US government – Looking Forward

June 7, 2016

White House Rural Telehealth — Continued

Two months ago, in “The Last Big Barrier To A Rural Renaissance: Healthcare”,
I reported on a White House meeting on rural telehealth that I
participated in. On June 1, we had a follow-up conference call.

This is sort of a report on that call, intertwined with my
observations from this call about why it’s hard to get things done in
the Federal government.

First, there was some encouraging news, including these items:

The
White House is starting to fund research on how telehealth improves
medical outcomes, which will be important for future changes.
Because
of changes in Federal law and market conditions, there has been such a
rapid growth of integrated health care systems that, on their own, some
are now reaching out to serve rural areas.
In various ways,
there was agreement that telehealth is now expanding into remote patient
monitoring. This is especially good news for rural residents who may
have to travel miles even to get to a local clinic which is in turn
connected to a major medical center.

This last item also reminded me of Longfellow’s Little Girl:

“There
was a little girl, and she had a little curl right in the middle of her
forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she
was bad she was horrid”

At the same time the Veterans Health
Administration has had its problems with waiting lists at some
facilities, it is has taken the lead in innovations, like tele-health, to bring health care to veterans at work or at home in small towns, rural areas and other places where it is difficult for the veterans to get to major facilities.

I’d
note that I’ve spent much more time with local and state government,
where with good leadership, things can get done fairly quickly, even
when major innovations are involved. Many of these governments are at
least as efficient, if not more efficient, than most large
corporations. As we’ve heard and seen many times in this election year,
the Federal government is another story.

Here then are some relevant, if not new, observations based on the rural tele-health work:

It’s very hard to get things done even if you’re sitting in the White House.
To
some extent, this is built into the constitution, the system of
government, which divides power and ensures that Federal agencies almost
suffer from a kind of matrix management with multiple parties having a
say about what happens.

And when the Federal government gets
around to doing something it needs to be very careful and thoughtful
about the rules because its impact is so outsized – part of its slowness
is to ensure it doesn’t behave like a bull in a china shop.
There
are millions of Federal employees to contend with, each of whom has
his/her own sense of what their public responsibility calls for. This
can lead to a silo effect where people in different departments don’t
work with each other or even know each other are working on the same
issue. As an example, psychiatrists who are encouraged by one part of
the Federal government to provide face-to-face services through
videoconferencing worry about running afoul of the concerns of the Drug Enforcement Administration about electronic prescriptions of controlled substances.

Having said all this, the White House staff should still be applauded
for continuing to push these innovative tele-healthcare services,
despite the built-in obstacles and the short time they have left.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/145558168934/white-house-rural-telehealth-continued]

May 17, 2016

When Will Citizens Be Able To Track Requests To The Government? Still?

In 2009, I wrote a blog titled: “When Will Citizens Be Able To Track Requests To The Government?”

It’s time to see if much progress has been made, but first some background …

The
people that public officials call citizens or voters or residents are
not single-minded civic machines. Most of the time, they are consumers
and workers outside of the public sector. And so what happens outside
of the public sector affects their expectations of what should happen in
the public sector.

One of the more frequent parts of a
consumer’s life these days is being able to track things. Here are just
a few of the many diverse examples, almost all of which have been
around for at least a few years: track your Domino’s pizza
order from the oven to your front door; track shipments, at all stages,
through FedEx or UPS or even USPS; track the path of a car that you
ordered via Uber; track an airline flight so you know when to leave for the airport to pick up a relative or friend.

Why
not enable citizens to track their government transactions in
mid-stream? While suggestions of this kind are often proposed to
increase transparency of government, the tracking actually serves a much
simpler goal – to reduce frustration on the part of the citizen.

If
people can see where their request or application is, they will have a
lower sense of frustration and a greater sense of control. If the
citizens could also get an estimate of how long it usually takes to go
through each step of an approval process, all the better.

In the public sector, this kind of tracking was very rare in 2009. The standout was the UK, for example enabling residents to driving license applications.

Since
2009, we’ve seen some more ways to track requests and applications.
This has been especially true of requests under various freedom of
information laws, such as the US Justice Department’s. However, the
average citizen is not submitting FOIL requests – I suspect that most
come from media employees.

You can track your request for US government grants
– again something that the average citizen isn’t focused on. The US
Internal Revenue Service IRS2go app lets you track the status of your
refund, which is likely to be of interest to a much larger number of
people.

While it is difficult for me to judge from this distance
how well it actually works, certainly one of the broadest and most
ambitious efforts to let residents track their requests is in India, not the US or Europe even.

Alas, in New York City, the government’s website tells you call 311 to track applications for Food Stamps.

In South Carolina, a “Multi-Agency Partnership Portal”
provides a reasonably good way of applying for various health and
support programs. Although the website refers to seeing the status of
the application, it’s not clear from the documentation how you’d do that.

Colorado’s version of the same kind of website, called PEAK, makes it very easy to track status.

Although Indiana also does this, its website seems much more complicated than Colorado’s.

Even
the City of San Francisco, which aims to be a technology leader, has
had its difficulties in enabling people to do the simple tracking of,
for example, building permits. Its website refers back to a partial implementation two years ago, but no recent update.

Even worse, one of the examples from 2009 was from the District of Columbia, where you could the track the status of building permit applications. If you try that now, you’ll get this backtracking message:

“DCRA
has removed its permit status check page also known as Online Building
Permit Application Tracking (OBPAT) application from its website.

"DCRA
recognizes that some constituents are disappointed about this
decision. In short, DCRA found that-the information was too often
unreliable and resulted in misinformation to constituents. This is
totally unacceptable, DCRA is hopeful that the site will eventually be
restored, but the data issues must be resolved before it is. DCRA is
committed to transparency, but transparency is helpful when accurate
information is available. It is DCRA’s goal to have truthful, accurate
communication from staff, and the public access sites need to reflect
that as well.”

Clearly, there are still many situations where people want to track their interaction with the government and cannot.

(Of
course, the ultimate goal, in so far as possible, is to complete those
transactions instantaneously online, like the fishing license app that Michigan makes available. Then the tracking problem disappears, but that’s a subject for a future blog post.)

So the answer to the question?

In
the last seven years, there has only been a little progress here and
there in some areas of government, but not the massive change that
technology makes possible.

Consider an analogy. While
every government, for instance, expects that it needs a formal budget
document, most apparently don’t yet have an expectation that they need
to make it easy for people to find out the status of their requests for
common services. In this Internet age that is no longer something new. It’s time to get moving on it.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/144503228624/when-will-citizens-be-able-to-track-requests-to]

March 18, 2015

Creativity Rules

I’ve written, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, about innovation in government. There are many examples, although many more are needed. Despite – or maybe because of – financial constraints and opposing interests who are ritually stuck in old debates, creativity rules in government as elsewhere.

But I was reminded by readers that public officials – or executives of corporations, for that matter – don’t always know how to create a culture of innovation. In response, I remembered a book published a bit less than a year ago, titled “Creativity, Inc.” by Ed Catmull, the founder and CEO of the very successful animation film studio, Pixar, and now also the head of Disney Animation.

The book is partly a biography and partly about film making. But it is mostly one of the best books on management in a long time. Many reviewers rightfully cite his wisdom, balance and humility and note that this book goes beyond the usual superficialities of most management books.

Catmull talks about how to run a company in a creative business, but it applies to many other situations. It certainly applies to the software and technology business, in general. It also applies to government.

One of the major themes of the book is that things will always go wrong and perfection is an elusive goal, even in companies that produce outstanding work. Leaders need to set the proper frame for all stakeholders.

To put this in the context of politics, a successful elected official I know has concluded that it’s not a good idea to go around (figuratively) wearing a white robe, touting your perfection. As soon as one small spot appears on that white robe, it will be noticed and condemned by everyone. Instead, it’s best to let the public know that you too are human and will make a few mistakes, but those mistakes are in the interest of making their lives better.

Catmull puts it this way:

“Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.”
“Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.”

The last point has a larger message: that success is less about the right way [the process] to fix a problem than actually fixing the problem.

“Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on— but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.”

Government, in general, would do well to convert as many activities as it can from being processes to being projects, whose aim is to achieve clear and discrete results.

Along with many of us who have supported open innovation and citizen engagement, he points out that good ideas can come from anywhere inside or outside the organization:

“Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere.”

And he adds that good managers don’t just look to employees for new solutions, but for help in an earlier stage – defining what the real problem is.

In government, you often hear the line that “information is power” and thus many leaders horde that information. Catmull, on the contrary, argues for the need for open communication:

“If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem. Many managers feel that if they are not notified about problems before others are or if they are surprised in a meeting, then that is a sign of disrespect. Get over it.”

Of course, actually having good communications isn’t any easier in government than it is anywhere else. Catmull suggests that it is the top leaders who have to make the major effort for good communications to occur and it is in their own interest. How many times have you been blindsided by something that others knew was a problem, but didn’t reach you until it was a full-fledged crisis?

“There are many valid reasons why people aren’t candid with one another in a work environment. Your job is to search for those reasons and then address them. … As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute.”

This brief review doesn’t do justice to the depth of the book. And I’m sure that many public officials could draw more parallels than I have.

Clearly the government would run better, the public would be better served and public officials would be more successful if creativity ruled in the public sector as well as it has at Pixar.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/113958132330/creativity-rules]

February 25, 2015

Innovations In Government

The National Association of Counties just concluded its annual mid-winter Legislative Conference in Washington, DC. I was there in my role as NACo’s first Senior Fellow.

As usual, its Chief Innovation Officer, Dr. Bert Jarreau, created a three-day extravaganza devoted to technology and innovation in local government.

The first day was a CIO Forum, the second day NACo’s Technology Innovation Summit and the final day a variety of NACO committees on IT, GIS, etc.

County government – especially the best ones – get too little recognition for their willingness to innovate, so I hope this post will provide some information about what county technologists and officials are discussing.

One main focus of the meetings was on government’s approach to technology and how it can be improved.

Jen Pahlka, founder and Executive Director of Code For America and former Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House, made the keynote presentations at both the CIO Forum on Friday and the Tech Summit on Saturday – and she was a hit in both.

She presented CfA’s seven “Principles for 21st Century Government”. The very first principle is that user experience comes before anything else. The use of technology is not, contrary to some internal views, about “solving” some problem that the government staff perceive.

She pointed out that the traditional lawyer-driven design of government services actually costs more than user-centric design. (I’ll have more on design in government in a future blog post.)

She referred to the approach taken by the United Kingdom’s Digital Service. For more about them, see https://gds.blog.gov.uk/about/ When she was in the White House, she took this as a model and helped create a US Digital Service.

She also discussed the importance of agile software development. She suggested that governments break up their big RFPs into several pieces so that smaller, more entrepreneurial and innovative firms can bid. This perhaps requires a bit more work on the part of government agencies, but they would be rewarded with lower costs and quicker results.

More generally she drew a distinction between the traditional approach that assumes all the answers – all the requirements for a computer system – are known ahead of time and an agile approach that encourages learning during the course of developing the software and changing the way an agency operates.

By way of example, she discussed why the Obamacare website failed. It used the traditional, waterfall method, not an agile, iterative approach. It didn’t involve real users testing and providing feedback on the website. And, despite the common wisdom to the contrary, the development project was too big and over-planned.

It was done in a way that was supposed to reduce risk, but instead was more risky. So she asked the NACo members to redefine risk, noting that yesterday’s risky approach is perhaps today’s prudent approach.

Helping along is the development of cloud computing. So Oakland County (Michigan) CIO Phil Bertolini has found that cloud computing is reducing government’s past dependence on big capital projects to deploy new technology, thus allowing for more day-to-day agility.

Finally Jen Pahlka suggested that government systems needed to be more open to integration with other systems. In a phrase, “share everything possible to share”. She showed an example where the government let Yelp use government restaurant inspection data and in turn learn about food problems from Yelp users. (And, of course, sharing includes not just data, but also software and analytics.)

In another illustration of open innovation in the public sector, Montgomery County, MD recently created its Thingstitute as an innovation laboratory where public services can be used as a test bed for the Internet of Things.
Even more examples were discussed in the IT Committee. Maricopa County, Arizona and Johnson County, Kansas, both now offer shared technology services to cities and nearby smaller counties. Rita Reynolds, CIO of the Pennsylvania County Commissioners Association, discussed the benefits of adopting the NIEM approach to data exchanges between governments.

The second major focus of these three days was cybersecurity.

Dr. Alan Shark, Executive Director of PTI, started off by revealing that latest surveys show security is the top concern for local government CIOs for the first time. Unfortunately, many don’t have the resources to react to the threat.
Actually, it’s more a reality than merely a threat. It was noted that, on average, it takes 229 days for organizations to find out they’ve been breached and that close to 100% have been attacked or hacked in some way. It’s obviously prudent to assume yours too has been hacked.

Jim Routh, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Aetna insurance recommended a more innovative approach to responding to cybersecurity threats. He said CIOs should ignore traditional advice to try to reduce risk. Instead “take risks to manage risk”. (This was an interesting, if unintentional, echo of Jen Pahlka’s comments about software development.)

Along those lines, he said it is better to buy less mature cybersecurity products, in addition to or even instead of the well-known products. The reason is that the newer products address new issues better in an ever changing world and cost less.

There was a lot more, but these highlights provide plenty of evidence that at least the folks at NACo’s meetings are dealing with serious and important issues in a creative way.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/112058162497/innovations-in-government]

February 17, 2015

Simplicity In Government?

The idea of simplicity in government is not new.

Thomas Jefferson was an advocate of “republican simplicity.” As he wrote in the year before he was elected President:

“I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple…”

Among others in the 18th century, Thomas Paine also was an advocate of simplicity in government. That was one reason he supported a single house of Congress which would control the national government, rather than the complex system we have.

Coming closer to our time, the last couple of years have seen a renewal of this idea. “Simpler: The Future of Government” was published in 2013. The book’s author, Cass Sunstein, was a long time professor at University of Chicago Law School and then ran the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for President Obama. In that role, he was a continual advocate for simplicity.

Partly, the complaints of the business community have encouraged the desire for simplicity in government regulations. More broadly, overly complex government operations have also been tied to higher than necessary taxes – so they affect everyone’s pocketbook.

It almost seems that no one can argue against simplification.

But Syracuse University’s Professor David Driesen argues in a review of Sunstein’s work, for example, that “complexity bears no fixed relationship to costs or benefits.” Moreover, he points out that there is often a trade-off between simplicity and other values; or looking at it another way, complexity in government is often a result of compromises that are necessary for a law to be enacted.

He’s also not the first to notice that some who advocate simplicity, attribute simplicity only to those policies and actions that they support on other grounds.

So perhaps simplicity of laws and regulations is not so simple, after all.

But simplicity has many forms. Is there a way of thinking about simplicity in government that bypasses underlying ideological motivations?

I think so, but it has less to do with debates about political philosophy and law, and more to do with the concrete interactions between government and people – the citizen’s experience.

For that, there are examples and inspiration from outside the public sector. Perhaps one of the best is Apple, especially as explained in the book, “Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success”. In this book,

Ken Segall, one of the company’s former marketing experts, points out the many ways that Apple and Steve Jobs worked to simplify the experience of dealing with Apple’s products and services – despite the ways that this might increase the complexity of the problems facing its designers, engineers and other staff.

Although this approach hasn’t been used much in governments in the US, it is not a completely outlandish idea. Tim Brown, the CEO of the famous design firm, Ideo, proclaimed in his blog that the “The UK Government Shows How to Design for Simplicity” – at least with respect to its Internet presence and digital public services.

The implication of Apple’s obsession with simplicity is that it starts out by subordinating everything it does to the user’s needs. And isn’t that what a democratic government is supposed to do too?

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/111280190609/simplicity-in-government]

May 1, 2014

Moving To A National Digital Library?

In a post last year, http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/66967472797/a-national-future-for-libraries , I discussed the increasing volume of digital text, video and audio, produced by millions more writers and artists than have been supported by the big publishing and media corporations in the past. These trends have important implications for libraries, especially the need to offer library patrons a national collection and reference to materials located anywhere. That’s why I titled the post “A National Future For Libraries”.

So it was great that the US Government’s Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) conducted their “Strategic Priorities 2014” conference with a focus on a National Digital Platform.

The meeting, held at the main building of the New York Public Library on Tuesday this week, featured most of the key leaders in the world of libraries and other non-profit cultural and information organizations as you can see below.

Jason Kucsma, ‎Executive Director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, was one of the speakers – a nice recognition for the innovative work that METRO is doing under his leadership and METRO’s role as the New York State hub for the Digital Public Library of America. (Note: I’m President of the board, but Jason and the staff of METRO actually do the work.)

It was very encouraging to see these leaders working together with a generally positive frame of mind, trying to figure out how to create and, more important, sustain a national digital library. There’s clearly lots of work ahead of us – including much more than the usual community of librarians – but this was a good start.

You can see the conference video at http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/imls/140429/. Since it was a whole day event, I’ve put the agenda below so you can watch particular sections.

Welcome and Framing the Day

Anthony Marx, President and CEO, New York Public Library – @NYPL

Maura Marx, Deputy Director for Libraries, IMLS – @mauramarx / @US_IMLS

Play Flash Video

INFRASTRUCTURE: Examining the Hubs Model

Moderated by:
Jim Neal, VP for Information Services and University Librarian, Columbia University, @columbialib

Panel:
Dan Cohen, Executive Director, Digital Public Library of America – @dancohen / @dpla

Brett Bobley, Chief Information Officer, National Endowment for the Humanities – @brettbobley / @NEH_ODH

Elliott Shore, Executive Director, Association of Research Libraries – @ARLnews

Play Flash Video

CONTENT: Beyond the low hanging fruit: Strategies on Providing Access to Complicated Content

Moderated by
Rachel Frick, Director, Digital Library Federation – @RLFrick / @CLIRDLF

Panel:
Sari Feldman, Executive Director, Cuyahoga County Public Libraries – @Sari_Feldman / @CuyahogaLib

Katherine Skinner, Executive Director, Educopia Institute – @Educopia

Clifford Lynch, Director, Coalition for Networked Information – @CNI_org

Play Flash Video

USE: Challenges and Opportunities to Broad Use of Digital Content

Moderated by:
Susan Hildreth, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services – @IMLSDirector / @US_IMLS

Panel:
Susan Gibbons, University Librarian, Yale University – @YaleLibrary

Bernie Margolis, New York State Librarian and Assistant Commissioner for Libraries

Play Flash Video

TOOLS: Encouraging Innovation

Moderated by:
Mary Lee Kennedy, Chief Library Officer, New York Public Library – @NYPL

Panel:
Ben Vershbow, Manager, NYPL Labs – @subsublibrary / @NYPL_Labs

Martin Kalfatovic, Associate Director Smithsonian Libraries, Program Director BHL – @UDCMRK / @SILibraries

Tom Scheinfeldt , Associate Professor of Digital Media / Director of Digital Humanities at University of Connecticut – @foundhistory / @UConn

Play Flash Video

ACCESS AT SCALE

Moderated by:
Josh Greenberg, Program Director for Digital Information Technology, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation – @epistemographer / @SloanFoundation

Panel:
MacKenzie Smith, University Librarian, University of California at Davis

Jason Kucsma, ?Executive Director at Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) – @J450NK / @mnylc

Dan Chudnov, Director, Scholarly Technology, George Washington University Libraries – @dchud / @gelmanlibrary

Play Flash Video

SKILLS

Moderated by:
Bob Horton, Associate Deputy Director for Library Services, IMLS – @US_IMLS

Panel:
Nancy McGovern , Head, Curation and Preservation Services, MIT Libraries – @mitlibraries

Jack Martin, Executive Director, Providence Public Library – @provlib

Play Flash Video

CONCLUSION AND CLOSING DISCUSSION

Maura Marx, Susan Hildreth and Bob Horton – @mauramarx, @IMLSDirector / @US_IMLS

Play Flash Video

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/84466500047/moving-to-a-national-digital-library]

November 14, 2013

A National Future For Libraries?

The second and final meeting of the Aspen Institute workgroup on the future of libraries was held last week.

[What follows does not necessarily represent views of anyone else there or even the discussion that took place. These are purely my reflections when the meeting was over and continue what I started in a previous post. I also apologize in advance for the length of this post.]

The question that kept crossing my mind is simple: given the obvious trends in the library world and, more broadly, the world of knowledge, is some form of national network of library services inevitable?

When books were physical items primarily produced by established book publishers, the local library was the place local residents needed to go to get access to those books (assuming they couldn’t afford to buy everything they wanted to read).

There are still many printed books in local libraries around the country. We are, after all, in a transitional period and we can expect to see some printed books lasting long after almost everyone will be reading digitally – 2050?

But books are changing. It’s not just that there are digital versions of printed books. Self-published books and co-created texts already are more numerous than traditionally published books, even including e-books. With so much digital content, produced by so many different sources, the purely local collections in a local library can easily be outmatched in both quantity and quality.

The Digital Public Library of America is one important response to this accelerating condition. Indeed, DPLA is as much the future of libraries as anything on the horizon right now. DPLA doesn’t centralize all of the digital collections, but it makes them available to everyone. It uses local library resources (and regional consortia) to collect and organize digital content created locally, but it lets that content escape the constraints of the physical building in which they have been stored.

Another sign of the times is the use of virtual reference librarians. These were first established to share the load of patron requests especially at odd hours.

However, the potential of a network of reference librarians is much greater than that. Consider the deep knowledge that a reference librarian in one part of the country can have about some subject – say Hellenic pottery as an example. Why shouldn’t she or he get the reference questions that come up about that subject no matter where the patron is? Can the reference desk in the local library match this knowledge? Of course not. Is it possible that the reference librarian locally happens to be that expert in a subject? Of course. Why not let her specialize?

In a future world where most content will be digital, a national network of reference librarians would provide patrons with the best possible service and pointers to the best places to find the content they are searching for.

DPLA and specialized virtual reference librarians are just two significant ways that library services are no longer limited to the local library building.

So, if not as the collector of printed books or the location for an all knowing reference librarian sitting at a desk there, what will be the purpose of local library buildings in the decades ahead?

Already we see the library building being used as a meeting place. Even more exciting, many libraries are becoming centers for create content and culture in various ways – offering Maker Spaces (with 3D printers), poetry rooms, video/audio studios, etc.

Consider also that the national digital collection that is being pioneered by DPLA will need much more manpower to become useful than DPLA and its hubs can provide. The local library building can be one place where the staff can help with the task of tagging/classifying and otherwise making sense of all the new content produced by others.

The local library can also be the outreach center to get volunteers to help with this enormous task and thus be the local chapters of a national pool of librarians and colleagues.

As with any other sea change, the shift to a national library network will not come without strife. The most obvious trouble is that libraries have been inherently local institutions supported by local taxes. There is currently a very small amount of Federal money devoted to library services, mostly in the form of a fraction of the e-rate program.

As library services become not merely local, but an interstate concern, the Federal government or some other national organization is going to have to step up funding for the national institutions that will make those services work.

***

The Aspen Institute has also been involved in projects about citizenship so it worth remembering that our founding fathers strongly supported libraries as the cornerstone of an educated citizenry, which they thought, in turn, was essential for democratic government to survive.

Our national leaders today don’t explicitly share that understanding and seem to find it easier to deal with a less engaged citizenry. Perhaps the nationalization of libraries will make it easier for American citizens all over the country to gain the knowledge necessary to play their proper role in our democracy and thereby improve the way that our national government functions. Now there’s a long term goal!

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/66967472797/a-national-future-for-libraries]