Some thoughts on take-aways from presentations by Erik Brynjolfsson (co-author, The Second Machine Age), Venkat Ramaswamy (co-author, The Co-Creation Paradigm), Liam Maxwell (CTO, UK Government) and Simon Wardley (LEF Researcher, Learning from Web 2.0). In essence:
- business and IT worlds are transforming in ways that are driven by the digitization of just about everything, the exponential improvement and accessibility of computing power, and a tsunami of recombinant innovation. The effect is deeply disruptive;
- the consumerization and proliferation of technology has shifted the balance of power between enterprises and individuals in ways that are changing the way business is done, and driving the adoption of new practices in which individual stakeholders co-create value for each other. Increasingly, this has to take place within an Outside-In mindset, where enterprises not only recognize but effectively draw on the capacities that exist outside of their organizations;
- governments like that of the United Kingdom are taking a “Digital By Default” approach that drives citizen adoption by delivering digital services that are “so good, people no longer want to use” non-digital pathways. The effect of this version of co-creation, which focuses obsessively on the question “what does the user need,” has been to visibly demonstrate close to a billion dollars in IT efficiency savings within two years;
- anyone seeking to take advantage of the possibilities opening up in the Second Machine Age and the Co-Creation Paradigm would benefit from the situational awareness afforded by the Mapping techniques developed by the LEF's Simon Wardley. Simply copying your competitors puts your future unnecessarily at risk. Instead, it has become increasingly critical to understand value chains, and to map these value chains into their appropriate categories of maturity. Once the terrain is understood, it becomes clearer how to set objectives that make sense, and design the strategies needed to achieve them.
What could this mean for government clients?
- You live in a new world where other governments are coming to understand that the efficiency of their core services is a global, competitive differentiator. More efficient government, easier-to-deal-with-government, and cheaper government all combine to reduce operational and economic burden on business. Capital, innovation and high value jobs will flow to countries that understand the value of making it easy for business to do business.
- It’s no secret that budget constraints are forcing government agencies to take a long, hard look at how they operate. But government executives will have to overcome the tendency to simply find ways of automating what their agencies have always done, because those methods of operation come from an industrial era in which citizens are seen as the subjects of bureaucratic power, and employees are seen as human “cogs” in a corporate machine. This traditional mentality is often colored by “us versus them”, “management versus employees,” “employees versus customers” frictions that are increasingly at odds with the characteristics of the modern, technologically-empowered individual who prefers to engage at a peer-to-peer level. Next-generation government programs will adapt to the new mentality, and engage their clients or stakeholders as potential co-creators and collaborators in achieving a particular mission. By leveraging the power of the human network — and the connected- and tech-enabled citizen — these programs will simultaneously find ways of improving their delivery of value, while reducing its cost.
- Outside-In and Co-Creation thinking are relevant to the Homeland Security domain. Take the visa, border and immigration domain, as one example. Treating every individual as a potential threat requires an inordinate infrastructure oriented towards “keeping threats out.” Treating every individual as a potential co-creator of visa, border and immigration integrity creates a human network aimed at a positive, shared concern. Inviting individuals to co-create the border experience creates options for the agency to learn more about their customers, and establish a win-win relationship in which transactions become part of a shared history and build trust. Enabling a conversation with those customers — encouraging feedback, suggestions, challenges — allows both customers and the border agency to learn from each other. That’s not to say it’s all about getting along, and singing Kumbaya. There’s no secret in the fact that individuals with undesirable characteristics and histories try to cross the border, and need to be stopped. But the numbers do speak for themselves: on a typical day (in 2013), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) process almost a million (992,210) people at Ports of Entry. Within these numbers… 137 (0.014%) are identified as national security concerns… and 366 are refused admission (0.04%). These are small numbers, proverbial needles in the haystack. The question for border security is whether it would be more or less efficient to target such individuals in a co-creative, digital approach that leverages voluntary exchange of information, contextually appropriate transaction histories, and analytics... and benefits 99.96% of participants by creating a friendly, seamless experience. That question is equally appropriate for the broader homeland security enterprise, which extends across multiple Departments and agencies.
- One way of starting on the path to Outside-In and Co-Creation is to follow the UK government’s example in addressing the inefficiency with which traditional government approaches the question of identifying its clients. Rather than continuing the pattern of having every agency and every program solve the problem of identification for its own purposes, the UK Cabinet Office has catalyzed commercial-sector identity services that can be leveraged by any government program. Having tried and failed with a National ID approach, today’s solution asks individuals to establish their own identity with a third party service, which can then be used to log into government services. That's a move in the right direction.
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