Don't take my question the wrong way. Technology has made an immeasurable contribution to state and local government. The Internet has led to significant improvements in the way government operates. Hundreds of thousands of government transactions now take place routinely online. But that's a far cry from the revolution in government performance. So what happened?
Many who jumped on the e-gov bandwagon--and I am one of them--point to the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the subsequent fiscal downturn in the states as reasons why a transformation never took place. No doubt these events took their toll. But after re-reading Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen's work on disruptive innovations, I've come to a different conclusion: From the beginning, e-gov was never really on track to produce a revolution in state and local government performance.
Christensen's theory of disruptive innovations is built upon several crucial insights. One is that not all technology-enabled innovations have the potential to fundamentally transform--or in the words of Christensen "disrupt"--the performance of organizations. That is, many technology-enabled innovations only help an organization achieve performance results that are readily within its grasp. While such "sustaining" innovations may produce significant improvements in organizational performance--in productivity, cost savings and responsiveness--its customers do not experience transformational changes.
The distinction between disruptive and sustaining innovations shifts the focus of attention away from the technology itself and over to the resulting change in organizational performance. This leads to the second critical insight and that is that sustaining innovations can be accompanied by tremendous change and require large financial investments. In other words, whether an innovation is sustaining or disruptive--or in my words transformational--is all about the resulting changes in performance, not about the change in technology itself or about the amount of money that is spent. So organizations can invest in significant changes in technology--from one generation of technology to the next or from one technology product to another-- but not experience transformational improvements.
A third insight of disruption theory is that well-established organizations are predisposed by their resources, processes and values to produce sustaining innovations. That means that highly stable, mature organizations--such as state and local governments--invest their energies and resources on today's problems using business processes that have proven themselves. Although government executives may start out with aspirations to create technology-enabled transformational changes in performance, they end up fitting the technology into existing processes and values. As a result, they fall short of producing the desired transformations in performance.
If you think about Christensen's disruption theory in the context of economic development, it makes a lot of sense. New construction almost always results in noticeable physical improvements to a blighted area. It certainly can be costly, and it is often accompanied by significant change. But it takes more than a new building to transform a dilapidated neighborhood into a vibrant new community.
Insights from disruption theory are crucial for understanding not only what happened to the e-gov revolution but also for anticipating what may or may not happen when the next wave of new technology, such as wireless data services (WiFi) or Internet telephony (VoIP), begins to spread across state and local government.
As I see it, simply spending more on technology--regardless of its promise--isn't going to produce a transformation in government performance. State and local governments invest more than $45 billion annually on technology. Another billion or two isn't going to lead to transformational changes in performance--at least they aren't if the monies are invested in technology-enabled innovations that are designed primarily to fit within the constraints of existing priorities and processes, and where the goal is to realize existing performance aspirations.
So the next time you want to ensure that technology leads to a true transformation of your state, city or county, ask yourself this question: Will the process, resources and values of your government work for you to create transformational improvements in performance, or are they primarily working to sustain the path you're already on? There's certainly nothing wrong with the latter. But let's all agree to refrain from using the word "revolution" every time a new hot technology comes along.
