Category Archives: public service sector renewal

Make Government easier (part 1)

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The other week I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the annual DPI conference – put on by the Association of Public Service Professionals. (I’m hoping to slidecast the presentation soon – just trying to get my hands on a recording ofthe presentation).

In the audience were something like 800 IT professionals from the Public Service – a great group of people – many of whom I’m had a great time connecting over email with this past week.

direct.srv.gc.ca_direct500_images_english_titleObviously, I spent some time talking about social networking in a government context – Facebook.gc.ca as I’ve come to refer to it. As many people know (but don’t think about in these terms) the government does offer a social networking piece of software, its called the Government Electronic Directory Service or, for short, GEDS.

As I’ve mentioned before GEDS has limited functionality, it only helps you find someone whose name, phone number or title you already know. But that can still be useful and so a ton of people – both within and outside government. However, after talking to a number of people, I’ve discovered that not one person I’ve met actually knows how to get to the GEDS website. They all have to search for it in Google to find it! Talk about making one of the best IT tools within government difficult to find/use!

Why is that?

Because the GEDS URL (or web address) is the easy to remember:

http://direct.srv.gc.ca/cgi-bin/direct500/BE

Really? Why did the people who created this IT directory simply not make everyone’s life easier and make it:

http://geds.gc.ca

Now, while I think GEDS should be replaced but something more sophisticated, I nonetheless bet that its usage would be much higher – or at least, its users would be much happier – with this little address change.

It’s a simple change – but exactly the kind of thinking that applied more broadly, could make our government run just a little more smoothly.

So much data… locked away

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I’m preparing for the keynote on Public Service Sector Renewal and technology I’ll be giving at this year’s DPI conference on Thurdsay in Ottawa. I’ve been working on creating a series of slides that I’m hoping will be quite interesting and tha I promise to share either here or via slideshare.net.

What has been most interesting is how hard it is to get data about the government. In my case, I’ve been trying to determine the address of every major ministry (or, if you must, department) in Ottawa in 1930, 1960, 1980 and today. I know this information exists – the problem is finding it. It would appear that it can only be found in the national archives – in hard form, from a protected document that people aren’t really allowed to access.

Sigh.

It makes me think of how much data the government has collected over the years – or even minute by minute that gets stored – even digitally – in inaccessible ways, making it harder for companies, non-profits or other entities to leverage the public resource.

If our government is going to get one thing right, it would be enabling its citizens to do that.

The Public Service is from Mars, We are from Venus

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Last week the Clerk of the Privy Council gave a speech this speech in Vancouver. There is much in the speech that is promising, and some that remains problematic.

That said, I want to key in on the last part of the Clerk’s speech. Myth number 8: “The Public Service is out of touch with Canadians — they’re from Venus, we’re from Mars.”

In this piece the Clerk touches on the traditional critiques of how the public service is out of touch. He goes out of his way to outline how the geographic, linguistic and ethnic, are or have been addressed. In addition he outlines why – through outreach – the culture gap between private and public sector can be overcome.

We can debate if these concerns have been sufficiently addressed, and if not, how they should be. I think it would be hard to argue with the notion that enormous progress has been made on this front in the past few decades. However, none of them represent the differences that concern me most.  One which I do not think we can resolve and so requires further thought.

Today, public service employees are members of a union, enjoy life long job security, are eligible for a generous pension plan, and, by and large (particularly in the more senior ranks) live in Ottawa – a city shaped by and dominated by, the public service.

There was a time when the first three traits meant that employment experience of a public servant – such as one’s notions about: job security, opportunity, the expectations of their employer, and relationship with their boss and peers – was not dissimilar to that of many other Canadians.

Today however, this is less and less the case. Fewer and fewer Canadians are unionized, enjoy job security, or a pension.

Simply put, there is a culture gap.

A public servant’s career, life choices and opportunities are shaped by a system that is far removed from that experienced by the vast majority of Canadians. This, in a city where your average public servant comes into contact with non-public servants less and less.  I’m not saying this shouldn’t be the case. What I am saying is that the capacity of a institution to make policy for a public it resembles less and less, and whose experience is increasingly far removed from its own, is troubling and worthy of further exploration. It’s a culture gap I think is on few people’s radar – even the clerk’s.

Public Service Sector Renewal and Gen Y: Don’t be efficient

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Perhaps the biggest problem for Public Sector Renewal is the enourmous expectation problem created by the internet.

Many of today’s Gen Yers have access to a dizzying array of free online tools. Tools this online generations has grown up and used to organize and make more efficient their personal lives.

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These range from the banal, such as Facebook (connect and find people), Evite and Socialzr (organize and send invites to parties), or Google Docs (manage version control and share essays across platforms) to the more sophisticated, such as Basecamp (manage school projects), del.icio.us (share research with friends), WordPress (share your thoughts) or TikiWiki (enable collaboration).

It isn’t hard to imagine how these tools can be used professionally. I’ve talked about the potential for a facebook-like application, but software similar to Evite and socialzr can help set up meetings, google docs and wiki’s can facilitate collaborative policy development, and basecamp is as effective at managing professional projects as it is school projects. A work blog can keep your colleagues up to date on your research and thinking as effectively as your personal blog keeps your friends up to date on your comings and goings.

And remember – these tools are not only free but people like using them.

However, as generation Y enters the work force – and, in particular the public service – it is confronted with a nasty reality. Their managers, Director Generals, ADMs and DMs aren’t familiar with these software programs and don’t grasp the full potential of the internet. More importantly, in the public service’s risk averse culture doing something new and different is frequently perceived as dangerous. And so, our intrepid new hires are literally being told – don’t be efficient.

This is remarkable. For perhaps the first time in the history of work a generation is finding that the tools they use to organize life at home allows them to be more productive than the tools they can use to organize life at work.

Take for example my friend who wanted to use survey monkey to send out a questionnaire asking 10 public servants across their department about potential dates and times when they would be free to meet.  The survey took 5 seconds to complete and would quickly identify the optimal date for such a meeting. However, her manager let her know very quickly that this was unacceptable. It was more important that each person be emailed – or better, called – individually, a process that gobbled up hours if not days. Time after time I hear stories of young people who, after doing what they do at home, quickly feel the full weight of the department descending on their cubicle. I won’t even mention an acquaintance who related a story of trying to set up a wiki (not even on accessible to the public!).

The larger point here is that it’s going to be hard to retain people when they feel like they have to work with two hands tied behind their back (because of the nature of the job public servants already work with one hand behind their back). Today’s best and brightest want the freedom to work quickly and efficiently – and why not? – this is what ambitious go getters do. Those that notice that their work lags too far behind what they can do on their own will find greener pastures to accomplish their aims.

Don’t believe me? Forget all the applications I mentioned above. Think about something as simple as Google. This simple application has created the expectation among Gen Yers (and even Xers and boomers) that information should be accessible and easily found. When was the last time you could easily find what you were looking for on a government webpage?

Public Service Sector Renewal’s biggest challenge is fighting the freedom that the internet is giving people. The freedom to accomplish tasks faster, to work more quickly and to be more effective – the only rub, is no one can control what anyone is doing because you can’t keep track of it all. There is simply too much going on. So, in short, in order to meet the expectations created by the internet the public service may have to learn to trust its employees.

Can it do this?

I don’t know.