decision-making
Today, many governments and agencies are benefiting from technology that gives them insight into real-time data thus significantly improving the decision-making process by facilitating the right insight at the right time. In that sense, individuals and teams can make better decisions when they can easily create and share reports and dashboards that illustrate valuable trends such as KPIs, budgets, and project status. A recent article by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation highlights the various benefits of tracking vaccines’ distribution to match outstanding demand with vaccines’ deployment at the State level.
In addition, with the onset of remote work as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, government employees need to access their digital tools and insights from any location. Digitizing government information has the potential to allow for easy report and database sharing.
4. Establish good practices for information sharing
Technology can facilitate sharing of good and replicable cases of public policy success. I recently interviewed Megan Minoka Hill, Director of Honoring Nations Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development (HPAIED), an organization that aims to “understand and foster the conditions under which sustained, self-determined social and economic development is achieved among American Indian Nations through applied research and service.” Housed within Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, HPAIED plays a pivotal role in centralizing and disseminating resources that help tribal leaders and local decision-makers learn from others who have faced similar challenges. With a unique integration of digital tools, data-sharing toolboxes, and innovative partnerships, HPAIED has managed to become an unparalleled resource for the 574 federally-recognized tribes in the United States.
One of their most popular resources is their toolboxes, a combination of media, guides, and resources that aim to share stories of success with other tribes that could benefit from adopting similar approaches. As expected, one of the most popular ones has been the one addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, which was co-created with the Johns Hopkins University Center for American Indian Health, and integrates resources that demonstrate ways to build governance capacity and introduce evidence-based best practices that tribes have used to respond to the various consequences of the pandemic. These include a wide variety of topics ranging from organizing food distribution efforts to designing a system of telehealth services.
If we think about subnational government structures, similar approaches could be incredibly useful. If one local, municipal, or city government had a particularly successful initiative, technology can assist with its diffusion, sharing, and presentation to other governments that could benefit from replicating such an approach.
