Presented to the New Media Group, Victorian Government (Melbourne, March 2010), by Martin Stewart-Weeks, Director, Public Sector (Asia-Pacific), Internet Business Solutions Group
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Getting Under the Skin of Government 2.0 - Issues, Insights and Implications
1. Getting Under the Skin of Government 2.0 - Issues, Insights and Implications New Media Group, Victorian Government (Melbourne, March 2010) Martin Stewart-Weeks, Director, Public Sector (Asia-Pacific), Internet Business Solutions Group, [email_address]
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5. A starting point? Paul Baran’s Theory of Distributed Networks…the World of “Connectedness”
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Hinweis der Redaktion
E-Government = Hub & Spoke Government collected all information and resented back to citizens in the format government thought best Ubiquitous = mobile (VPN) expanded access to the e-government solution put forward by government Virtual in game changing Government is only one of many nodes on the information / solutions network. Citizen / Citizen, Citizen / Government/ citizen. Paul Baran’s Theory of Distributed Networks…the World of “Connectedness Natural science: Spider Web Agricultural science: Fishing Net
In his thirty-first article for HBR, Peter F. Drucker argues that what underlies the current malaise of so many large and successful organizations worldwide is that their theory of the business no longer works. The story is a familiar one: a company that was a superstar only yesterday finds itself stagnating and frustrated, in trouble and, often, in a seemingly unmanageable crisis. The root cause of nearly every one of these crises is not that things are being done poorly. It is not even that the wrong things are being done. Indeed, in most cases, the right things are being done--but fruitlessly. What accounts for this apparent paradox? The assumptions on which the organization has been built and is being run no longer fit reality. These are the assumptions that shape any organization's behavior, dictate its decisions about what to do and what not to do, and define what an organization considers meaningful results. These assumptions are what Drucker calls a company's theory of the business. http ://hbr.org/product/the-theory-of-the-business-hbr-org/an/94506-PDF-ENG?Ntt=Peter+Drucker&Nao=20 It demands getting truthful answers on four key points; • What assumptions are we making about (1) the environment, (2) our mission and (3) the core competencies that we need? • Do the assumptions in all three areas fit each other? • Is the theory of the business known and understood by everybody? • Is the theory tested constantly - and altered if necessary? Even if your answers are four resounding cries of Yes!, the theory of the business won’t last forever. Drucker was fully aware that change is inevitable, like it or not: ‘A theory of the business always becomes obsolete when an organisation attains its original objectives’. That’s why he advised use of ‘abandonment’ - meaning that every three years you should challenge every product, service, policy and distribution channel with the question, ‘If we were not in it already, would we be going into it now?’ - the self-same question that led to the revolution at GE. But Drucker adds three more queries: • Why didn’t this work, even though it looked so promising when we went into it five years ago? • Is it because we made a mistake? • Is it because we did the wrong things? • Or is it because the right things didn’t work? Note the simplicity of the questions – Drucker believed in making himself understood. He also insisted that preventing collapse required studying the customers - and, very important, the non-customers: ‘The first signs of fundamental change rarely appear within one’s own organisation or among one’s own customers’. http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/management/drucker
Trying to support and ‘scale up’ local action centrally can undermine this rootedness and take away from what makes localism successful in the first place … government action alone isn’t enough: impact depends on the knowledge, commitment and engagement of citizens At the heart of this are the limits to the traditional ‘deficit model’ of public services that undervalues the hidden resources of service users (today’s challenges)…have two factors in common: uncertainty as to what works best on the ground; and the requirement for deep level of personal commitment and collective action. … make better use of local knowledge, assets and infrastructure…such assets are almost invariably unknown or beyond the reach of approaches designed and developed from the centre. The ingenuity and local knowledge of communities is a powerful national asset Genuinely letting go of control is difficult when accountability is seen to lie with politicians and central government departments This questions the assumption that localism is in effect a testing-ground for ideas that can subsequently be scaled up at a national level, a kind of R&D lab for public sector practice. It means government focusing less on codifying practice and pushing ideas out from the centre and more on finding new ways to tap into the energies, insights and existing networks in local communities. This different approach to scaling – supporting mass innovation rather than stretching particular solutions – questions the efficiency of so-called ‘economies of scale’ … how to stimulate and support local responses to big problems, not what these solutions might or should be. This requires a different type of policy making – a much greater sharing of responsibility between the state, communities and citizens to determine what works and to deliver results. Advances in digital communication technologies and the tends towards a more distributed production in other parts of the economy provide an opportunity for this approach to be much more widespread.
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