Tag: public sector

Governance and Service Delivery: Practical Applications of Social Accountability Across Sectors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Derick W. Brinkerhoff, Jana C. Hertz, and Anna Wetterberg: “…Historically, donors and academics have sought to clarify what makes sectoral projects effective and sustainable contributors to development. Among the key factors identified have been (1) the role and capabilities of the state and (2) the relationships between the state and citizens, phenomena often lumped together under the broad rubric of “governance.” Given the importance of a functioning state and positive interactions with citizens, donors have treated governance as a sector in its own right, with projects ranging from public sector management reform, to civil society strengthening, to democratization (Brinkerhoff, 2008). The link between governance and sectoral service delivery was highlighted in the World Bank’s 2004 World Development Report, which focused on accountability structures and processes (World Bank, 2004).

Since then, sectoral specialists’ awareness that governance interventions can contribute to service delivery improvements has increased substantially, and there is growing recognition that both technical and governance elements are necessary facets of strengthening public services. However, expanded awareness has not reliably translated into effective integration of governance into sectoral programs and projects in, for example, health, education, water, agriculture, or community development. The bureaucratic realities of donor programming offer a partial explanation…. Beyond bureaucratic barriers, though, lie ongoing gaps in practical knowledge of how best to combine attention to governance with sector-specific technical investments. What interventions make sense, and what results can reasonably be expected? What conditions support or limit both improved governance and better service delivery? How can citizens interact with public officials and service providers to express their needs, improve services, and increase responsiveness? Various models and compilations of best practices have been developed, but debates remain, and answers to these questions are far from settled. This volume investigates these questions and contributes to building understanding that will enhance both knowledge and practice. In this book, we examine six recent projects, funded mostly by the United States Agency for International Development and implemented by RTI International, that pursued several different paths to engaging citizens, public officials, and service providers on issues related to accountability and sectoral services…(More)”

Talent Gap Is a Main Roadblock as Agencies Eye Emerging Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Theo Douglas in GovTech: “U.S. public service agencies are closely eyeing emerging technologies, chiefly advanced analytics and predictive modeling, according to a new report from Accenture, but like their counterparts globally they must address talent and complexity issues before adoption rates will rise.

The report, Emerging Technologies in Public Service, compiled a nine-nation survey of IT officials across all levels of government in policing and justice, health and social services, revenue, border services, pension/Social Security and administration, and was released earlier this week.

It revealed a deep interest in emerging tech from the public sector, finding 70 percent of agencies are evaluating their potential — but a much lower adoption level, with just 25 percent going beyond piloting to implementation….

The revenue and tax industries have been early adopters of advanced analytics and predictive modeling, he said, while biometrics and video analytics are resonating with police agencies.

In Australia, the tax office found using voiceprint technology could save 75,000 work hours annually.

Closer to home, Utah Chief Technology Officer Dave Fletcher told Accenture that consolidating data centers into a virtualized infrastructure improved speed and flexibility, so some processes that once took weeks or months can now happen in minutes or hours.

Nationally, 70 percent of agencies have either piloted or implemented an advanced analytics or predictive modeling program. Biometrics and identity analytics were the next most popular technologies, with 29 percent piloting or implementing, followed by machine learning at 22 percent.

Those numbers contrast globally with Australia, where 68 percent of government agencies have charged into piloting and implementing biometric and identity analytics programs; and Germany and Singapore, where 27 percent and 57 percent of agencies respectively have piloted or adopted video analytic programs.

Overall, 78 percent of respondents said they were either underway or had implemented some machine-learning technologies.

The benefits of embracing emerging tech that were identified ranged from finding better ways of working through automation to innovating and developing new services and reducing costs.

Agencies told Accenture their No. 1 objective was increasing customer satisfaction. But 89 percent said they’d expect a return on implementing intelligent technology within two years. Four-fifths, or 80 percent, agreed intelligent tech would improve employees’ job satisfaction….(More).

Embracing Digital Democracy: A Call for Building an Online Civic Commons

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Gastil and Robert C. Richards Jr. in Political Science & Politics (Forthcoming): “Recent advances in online civic engagement tools have created a digital civic space replete with opportunities to craft and critique laws and rules or evaluate candidates, ballot measures, and policy ideas. These civic spaces, however, remain largely disconnected from one another, such that tremendous energy dissipates from each civic portal. Long-term feedback loops also remain rare. We propose addressing these limitations by building an integrative online commons that links together the best existing tools by making them components in a larger “Democracy Machine.” Drawing on gamification principles, this integrative platform would provide incentives for drawing new people into the civic sphere, encouraging more sustained and deliberative engagement, and feedback back to government and citizen alike to improve how the public interfaces with the public sector. After describing this proposed platform, we consider the most challenging problems it faces and how to address them….(More)”

We All Need Help: “Big Data” and the Mismeasure of Public Administration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Stephane Lavertu in Public Administration Review: “Rapid advances in our ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate information are transforming public administration. This “big data” revolution presents opportunities for improving the management of public programs, but it also entails some risks. In addition to potentially magnifying well-known problems with public sector performance management—particularly the problem of goal displacement—the widespread dissemination of administrative data and performance information increasingly enables external political actors to peer into and evaluate the administration of public programs. The latter trend is consequential because external actors may have little sense of the validity of performance metrics and little understanding of the policy priorities they capture. The author illustrates these potential problems using recent research on U.S. primary and secondary education and suggests that public administration scholars could help improve governance in the data-rich future by informing the development and dissemination of organizational report cards that better capture the value that public agencies deliver….(More)”.

Digital Government: Leveraging Innovation to Improve Public Sector Performance and Outcomes for Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Svenja Falk, Andrea Römmele, Andrea and Michael Silverman: “This book focuses on the implementation of digital strategies in the public sectors in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India and Germany. The case studies presented examine different digital projects by looking at their impact as well as their alignment with their national governments’ digital strategies. The contributors assess the current state of digital government, analyze the contribution of digital technologies in achieving outcomes for citizens, discuss ways to measure digitalization and address the question of how governments oversee the legal and regulatory obligations of information technology. The book argues that most countries formulate good strategies for digital government, but do not effectively prescribe and implement corresponding policies and programs. Showing specific programs that deliver results can help policy makers, knowledge specialists and public-sector researchers to develop best practices for future national strategies….(More)”

Service Design Impact Report: Public Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

SDN: “In our study we have identified five different areas that are relevant for service design: policy making, cultural and organizational change, training and capacity building, citizens engagement and digitization.

Service design is taking a role in “policy creation”. Not only does it bring in-depth insights in the needs and constraints of citizens that help to design policies that really work for citizens – it also enables and facilitates processes of co-creation with different stakeholders. Policies are perceived as a piece of design work that is in a constant development and they are made by people for people.

Service design is also taking a role in the process of cultural and organizational change. It collaborates with other experts in this field in order to enable change by reframing the challenges, by engaging stakeholders in development of scenarios of futures that do not yet exist and by prototyping envisioned scenarios. These processes change the role of public servants from experts to partners. It is no longer the public service that is doing something for the citizens but doing it with them.

This new way of thinking and working demands not only a change in mindset, but also in the way of doing things. Service design helps to build these new capacities. Very often it is a combination of teaching and learning by doing, in the process of capacity building small service design projects can be approached that create a sense of what service design can do and how to do it.

In this sentence service design works along with existing practices of citizens engagement and enriches them by the design approach. People are no longer victims of circumstances but creators of environments.

Very often we find that the digitalization of public services is the entrance door for designers. So enabling designers to expand their capacities and showcase how service design does not only polish the bits and bytes but really changes the way we live and work….(Full report)”

Overcoming the Public-Sector Coordination Problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ricardo Hausmann at Project Syndicate: “Public-private cooperation or coordination is receiving considerable attention nowadays. A plethora of centers for the study of business and government relations have been created, and researchers have produced a large literature on the design, analysis, and evaluation of public-private partnerships. Even the World Economic Forum has been transformed into “an international organization for public-private cooperation.”

Of course, private-private coordination has been the essence of economics for the past 250 years. While Adam Smith started us on the optimistic belief that an invisible hand would take care of most coordination issues, in the intervening period economists discovered all sorts of market failures, informational imperfections, and incentive problems, which have given rise to rules, regulations, and other forms of government and societal intervention. This year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was granted to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their contribution to understanding contracts, a fundamental device for private-private coordination.

But much less attention has been devoted to public-public coordination. This is surprising, because anyone who has worked in government knows that coordinating the public and private sectors to address a particular issue, while often complicated, is a cakewalk compared to the problem of herding the cats that constitute the panoply of government agencies.

The reason for this difficulty is the other side of Smith’s invisible hand. In the private sector, the market mechanism provides the elements of a self-organizing system, thanks to three interconnected structures: the price system, the profit motive, and capital markets. In the public sector, this mechanism is either non-existent or significantly different and less efficient.

The price system is a decentralized information system that reveals people’s willingness to buy or sell and the wisdom of buying some inputs in order to produce a certain output at the going market price. The profit motive provides an incentive system to respond to the information that prices contain. And capital markets mobilize resources for activities that are expected to be profitable; those that adequately respond to prices.

By contrast, most public services have no prices, there is not supposed to be a profit motive in their provision, and capital markets are not supposed to choose what to fund: the money funds whatever is in the budget.

…addressing most problems in government involves multiple agencies….

One solution is to create a market-like mechanism within the government. The idea is to assign a portion of the budget, say 3-5%, to a central pool of funds to be requested by one ministry but to be executed by another, as if one was buying services from the other. These resources would allow the demand for public goods to permeate the allocation of budgetary resources across ministries….

The central pool of resources is designed to increase the responsiveness of one ministry’s back end to the demands of society as identified by another ministry’s front end, without these resources competing with the priorities that each ministry has for its “own” budget.

By allocating a small proportion of each year’s budget to priorities identified in this way, we may find that, over time, budgets become more responsive and better reflect society’s evolving needs. And public-private coordination may flourish once the public-public bottlenecks are removed….(More)”

Public Administration: A Very Short Introduction

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stella Z. Theodoulou and Ravi K. Roy: “In a modern democratic nation, everyday life is shaped by the decisions of those who manage and administer public policies. This Very Short Introduction provides a practical insight into the development and delivery of the decisions that shape how individuals, and society as a whole, live and interact.

  • Covers all areas of public administration, including public safety, social welfare, public transport and state provided education
  • Offers a global perspective, drawing on real case studies taken from a wide array of countries
  • Considers the issues and challenges which confront the public sector worldwide….(More)”

Data Ethics: Investing Wisely in Data at Scale

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by David Robinson & Miranda Bogen prepared for the MacArthur and Ford Foundations: ““Data at scale” — digital information collected, stored and used in ways that are newly feasible — opens new avenues for philanthropic investment. At the same time, projects that leverage data at scale create new risks that are not addressed by existing regulatory, legal and best practice frameworks. Data-oriented projects funded by major foundations are a natural proving ground for the ethical principles and controls that should guide the ethical treatment of data in the social sector and beyond.

This project is an initial effort to map the ways that data at scale may pose risks to philanthropic priorities and beneficiaries, for grantmakers at major foundations, and draws from desk research and unstructured interviews with key individuals involved in the grantmaking enterprise at major U.S. foundations. The resulting report was prepared at the joint request of the MacArthur and Ford Foundations.

Grantmakers are exploring data at scale, but currently have poor visibility into its benefits and risks. Rapid technological change, the scarcity of data science expertise, limited training and resources, and a lack of clear guideposts around emergent risks all contribute to this problem.

Funders have important opportunities to invest in, learn from, and innovate around data-intensive projects, in concert with their grantees. Grantmakers should not treat the new ethical risks of data at scale as a barrier to investment, but these risks also must not become a blind spot that threatens the success and effectiveness of philanthropic projects. Those working with data at scale in the philanthropic context have much to learn: throughout our conversations with stakeholders, we heard consistently that grantmakers and grantees lack baseline knowledge on using data at scale, and many said that they are unsure how to make better informed decisions, both about data’s benefits and about its risks. Existing frameworks address many risks introduced by data-intensive grantmaking, but leave some major gaps. In particular, we found that:

  • Some new data-intensive research projects involve meaningful risk to vulnerable populations, but are not covered by existing human subjects regimes, and lack a structured way to consider these risks. In the philanthropic and public sector, human subject review is not always required and program officers, researchers, and implementers do not yet have a shared standard by which to evaluate ethical implications of using public or existing data, which is often exempt from human subjects review.
  • Social sector projects often depend on data that reflects patterns of bias or discrimination against vulnerable groups, and face a challenge of how to avoid reinforcing existing disparities. Automated decisions can absorb and sanitize bias from input data, and responsibly funding or evaluating statistical models in data-intensive projects increasingly demands advanced mathematical literacy which foundations lack.
  • Both data and the capacity to analyze it are being concentrated in the private sector, which could marginalize academic and civil society actors.Some individuals and organizations have begun to call attention to these issues and create their own trainings, guidelines, and policies — but ad hoc solutions can only accomplish so much.

To address these and other challenges, we’ve identified eight key questions that program staff and grantees need to consider in data-intensive work:

  1. For a given project, what data should be collected, and who should have access to it?
  2. How can projects decide when more data will help — and when it won’t?
  3. How can grantmakers best manage the reputational risk of data-oriented projects that may be at a frontier of social acceptability?
  4. When concerns are recognized with respect to a data-intensive grant, how will those concerns get aired and addressed?
  5. How can funders and grantees gain the insight they need in order to critique other institutions’ use of data at scale?
  6. How can the social sector respond to the unique leverage and power that large technology companies are developing through their accumulation of data and data-related expertise?
  7. How should foundations and nonprofits handle their own data?
  8. How can foundations begin to make the needed long term investments in training and capacity?

Newly emergent ethical issues inherent in using data at scale point to the need for both a broader understanding of the possibilities and challenges of using data in the philanthropic context as well as conscientious treatment of data ethics issues. Major foundations can play a meaningful role in building a broader understanding of these possibilities and challenges, and they can set a positive example in creating space for open and candid reflection on these issues. To those ends, we recommend that funders:…(More)”

Living labs: Implementing open innovation in the public sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mila Gascó in Government Information Quarterly: “Public sector innovation is an important issue in the agenda of policymakers and academics but there is a need for a change of perspective, one that promotes a more open model of innovating, which takes advantage of the possibilities offered by collaboration between citizens, entrepreneurs and civil society as well as of new emerging technologies. Living labs are environments that can support public open innovation processes.

This article makes a practical contribution to understand the role of living labs as intermediaries of public open innovation. The analysis focuses on the dynamics of these innovation intermediaries, their outcomes, and their main challenges. In particular, it adopts a qualitative approach (fourteen semi-structured interviews and one focus group were conducted) in order to analyze two living labs: Citilab in the city of Cornellà and the network of fab athenaeums (public fab labs) in the city of Barcelona, both in Spain. After a thorough analysis of the attributes of these living labs, the article concludes that 1) living labs provide the opportunity for public agencies to meet with private sector organizations and thus function as innovation intermediaries, 2) implementing an open innovation perspective is considered more important than obtaining specific innovation results, and 3) scalability and sustainability are the main problems living labs encounter as open innovation intermediaries….(More)”

Proudly powered by WordPress