Governing Magazine/April 1995

TECHNOLOGY COLUMN

WE MUST INVEST IN INNOVATION

By Jerry Mechling

Jerry Mechling is director of the Program on Strategic Computing and
Telecommunications in the Public Sector at Harvard University's
Kennedy School of Government. To reach him, call 617-495-3036 or send
e-mail to jerrym@ksgrsch.harvard.edu.

Back when I worked for the mayor of New York City, my office in the
Municipal Building gave me daily opportunities to view the Brooklyn
Bridge. I learned that Washington A. Roebling, the bridge's chief
engineer, calculated the strength of the construction materials
needed, and then specified materials four times stronger. Why?
 The answer was the spoils-system politics of the 19th century.
Roebling knew that publicly purchased concrete and steel, given
corruption and shoddy controls, would be contaminated. Roebling was
not the only person outraged by out-of-control politics. Reformers
soon arose who created our classic "bureaucratic" controls:
centralized budgets, centralized procurements and centralized
personnel systems, all with managers held accountable under strict
rules. In the early 20th century, bureaucracy was considered such a
successful form of organization that it was widely adopted in private-
as well as public-sector settings.
 As the century continued, however, the dark side of bureaucracy grew
to dominate. Internally oriented rules blinded bureaucrats to customer
service and innovation. Today, a fundamental problem of government is
the erosion of public trust and support that has resulted from its
accumulating failures in customer service and innovation.
 In the private sector, especially in high-tech industries, half of
today's revenue may flow from products and services invented less than
five years ago. In the public sector, however, it is hard to gain
support and money for experimentation, especially for efforts that
extend across bureaucratic or jurisdictional lines. It is also hard to
attract and reward technological pioneers. For public-sector managers,
the personal and organizational rewards for innovation are small in
comparison with the potentially huge penalties for failure.
 Despite--indeed, because of--these difficulties, we need to find
better ways to support organizational learning in government, much of
which inevitably involves technology. Over the next decade and more,
improvement in government must come primarily from learning new ways
of doing things, not from making the old ways mildly more efficient.
At the early stages of new investments, the appropriate goal is not
efficiency (and avoiding all mistakes) but developing new capacities
for adding value (and learning from mistakes). Avoiding mistakes by
holding fast to the cards we've already been dealt is a death wish. To
strengthen our hand, we need to develop:
 --More institutions with a focus on developing and applying
technology (such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the
federal government, which spawned the computer network that became the
Internet, and Sharon Dawes' Center for Technology in Government in New
York State).
 --More staff with responsibilities for learning about emerging
technologies and for benchmarking agency performance against leading-
edge innovators.
 --New budgetary processes that encourage innovation by allowing
agencies to retain more of its benefits.
 --New planning processes that align IT and organizational strategies,
and especially those that explore cross-agency, technology-based
innovation.
 --New frameworks for evaluating high-risk/high-return innovations and
for counteracting the heavily incrementalist bias of traditional
return-on-investment calculations.
 --New alliances among public agencies, including new federal-state-
local partnerships in areas such as child support enforcement, tax
collection, health care and business development.
 --New efforts toward privatization and/or public-private partnerships
(much as has been done with great effectiveness in Singapore).
 --New ways of encouraging entrepreneurial behavior, perhaps through
authorizing revolving fund budgets or allowing limited governmental
copyrights.
 We must budget our IT investments not merely as single projects but
as a portfolio that always allocates 15 to 30 percent of its resources
for true learning and new work processes rather than for the simple
automation of established processes.
 While "reinvention" is a timely concept, it is unrealistic to suggest
that we can do it now and be done with it. That misses the fundamental
point: While survival of the fittest does not apply in the short term
as much in government as it does in the private sector, the long-term
imperatives for organizational learning are quite similar in both
sectors. If future government bureaucracy is to avoid the politically
imposed starvation diets of today, it must recognize the wisdom in
actively investing to stay fit.

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