How can we Reconfigure the State for the Internet Era?
I analyze a straightforward and visionary proposal for bringing government into the digital age
There is a paradox at the heart of US politics — we love our country, but increasingly don’t trust our leadership and institutions. This isn’t my opinion, but the result of study after study. We are put in the awkward position of admiring our democratic government in spirit, but these days at least, we’re not loving the results. For example, look at the battering our current president is taking in public confidence.
So today, I’m going to take us through a paper designed to fix that, called Reconfiguring the State for the Internet Era, produced by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. It addresses broad issues in our model of government that prevent it from delivering, and the solution they propose is to have a digital enabled government that, like the tech platforms we’re so used to, puts users first. They released several excellent papers under the leadership of Executive Director Chris Yiu. I hope to go over more in the future.
The authors advocate for a full overhaul of how the state manages information and makes decisions. They propose changes from how the state receives, presents, and shares data, to how it runs procurement for public works, provides services, and engages with the public. It’s as ambitious as it is common-sense. In a nut-shell, it’s about taking all that we’ve learned from what makes the tech sector so efficient, effective, nimble and responsive to user needs, and applying it government.
They make the claim that the current “industrial model” of government needs to be replaced with one that runs more like a “21st century tech enabled institution.” This model would provide a quantum leap in government performance, and this is essential because as our current government capacity declines, the complexity of the 21st century does not.
When we talk about dysfunctional government, a common refrain from the citizen is “what are we supposed to do?” Most TV and corporate press political coverage converges on the solutions of voting for the “blue one” or the “red one.” The value of this paper is that it allows us to remove ourselves from the constantly shifting spectacle of politics to consider what might actually put us back on the path of growth and prosperity.
[During Covid], the gap between expectations and government capacity has never been clearer. This is why the primary challenge for governments in the next decade is how to reconfigure the state using technology to make better decisions, better resolve crises, and improve people’s lives. This paper sets out the progressive case for reforming the operational model of the state so that it looks more like a modern, tech-enabled institution and less like a 20th-century bureaucracy.
As we dive in, notice that the authors don’t mince words on the importance of this issue. The ‘primary challenge for governments’ is not Covid, is not Russia, is not Donald Trump. It’s ‘reconfiguring the state using technology to make better decisions.’ This is the paper’s central claim.
Today’s model of government is insulated from change. State silos block wholesale reform, and top-down hierarchies can no longer deliver in an era of overwhelming complexity. Progress relies on those in power overcoming immense inertia to help small bits of the system catch up, instead of the underlying conditions encouraging continuous improvement.
The problem is the “model” of government. Not who’s in power.
It’s “top-down” orientation has made it top heavy. It can no longer process or respond to the complexity of the internet age.
Technology [enables vast improvements in] scale, personalization, iteration, feedback, experimentation and collaboration. Platforms open up service delivery to a wider range of actors to compete on quality. Digital marketplaces can reduce procurement costs and raise standards. Common functions can be expressed in infinitely scalable software, built once, and reused elsewhere to save precious resource.
In other words, most of what state capacity currently lacks, technology could provide. Imagine if government services came on a platform with information and public reviews, empowering the user to choose services from competing vendors. It would increase efficiency, accountability, and citizen satisfaction immeasurably compared to where we are today.
This vision must start with a radically more open approach to government that puts users first. This means government and public services must be subject to the same pressures and consumer demands that push other organizations to evolve continuously; that in the internet era, no single actor can succeed alone; that authority and credibility are earned from delivery not conferred on arrival; and that resilience relies more on agility than artificial order. It should also involve far greater engagement with the public: Government is well placed to aggregate broader societal needs and will need this insight to assess how others are meeting them.
Consider how dramatic a shift this is — a government that puts users first, subject to the same pressures and consumer demands that push other orgs. That means it’s time to end the exception we’ve given government for generations that says it is by its nature inefficient and cannot deliver as well as the private sector. That may have been true in the pre-internet world where feedback and accountability were prohibitively costly on all sides, but no longer.
Now, with technology we need to make our governments authority and credibility contingent on competent and efficient services. And how do we qualify what makes a good service? Greater engagement with the public.
With modern communications platforms, for the first time in history, the public is able to provide real-time feedback. It is basically free to aggregate, display, and measure, providing pressure on the system to adapt in the form of public sentiment analysis.
The authors don’t put it this way (probably because they work for Tony Blair), but it’s easy to interpret the sentence- “government and public services must be subject to the same pressures and consumer demands that push other organizations to evolve continuously,” as saying taxation should one day be contingent on proper service delivery. After all, payment is the pressure that pushes organizations to evolve continuously. So if government can’t provide its services at the cost and quality promised, they don’t collect revenue, and are replaced by those that can.
In the meantime we’ll have to settle for measuring sentiment through public engagement. Ideally, systems of consequences and bonuses are developed to provide incentives.
All this sounds great to the citizen. But all this talk of measurement and openness and accountability makes governments very hesitant, and understandably so. It describes a pretty different organization than the one they were hired for! Will all this supposed innovation just get in the way of them doing their job?
Next, the authors go over three challenges that their suggested model surfaces and ways to think about them.
Challenges
1- How States can give up control to encourage innovation while protecting quality and in-house capacity
Control software services’ access to government platforms and datasets via public-interest guidelines which govern activity, e.g., App Store guidelines.
Focus contracts on outcomes rather than outputs, measured over time using data, to promote experimentation while upholding standards
The tension here is how to present a more open approach to government services while retaining in-house capacity for things like, well, a pandemic. Governments are afraid that if they only become “marketplaces” then when a major challenge occurs they will have given away all their capacity. For things like health and national defense, it makes sense that capacity remain with the state to respond to threats.
2- How to scale while moving delivery closer to people’s lives.
Leaders should recognize that it is consistent to seek economies of scale while also unbundling the services that are built on top. Indeed, selecting from a suite of well-maintained, constantly improving, and cheap and easy-to-use platforms, rather than needing to procure or build the same common components for each new service, should free up capacity and resource to improve each locally tailored service.
Instead, the risk is about misallocating power, so for this model to be sustainable, any technology stack should truly be open to everyone on the right terms, not just those that the center of government favors.
Moving delivery closer to people’s lives is absolutely the right track, but can seem in tension with scaling. Standardized platforms can be developed at national or state levels and then given to local governments to enable tailored local service provision. Scalable but customizable.
The importance of the second paragraph cannot be overstated. One of the major pitfalls of government is, and has always been, misallocating power. Platforms of the future must create fair access to government procurement rather than replicate the “old boys clubs” that dominate all too many cities. To the extent that it doesn’t, costs will stay high, quality will struggle, both of which will remain a point of resentment among the population and continue to put undue pressure on the system.
The starting point must be recognizing that top-down, centralized departmental hierarchies lost their ability to control the external operating environment long ago… the focus should again be on setting the right conditions for optimal services to come to the fore. This requires recognizing that government’s monopoly on service delivery has more to do with history than principle. States should organize around users and provide the foundations that allow new services to operate, while letting go of controlling the last mile of service delivery. A better way forward is a more collaborative approach that encourages communities, charities and companies to design more tailored services, and enables people to choose those which best meet their needs.
This is one of the more daring paragraphs in the whole report. It should be plainly understood that government monopolies make themselves and their populations weaker. We know that monopolies of any kind, even government, lead to more expensive and less efficient services. If the government can step back and play referee, or can compete on fair terms with other service providers, people will be far more prosperous and the system will be more stable as a result. When they let go of the last mile of delivery, and partner with local organizations for tailored services, governments will be more stable and the local business and civic environment will be more prosperous as a result.
3- How to better listen, engage with and adapt to peoples’ views without undermining the basic tenets of representative democracy
Existing consultation approaches also remain out of step. They have high barriers for engagement, do not track views as they evolve, miss crucial segmentations and are routinely ignored.
A closer relationship between the citizen and state, properly scoped, should help leaders understand the plurality of public opinions on thorny policy issues, in turn potentially addressing the growing disconnect between public institutions and those they represent.
The tension they’re addressing here is very real. Some government employees unfortunately feel that if the public had a seat at the table, their job would become redundant. This is an outmoded way of thinking. We live in a representative democracy, so we still rely on decision-makers to legislate and make decisions on our behalf. Now that technology allows information and preferences to flow freely there needs to be a rebalancing of the relationship between citizen and representative. Tech-enabled communication should empower elected officials represent their constituents better.
Recommendations:
They complete their paper with four recommendations for this future government. They go into much greater detail here. Since they are quite technical they deserve a piece of their own (plus this piece is getting quite long!). I will just list them and provide a few words. Perhaps next week I will dedicate more time on them, as they’re quite interesting.
1- Infrastructure
Focus procurement around a single, user-centric digital marketplace to simplify access to public tenders for small providers and establish common standards for issues like subcontracting transparency.
This would vastly increase efficiency, transparency, and quality. Using smaller vendors would boost the resiliency of the government and community alike.
2- Organization
Replace hierarchical policy departments with portfolios of multi-disciplinary teams, organized around user needs and able to move around easily.
Decouple data functions from policy teams and create a network of Data Registrars independent of departments who are empowered to make data registers findable, accessible, usable and trustworthy — this will help to improve leaders’ situational awareness.
3- Competition
Establish a presumption of choice for service providers. Just as app stores enable users to choose from a wide range of vetted but competing services to meet their needs, government should seek to dramatically increase the choice available to citizens seeking to get their needs met.
4- Engagement
Create a new Digital Citizen Service built on the vTaiwan model to deliver scalable feedback and citizen engagement for all services, modernizing democratic engagement as GDS did for service delivery.
Provide insights openly as a public good: Aggregate public sentiment and real-time data about policy challenges and make them available both within government and beyond,
Use public engagement to assess in real-time the outcomes of partner services to ensure that people’s needs are being met and that users have avenues for redress where necessary.
Conclusion:
The way forward is to focus on establishing the conditions which force continuous improvement over time: Provide platforms to open up delivery to a range of actors competing on quality, empower users to push organizations to organize around their needs, articulate public-interest guidelines to regulate this more open approach to service delivery, and put understanding people’s needs and views at the heart of governance to restore faith in public institutions.
I would posit that our biggest problem is not that our government is inefficient, but it’s that it’s no longer even directed by the population. We are digital citizens incapable and uninterested in managing an industrial government. It doesn’t provide us information, it isn’t responsive, it isn’t transparent, it doesn’t provide meaningful choice and as a result, it doesn’t make sense to us.
The current arrangement is utterly unsustainable, and most members of the population know it. We need a government model that not only that works for the present, but actually gets better as time goes on, helping us create a future of prosperity and possibility. This is not a question of blue or red, but a question of structure and incentives, and its reforms like these envisioned by Chris Yiu and his co authors that provide a map for how to get there.
Matt Harder runs the civic engagement firm Civic Trust, where he guides cities in re-building their civic infrastructure by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government co-create public projects. He is also a passionate Bitcoiner. Follow him on Twitter.
