Building public organizations fit for the digital age
Public leaders and officials need a new set of skills to govern in the digital age – a new initiative is showing the way
Changes to governments’ form and function can be explained, to some extent, by their constant adaptation to the role played by information technologies (IT) in the economy, society and governance processes. Dunleavy et al. (2006) developed one of the classic studies on the topic more than a decade ago. Some of the trends they describe, have accelerated since then.
Oversimplifying, we can distinguish three main historical stages. During the industrial era, which run parallel to the emergence of Weberian bureaucracies, governments were structured around hierarchical and compartmentalized organizations where attachment to rules, processes and expertise was fundamental. During this phase, which still shape many government forms and functions today, the main role of IT was to help store, index and retrieve information. Governments, through their internal IT departments, were central main investors in and developers of technological solutions.
In the 1970s and 80s, industrial economies started to undergo a profound transformation, with large parts of the production being moved to other parts of the world, and services becoming greater portions of the economic output. During this time, the ideas later labelled New Public Management started to influence changes in government. These reforms, characterized by shrinking public budgets, and the introduction of performance management and private sector practices in government agencies, resulted in the outsourcing or privatization of large parts of government functions traditionally performed by in-house departments. During this phase, many government IT operations were externalized. In some countries like the UK, this resulted in a concentrated IT vendor market. Other countries such as the US or The Netherlands managed to keep a more diversified supplier ecosystem, with thriving smaller and medium sized players.
Since the late 90s we have entered a new phase. The advent and widespread adoption of personal computers, smart devices, computing power and the internet are transforming the economy, giving way to a new era whose shape, and name (network society, digital economy, or fourth industrial revolution, are among the candidates), is still evolving. One common denominator across descriptions is the fundamental role that these technologies are having in transforming economic and social relations.
This also applies to governments. The relationship between citizens and governments has changed dramatically, with new forms of communication, interaction and participation being opened by new technologies. Many citizens’ exchanges with government are conducted completely online, forcing public entities to transform their services, processes and organizations around these digital interfaces. Although it does not have an agreed name, following Dunleavy, Margetts and others we can call this third phase, in which we are still immersed, Digital Era Governance.
With an increased percentage of social and economic activities occurring online, citizens’ expectations about governments’ digital presence and the way in which they should deliver their services are changing, particularly among younger generations. The market is also changing, with rapid creation and diffusion of innovations, and the development of technologies such as cloud computing, which has lowered entry barriers and scaling costs for many startups and small and medium-sized companies producing useful solutions for government needs.
These profound changes in the demand and supply is slowly but steadily impacting governments. The digitalization and automatization of processes labelled e-government was just the first stage of a creeping revolution. Like many tectonic shifts before it, the digital transformation of governments is occurring under the radar of mainstream public debates. Its full impact will likely only be realized long after it has become so embedded in our government structures and functions, that it will be just part of the landscape.
Governments and public sector leaders are already feeling the heat of thorny debates around the ethics, power dynamics, security and privacy challenges posed by new technologies. They are also noticing the impact in their daily operations, and are currently immersed in an emerging debate about how to equip themselves to navigate this transformation. Traditional IT functions (running basic tech infrastructure like phones and email, protecting systems’ security or automating processes) are still important, but they need to be complemented with a wider and more strategic set of technical skills, such as service design, product management and data analytics.
Governments are just starting to grasp the need to incorporate those skills and capacities in their organizations, and wondering about how to do it in their often-sclerotic structures and processes. They will hardly find inspiration in traditional schools of public policy and administration, where there is no specialized curriculum for public officials and leaders in the digital age. One of the most interesting efforts to fill that gap is the Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age initiative championed by David Eaves, Ines Mergel and Tom Steinberg, along many other collaborators.
If the digital transformation of governments is as deep, long-lasting, and inevitable as it seems, in a few decades, scholars will probably read this curriculum with the same interest and attention with which we have studied the works of Max Weber.