Governing Magazine/August 1996

TECHNOLOGY COLUMN

WHEN IT'S GOOD TO STEAL

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.

It's a huge problem for government: failure to keep pace in a world of
rapid innovation. Private firms have long recognized the competitive
value of cutting-edge technology to enhance customer service. The
credit card companies, for example, promise to solve your billing
problems quickly and cheerfully--24 hours a day, from anywhere in the
world, with a single phone call. Few consumers believe that this
actually works exactly as the commercials proclaim. But most are
certain of this: They can't get service like that from government.
 One reason government is slow to adopt and adapt is that there is
little incentive for being a "first mover." In the private sector,
vast fortunes flow to those who get there first. In government,
however, the rewards for moving first are mild while the risks are
murderous. Many government leaders privately admit: "I'd rather be
third." That's often a sensible stance, at least personally, despite
the damper it puts on innovation.
 Perhaps we could make it better for first movers. This would require
educating oversight agencies and the public on the importance of
innovation. We need leaders to be willing, even in a time of tight
budgets, to allocate real money to experimental approaches. We need to
reward successful programs and individuals. We need to protect those
who "fall forward"--that is, those whose innovations fail but whose
failures generate useful knowledge nonetheless.
 While first movers are important, however, the most significant boost
to innovation will come from "fast followers." Emphasizing fast
followership, admittedly, has less pizzazz. Nevertheless, it's the
easier, more reliable and more cost-effective road to success. Here's
what we need to do:
 1. Make it easier to identify leading-edge practice. While we need to
monitor emerging technologies, the key need is to better monitor the
emerging practices that represent promising new approaches to solving
public problems. This requires investments in the searching,
evaluating and educating necessary to identify leading-edge practice
and to make it widely visible. Operationally, we need more case
studies, more surveys, more performance measurement, more best-
practice awards and--yes--even more seminars and conferences.
 If you want to see how rapidly innovations can diffuse, look at high
school football coaches. Coaching clinics spread new techniques like
wildfire. Like the coaches, we need to get beyond the inhibitions of
"not invented here" to become aware of what's happening "out there."
Research shows that innovation benefits from "the strength of weak
ties" or from communications links that extend beyond the normal
channels and boundaries. We thus need to get technologists talking to
managers, state people talking to local and federal people, vendors
talking with governments, etc.
 2. Make it easier to learn from and adopt leading-edge practice. This
requires a more focused, in-depth and organizationally participative
kind of learning and education than is needed to merely identify
leading-edge practice. This is the kind of activity that some Asian
governmental organizations are famous for--taking ideas developed
elsewhere and adapting them to their own operations. Look at
Singapore.
 To improve such learning, we need to invest heavily in benchmarking
and to design technology projects as organizational-change efforts. We
need to explicitly analyze our portfolio of investments in technology-
based innovations and decide whether it is sufficiently large and
aggressive. When adopting the applications of others, we need to
educate our project teams intensively and send them to study best
practice in the field. We need more units whose mission is to test and
disseminate new applications, much like New York State's Center for
Technology in Government. To reward agencies for continuous learning,
we need to create multi-year technology innovation funds and other
techniques to allow them to retain more of the savings generated.
 3. Make it harder to be a laggard. Here is where competition helps
most. Outsourcing and privatization are important prods for
innovation. Internal markets and competition can also be expanded: Why
shouldn't the internal customers of payroll or address-change or other
information-based services be charged user fees and given the power to
take their business elsewhere? To support customers, we need more
evaluation services, much like the work of Consumer Reports.
 When we took tests back in our school days, we were taught to keep
our heads down and not to copy from others. For the tests of
governmental innovation, however, the reverse is true: We've got to
pick our heads up and copy freely. If this idea is relevant for you,
steal it.

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