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We Have “Smart Cities” Programs. Why Not “Smart Bureaucracy”?
My company has done projects with the DoD, DHS, Air Force, Veterans Affairs, and the Peace Corps. The tech part of these projects was relatively simple, but navigating the bureaucracy was really painful. We would build websites or apps and be ready to deploy — only to find out that we didn’t have the right signoffs. The turnover was high, the policies unclear, and the communication extremely volatile. I’m not surprised that the vast majority of Federal IT projects fail. When I read about how government websites go down or fail to launch, I’m not surprised at all.
The government is one of the most important institutions in our lives and we simply do not put enough thought as a society into how we can make it more productive. When it comes to government, the discussion often involves making it bigger or smaller, but not about how to make it smarter. When we do talk about making it smarter, much of the discourse involves buzzwords (agile is the big one) or tech (IoT, AI, Cloud, Blockchain). Technologies tend to solve very specific problems but rarely disrupt the entire system and make it more efficient.
Moreover, a lot of the advisers on how to make the government more innovative come from big tech, defense contractors, management consultant, or beltway bandits who have a perverse incentive. They don’t really solve…
