E-government and new ways of working

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Recently we had the opportunity to talk with Miguel Peromingo who wanted to question us on how e-government will impact the future ways of working in public administrations. The following is a brief overview of the topics that were tackled.

Digital transformation at different speeds

According to the United Nations (2016), the digitization of governments is running at very different speeds worldwide with countries like Estonia and Singapore being at the forefront of e-solutions and countries in South-Eastern Europe or in Central America continuing to rely more on traditional paper-based processes. Geoffrey believes that in the near future many public services will be digitized, while different systems will keep running in parallel and in many cases, the old offline way of working will also be kept as a backup. Another reason why e-government may not be fully implemented is because the tasks at hand can be so chaotic and complex that they need a human decision maker to keep them running. Digitizing an organization reflects the human longing for doing things more efficiently, better, if you want, but once achieved, will not stop there. While we will be able to digitize a large sub-set of tasks that are performed in public organizations, some tasks will continuously change and reintroduce efficiency loops in the organization. This perpetuated search for improvement in the short term is better done by humans than by machines, even if the latter are self-teaching and intelligent, Geoffrey claims.

"Maintenance and fostering of interoperability of systems today for example is far from completely automated. There is still a lot of human intervention needed in the design, set up and maintenance of digital systems, even with the onset of advanced A.I. Also, citizens might still want to feel the human factor in extreme situations of government intervention like, say, law enforcement. Many people probably still prefer to talk to a human police officer over a robot when faced with a robbery. This brings us to the question which role the State, as we know it today, will play in the digital world of tomorrow."

Digital subsidiarity

“The notion of the state to me, seems rather hollow, as the state is, at best, a myth”, Geoffrey answers. A state to him is a collection of rules, norms, values, people, processes, tasks and organizations that have been tied together in legal and institutional frameworks. Hence, the state as such is no more than an idea that is used to describe how people shape parts of their societies next to other meta-institutions, like the market or civil society. The physical infrastructure of the state, Geoffrey thinks, will most likely vaporize in the long run leaving policy and delivery tasks, which are now state-run, to be automated. Military power or the redistribution of wealth, which are very complex tasks in their planning and roll-out, require human interaction and collaboration through joint-decision making, but can just as well be adjusted to people’s (digitized) demand in having more say in what happens and more speed and flexibility in how governments succeed in tackling those requests. Ultimately, the regulatory framework that we accept as ‘the State’ might be disrupted by better and more suited mechanisms for joint-decision making amongst human beings.

This subsidiarity in extremo, the future power of crowds, will find ways to manage trust and responsibility, and in doing so allow for joint-decision making through online means. And for this, Geoffrey emphasizes two determining factors: “people have to find their role in the digital system and be educated as such, rather than letting them guess or fear what will happen, and the current political decision makers need a clear vision and buy-in from their governing peers in order to navigate any digital transition.”

Hybrid contracting

On the practical side of things, Geoffrey advises those public services who are looking for providers to, for instance, implement their digital transition to:

“Some institutions prefer having their projects executed by big corporations, others opt for SMEs. The bigger corporation can guarantee performance and scale and will rather be viewed as more experienced in lowering the risks to which governments are exposed in the digital world. The smaller suppliers tend to focus on innovation and new technologies and aim to make sure their project management is cutting edge. In comparison to the smaller SMEs the government actor is a disproportionally powerful player and has substantial bargaining power that might exhaust the scaling capacity of a small provider entity, for example when it comes to bridging public payment cycles. Larger ICT companies might on the other hand be too slow and hierarchical themselves to unfold the necessary agility that a digitization project requires.”

Why not move to a hybrid solution then? – “We can imagine a solution, where the procurement of ICT services is cut into smaller project slices that can be mixed and matched between several providers instead of paying one large lump-sum for just one provider. The creation of a reputation-based procurement platform for ICT services that makes transparent, how providers performed on the smaller building blocks of a project, can help future contracting decisions and allow for more pin-pointed talent search and less levelling out of skills in large project teams. I believe that the future of ICT procurement in the public sector will go towards the level of the individual provider, as we can already see in our gig-economy.”

Miguel Peromingo is a consultant in the field of Employment Policy and Intercultural Communication, he can be contacted via: miguel.peromingo@gmail.com