The Long Life of Digital Era Governance
Whether that life will be healthy, however, is still up for grabs
In 2006, Patrick Dunleavy, Helen Margetts, Simon Bastow and Jane Tinkler published their famous book Digital Era Governance. In other posts I have discussed their investigation of the role of IT systems in public administration and its historical evolution. The book not only explored the past, but it also forecasted, with remarkable precision, some of the changes that governments have experienced since the book was published.
Their interesting forward-looking analysis, presented in the last chapter of the book, had been previously published as an academic article in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. In the paper, Dunleavy and co-authors make the case that “a range of connected and information technology-centered changes will be critical for the current and next wave of change”, a movement that they called Digital Era Governance.
Central to this new paradigm were the changes in the interaction of government with citizens and service users. These changes were forcing bureaucracies to adapt their organization to a completely new set of “cognitive, behavioral, organizational, political and cultural changes”. This was not just the digitalization of paper documents, but a restructuring of government based on the deep transformation that digital technologies were producing in societies. Contrary to the limited transformative impacts of previous IT change (for example the automatization of data processes that resulted in large cost savings but that, once routinized, did not reshape public organizations’ operations), the internet, e-mail communications and the pervasiveness of personal devices were not only affecting back-office processes, but the way in which governments and society interacted.
The analysis was published in 2005, before the Open Data movement, the Obama campaign, the concept of Government as a Platform, and all the rapid transformations that governments have continued to experience since. The article also identified the key elements of this new paradigm. Many of the components that they presented are, still today, central to digital transformation programs: client-based and needs-based organizational arrangements, data warehousing, ask-once information seeking, agile government processes, new forms of automated (Zero Touch Technologies) processes, open government, etc.
The article also recognized that Digital Era Governance demanded new capabilities, a central finding of scholars studying the public value of digital government over the last decade. For example, in their introduction to a Special Issue about the topic in Government Information Quarterly, Panos Panagiotopoulos, Bram Klievink and Antonio Cordella (2019) state that:
Digital government in fact transforms the ways in which public sector organizations produce and deliver services and interact with citizens. These transformations are mediated by digital technologies but also by organizational and institutional factors. To be able to adapt to these transformations and better fulfil social expectations and needs, public sector organizations need to acquire or develop capabilities that will enable them to exploit the opportunities and mitigate the challenges associated with digital government initiatives.
And yet, as Collington (2021) and others have documented, digitalization has sometimes been used to dismantle rather than to strengthen public organizations’ capabilities. Dunleavy and co-authors did find that “the key influences on primary IT changes are commercial, the demands from the business sector for new capabilities and then the oligopolistic (or in software near-monopolistic) supply-side responses. The major external influences on state organizational changes remain business managerialism, although a different vintage from the now-dated NPM influences, with many current effects also shaped strongly by digital-era influences.” All this suggested - and still suggests- that, unless public organizations retain some degree of autonomy in their capacity-building processes, current and future digital transformation programs will continue to be shaped by commercial interests and may further damage government capacities.
This is an important observation, given Dunleavy and colleagues’ insights into the future. The book chapter version of the piece ventured some additional predictions about the technology changes that would have more relevance for governments in the following decades:
Utility computing
Shared services
Zero trend technologies
Semantic web
Graphical interface to governmental services
Given the fast pace of technological change, it is quite remarkable how well these predictions have aged. First, cloud computing and Software as a Service (utility computing) is now widespread. Shared services can also be seen as a precursor to the – strongly supported though still underdelivered – Government as a Platform. Zero trend technologies directly pointed to the multiplication of algorithmic governance applications that are now embedded in the landscape, and the graphical interface to governmental services has been materialized in the increased use of service design, visualization techniques, dashboards, and digital twins. Finally, the reference to the semantic web, although still in development, shows a clear intuition about the power of data and computer-to-computer exchange of it, a frontier that is continuing to develop exponentially.
The trajectories of Digital Era Governance vary by country, and in most of them the new paradigm has been implemented partially, with governments adding digital capabilities slowly and often lagging decades behind private corporations. Part of this has been the result of bureaucratic resistance to change, but often it has also been produced by a lack of investment in key government capabilities, making them “heavily reliant on IT corporations,” as Dunleavy and colleagues found.
Given the book’s focus on IT contracting, a notable omission in their predictions is the emergence of small and medium sized companies and startups that, given rapid technological change and lower entry barriers, are increasingly able to provide interesting technological solutions to government challenges. This was behind one of the key reforms that led to the creation of the digital marketplace in the UK. The text also mentioned, although too briefly and in passing, some of the dangers unlocked by new technologies, such as widespread surveillance, now at the center of the debates around Digital Era Governance.
Dunleavy and colleagues titled their piece “New Public Management is Dead, Long Live to Digital Era Governance.” We can conclude that Digital Era Governance has aged quite well since the authors coined the term. Whether its life will be long, and most importantly, healthy, will depend on governments’ ability to develop the capabilities required to govern the digital age and its associated challenges.