Quick learnings on digital transformation
Quick learnings from this great post of Jennifer Pahlka
* Focus on delivery like the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) did. Center the work around the delivery of services to the public and measuring its value by the improvement to real people’s lives. Government is judged by the services it delivers: if a service is poorly designed, inflexible, slow, and unfriendly, the conclusion is that government too is all of these things.
* If it’s harder to sign up for these services than it is to sign up for online banking, that’s a delivery problem.
* The problem is not that we don’t have enough technology in government, or enough investment in technology. What we have too little of is service design, agility, understanding of user needs, and feedback loops.
The waterfall method that produces most deliverables in government “amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work”. Waterfall processes attempt to avoid failure at all costs, resulting in spectacularly large failures.
* Citing Rahm Emanuel’s words, “never let a crisis go to waste.” Take profit from failures: fail small, fail fast, learn and iterate. Adopt an iterative, user-centered, data driven approaches.
* While you don’t want to wait for changes in law and policy to change procurement practices, you should still initiate those changes. There’s a lot of money at stake. The US spent $2B for a court documents system that never saw the light of day, $900M for a deeply troubled financial system, and so on. Reach out for smaller contracts, but more of them. And they’d get to do more technology and less litigating. (Many people describe the process today as contract, build, fail, sue).
November 06 2018 09:39 am | Politica| 1,028 views