It’s Not About the Technology

“This is not about technology at all. Frankly I think it just furthers the digital divide if governments only think of technology and not the human interaction between the two.”

Anthony Lyons, City Manager, Gainesville

As noted above, one of our early findings was that the phrases “public interest technology” and “civic tech” didn’t resonate for many practitioners because they didn’t connect their work inherently to technology. Despite the fact that many people we spoke with work for digital services or technology teams, they de-emphasized the technology part of their work. People talked about improving processes, introducing service-oriented models from the private sector, and changing the building blocks of how government solves problems: incorporating user research, human-centered design, agile work processes, open data, prototyping, iterative design and metrics. Many of the ideas teams are working on tackle not only one instance of a problem, but how government approached problem solving.

However, in talking to people about how they identified with technology, we found common themes in the relationship or connections they made to its use or application to their work.

Many of our interviewees eschewed the popular narrative that it requires special wunderkids from the technology industry, or even specialized technology training at all. Nigel Jacobs is the co-founder of the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston, one of the first innovation teams in government in the United States. He’s also one of the first to challenge the notion of technology as part of any title or qualifier for hiring or description of the work:

“Whether you use the word ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘hustler’ or some other euphemism, it’s useful as a way of challenging the language that is typically used in local gov. We are more often than not service delivery people. I think that new language and new concepts are needed to highlight the kind of work that needs to get done.”

Several people noted that they worked hard to shift the view of their team’s capabilities from tech-solution provider (e.g. “We need a website.” or “We need an app.” or “This tech thing is broken.”) to solution-agnostic problem solvers. Lamar Gardere, the former chief technology officer of New Orleans, described his team’s approach to shifting the focus:

“We would go into conversations and say, we're not going to talk about IT or technology at all. That is not where your solution lies. We're just going to talk about where your difficulties are, where your problems are, where your pain points are, what are things that you struggle with and could see yourself doing a better job if you had some solutions in that space.’”

Technology is “the easy part” compared to improving business processes, and implementing and maintaining technical solutions, we heard. But at the same time, even though practitioners said that technology often wasn’t the most difficult piece of solving a larger problem and wanted to be recognized for bringing more to the table, they also found others in government often downplay the degree of technical complexity many projects entail, to the point that unqualified people get assigned, resulting in technical disaster. One practitioner told us:

“You see a lot of things where they ask an intern to manage a website redesign project. And you look these senior people in the face and think, website designers make more money than you do in the private sector. Why are you asking your intern to do this? Just because your intern knows how to use Photoshop?”

This push-pull between wanting to de-emphasize the tech part of practitioners’ skill sets, or the degree to which technology can solve problems, while also wanting it to be recognized as a serious, complex skill, while also needing to differentiate it from IT work is a source of frustration for many practitioners. Some practitioners told us that simply getting their coworkers or senior government staff to recognize these three elements was an important first step in moving their city toward a culture of service design and innovation. Ashley Meyers, a product manager at San Francisco Digital Services, explained:

“It's got to be baby steps towards understanding what this field of expertise even is, how it is different from IT, why do we need it, how much does it cost, what kind of roles would be on that team. It's very slow bringing them along with us and I think the way to do that is showing them what's possible.”

Even though technology often isn’t the solution, and is frequently undervalued or misunderstood, it serves as an entry point to tackling larger problems in government. Several teams took on small technical projects early on to prove their worth and help build relationships.

Marina Martin, former chief technology officer at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, described her approach to winning people’s trust as simply being helpful, while having a larger plan.

“I wanted to automate how disability claims were processed, and I knew how to do that, I just didn't have resources or political buy in,” she said. “Instead of going in day one announcing that was my plan, I just tried to be very quiet and listen and leverage the people that I had a relationship with, and ask them where I could be helpful to them. Sometimes they would be like, ‘Oh, could you explain this technology thing?’ Sometimes it was, ‘Can you help me set up my printer?’ Whatever it was, I was willing to do that to help build the relationship.”

"You can’t sell people on ‘all management things are terrible.’ You can sell ‘modernizing technology in government.’"

The emphasis on technology can also open doors to larger strategic conversations. It can be easier to talk about fixing technology than fixing less precise problems in government. It feels like a category, a point of entry. Dana Chisnell, co-director at the Center for Civic Design, points out that, “You can’t sell people on ‘all management things are terrible.’ You can sell ‘modernizing technology in government.’ Because there is no shortage of engineering problems.” No shortage of engineering problems means that there are multiple entry points into this work.

Technology can also serve as an entry point because it presents the greatest, most immediate need. As government services increasingly incorporate technology either on the user-facing side or the back end, basic technology literacy becomes increasingly important for all government workers. Ariel Kennan, former director of design and product at the New York City Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity notes:

“Competency in technology is essential if you're delivering public services in the twenty-first century. You may not be delivering a service via a website, but you probably have a case management system or data analytics or metrics or something that has something to do with technology. You have to be literate in it at some level.”

Because there are so many quick-hit tech needs across government, teams who are just starting out are often best served by finding bite-sized technical problems to solve first. In addition to pulling low-hanging fruit, they can give teams key capital for getting real work done: political capital and strong relationships, Both of these build preliminary steps into tackling larger problems down the road.

The endgame for every team we spoke with was to shift the thinking in their city or government agency toward service design and solving process problems. When governments try to employ technology to solve problems without also considering the process on the back end, predictably they run into problems. Beth Noveck, director of the Governance Lab at NYU, described a familiar scenario she’d encountered recently in her consulting work:

"Madrid built a platform for citizen engagement. They can make proposals to the city for things they want fixed or changed. In the first year they got 19,000 citizen proposals. Exactly two have moved forward, and none have been acted upon. It's not that the website or the app isn’t great. The technology is fine. The challenge is you don't have a process that works the way the city does."

Anyone who has worked in or around government has come across a project conceived with the best of intentions, but undertaken as though technology is a silver bullet that can pierce the thickest bureaucracy and create internal processes where none exist. When government fails to use technology correctly––leaping at exciting projects over practical ones––the entire field suffers, as projects falter or fail, and the entire idea of employing technology or trying new things gets scrapped. Ben Guhin, head of design and technology policy for Austin, says:

“There are so many ways this work can get discredited because you're doing bright and shiny things because you think they are cool. If the work isn't grounded in these desired outcomes in solving real problems for real people, then it's not going to be sustainable.”

To this end, practitioners tend to think of technology as one of multiple tools they can deploy to solve human problems. Jesse Taggart, formerly director of service design and user research at California’s Child Welfare Digital Service, summed up this sentiment:

“I don't think of myself as a technologist. I think of myself as an experience designer and a strategist and we're using technology to do that. Like a carpenter would use nails, or like you would use a bowl to get water out of a stream.”

As a result, many reported that simply shifting the way their city or agency thought about technology was a significant success. They spent large amounts of time working on process design and staffing or organizational improvements––in some cases teams reorganized entire departments and workflows––and worked hard to help their colleagues view technology as one potential tool to help improve citizen services in conjunction with these other changes. “Our biggest accomplishment was getting people to the idea that you've got to do this work up front to study what's happening before you start having any conversation about technology,” Lamar Gardere told us of his time as New Orleans’ chief technology officer.

"If the work isn't grounded in these desired outcomes in solving real problems for real people, then it's not going to be sustainable."

When governments aren’t able to make this shift––when they implement technology without considering process and people implications, or when they start with the technology rather than viewing it as one tool in an arsenal of possible solutions––they risk reinforcing the concept that government can’t do anything right. This narrative isn’t wildly off. Over the course of the year we conducted this research, huge government tech failure stories made regular headlines, including the Hawaii false missile alert,¹ an IRS failure that prevented people from paying taxes,² a fiasco involving the state of Rhode Island’s massive benefits system that left residents unable to collect SNAP benefits and health insurance,³ and the shutdown of Canada’s payroll system.⁴

People’s trust in government depends on the ability of government to successfully meet their needs. Every failure chips away at the belief that government is there to serve the people. While these appear to be tech failures, those on the inside also see them as people and process failures. As Beth Noveck puts it, “We risk increasing people's frustration with government and their apathy with democracy if we don't focus first on the finding of problems more than we do on the technology.”