Governing Magazine/June 1995

TECHNOLOGY COLUMN

REACHING ACROSS ORGANIZATIONAL LINES

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.

As we invest in information infrastructure and reengineering our
government agencies, are we targeting enough effort at initiatives
with other agencies, jurisdictions and the private sector--that is, at
initiatives which cross existing organizational boundaries?
 To answer this question, we need to focus first on work "hand-offs."
Handing off work from one person to another is often essential, of
course, and gains us the benefits of specialization. For example,
brain surgery requires competent specialists, necessitating hand-offs
of responsibility among surgeons, anesthesiologists and hospital
administrators. Unfortunately, hand-offs typically create problems,
even among competent specialists: They take time, consume resources,
limit communications with the end customer and introduce errors (as
anyone who remembers the elementary-school game of "telephone" can
attest).
 Recently, information technologies have become capable of improving
the efficiency of hand-offs--and even eliminating them. Where workers
have access to powerful interactive workstations and databases, they
can often assume broader responsibilities and reduce the number of
hand-offs required to complete a job; in human services agencies and
insurance companies, the use of the single caseworker to handle all of
a client's needs has been growing because of this capability. Further,
when workers have access to pervasive computer networking, they can
make immediate hand-offs with complete accuracy and from great
distances.
 But why stop at the organization's boundary? Why not reform or
eliminate cross-organizational hand-offs via networked transactions
with virtually everyone--suppliers, intermediate customers and other
stakeholders?
 While the potential benefits are enormous, the costs and risks of
reforming cross-organizational hand-offs also can be enormous. Getting
people to cooperate involves getting them to understand what is
required and getting them to believe it is in their interest. Cross-
organizational initiatives are often the most confusing, since there
is less of the shared experience and context needed to coordinate
transactions efficiently. And cross-organizational conflicts are often
the most difficult to resolve, since the missions and cultures of the
participating organizations may be quite divergent.
 Given these problems, how can we understand whether the benefits of
cross-organizational reforms are worth the effort, and how can we
minimize the inevitable risks involved? Three guidelines are key:
 1. Reduce the confusion of cross-organizational initiatives through
explicit analysis. Planning, stakeholder participation, education,
training and pilot projects are all relevant here. People must have
the time, information and experience needed to get comfortable with
the new vision of success. The key point for public leaders is that
cross-organizational initiatives are unlikely to emerge on their own,
absent the analytic activities needed to make them understandable and
credible to the participants.
 2. Manage the conflicts of cross-organizational initiatives through
leadership. Planning and shrewd delegation alone will not be enough.
Leaders must also authorize the staffing and budgeting of cross-
organizational initiatives, and usually must be prepared to buy off
opponents or bully them into cooperation or submission. If turf and
careers make cross-organizational cooperation too difficult, leaders
may need to establish new organizations. The Info/Texas kiosk network
is an example of a program in which an outside partner was created as
a broker to pull things together.
 3. Avoid initiatives that are just too risky. If initiatives are both
highly confusing and conflicted, the risks may simply be too high,
even for projects that otherwise promise high returns. In the private
sector, a key tool for radical change is the ability to move quickly
in implementing a new regime. But moving quickly is often impossible
in the public sector, and the better part of political valor may
sometimes require backing off and trying something smaller.
 But we shouldn't back off unless we really need to. Over the next
decade and more, cross-organizational investments will be critical
both for government and the larger society. Health care, job training,
criminal justice, human services, environmental protection and tax
collection--these are but a few of the arenas where the key reforms
will involve the structure of entire communities of interest, not just
the work of the individual organizations within those communities. We
need government leaders to step forward agressively to help such
community-wide, cross-organizational reforms to succeed.

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