The Field is Siloed

It requires a lot of effort to be connected. Most of our jobs are delivering things for others. But it’s hard to stay connected to each other.

Harlan Weber, Product Lead, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority

Early in this project, we were struck by the number of interviewees who said something like, “I’m so glad you’re doing this. It’s important work, and needed.” We came to understand that practitioners are desperate for a shared understanding of best practices, views into work others have done and want to do, and connection. Most are connected to a few other places or people––typically those they’ve met at conferences or convenings, through Twitter, or via peers or networks––but people lack ways to find places that have tackled similar problems.

The field lacks professional organizational resources––not surprising given how young and undefined it is. Many find themselves in a netherworld, caught between government convenings and private sector conferences, with neither really hitting the mark. Many practitioners noted that they eagerly look forward to the Code for America Summit, but that beyond the summit, opportunities to share with and learn from practitioners engaged in similar work are limited.

A few people told us they had attended existing conferences for city managers, CIOs or others in government in an effort to “find people like me” and had come up short. Practitioners reported that the conferences and professional organizations that dominate government lend themselves to rehashing the same approaches, and a limited understanding of technology, data and human centered design.

Lack of in-person opportunities means that the opportunity for professional development is severely limited. Practitioners who have spent the bulk of their careers in government, or who have been out of the private sector for a long period of time, told us they would like to have an opportunity to learn modern private sector practices without spending tons of money or being talked down to. Unfortunately, they weren’t clear on how to make that happen.

Conferences and professional organizations that dominate government lend themselves to rehashing the same approaches.

The success of New York City’s office hours and San Jose’s Scrum boot camp demonstrate a true hunger for these kinds of resources in government. In the private sector, employees can sign up to attend trainings offered either by their company or by professional development organizations. But government doesn’t have a history of professional development, and government-specific training in this area is limited (or possibly nonexistent; we didn’t hear about a single person who had attended this type of training).

So much of the work in the public interest technology field involves breaking down silos, figuring out how to get person A in one agency to talk to person B in another agency, or taking a holistic view of a process. Yet, the field falls victim to the same silos. We’re too busy to share information, lack an obvious point of connection, a standardized format, or a designated repo for work. In turn, practitioners reported defaulting to things like Googling examples of other places’ work—paradigmatic of inefficiency. (e.g. Google “government” and “innovation” and “blight” and then try to figure out how to connect to practitioners who worked on any given project.)

While it is not as easy to connect over silos without specific programs in place, everyone we talked to reinforced that unlike industry, innovators in different places are not competitive. So perhaps the most frustrating element of the siloing is that cities want to share. They are looking to swap stories, specific solutions, and technologies tried and failed. They want to share for good reason: most cities are working in the exact same areas.

As we conducted our interviews and started doing synthesis sessions, we had a running joke was that everyone we interviewed was, unbeknownst to them, solving the same 10 problems. While 10 was a number we plucked out of the air, the truth is that most cities aren’t working on issues that are unique to that city alone. Government has responsibility for a limited scope of services, and those services replicate in many ways, both across agencies and across cities. At the same time, the challenges of the siloed field means cities and agencies who may spend weeks, months, or even years seeking solutions for a problem without knowing, connecting, or learning from others gone on the same journey.

Understanding where others have succeeded can help government scale its capacity to deliver better services, as well as save time, money, and staff. Equally important is learning where others have failed. Because of endemic fears of public failure and wasting taxpayer dollars, getting government to discuss failure can be even harder than figuring out where someone else has already solved your problem. Not discussing failures can have cascading impacts, as other places with the same problems in turn fail to learn from solutions that other places tried that failed—and try them again.

We are not the first people to recognize the overlap in city problems, but we would like to help push that conversation further. To this end, we’ve broken down the types of problems our research unearthed into two areas. The first are shared thematic problems specific to services government delivers to solve constituents’ problems. We call these “vertical challenges.” The projects people are working across cities and states on can be distilled to a small vertical problem set. While this is not an all-encompassing list, some of them include:

• Child welfare
• Blight/Code enforcement
• Affordable housing
• Infrastructure
• Street homelessness
• Poverty/SNAP
• Permitting
• Public works
• EMS/911/Emergency response
• Criminal justice reform/police/justice-involved citizens

A second set of problems cuts across specific service delivery issues, regardless of department. We have labeled these “horizontal challenges.” They include, but are not limited to:

• Data transfer across departments and agencies
• Procurement
• Moving to the cloud.
• How to structure digital services
• Recruitment and hiring
• When to build in-house vs. find an existing solution
• Effective mail to citizens
• How best to effect culture change
• Design literacy
• Finding good vendors or off-the-shelf solutions
• Online forms