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“FAST” Government (Flatter, Agile, Streamlined, Tech-enabled)

Leading governments throughout the globe are transforming themselves into flatter, agile, streamlined and tech-enabled (“FAST”) organizations. FAST governments develop innovative public services, effectively meet citizens’ needs, care for scarce natural resources and create new public value. FAST does not necessarily mean DRAFT: for discussion speedy, although the timeframe for many decisions may be shortened with the help of collaboration platforms, tools and analytics; nor does FAST mean ignoring the core government values of merit, equity, checks and balances, accountability and jurisdiction. The following provides an outline of FAST government for leaders everywhere. Government must be flatter. Governments become “flatter” in four ways: Citizen engagement. Flattening here means decreasing the distance between government and the people through the use of social media, mobile devices and mapping tools; increasing participation through online deliberation, consultations, surveys and other communication modes; committing to open data that provide citizens and businesses with access to much more public information in easy to use, searchable electronic formats. Administrative efficiency. Flattening here means decreasing layers in hierarchies between top management and line personnel and removing red tape, aided by collaborative work environments, business process redesign and business analytics to foster evidence-based decision-making. Decision-making processes. Flattening of the decision-making process can be accomplished vertically as new data and analytical processes put information where it is needed by policy-makers and others, and horizontally by building collaboration within and across government departments, agencies and ministries. Intergovernmental and cross-sectoral collaboration. Networks that lie across public, private and non-profit sector organizations and across various government entities will be critical in the 21st century to solve complex problems, gain economies of scale and scope, and leverage innovative ideas and best practice.  Government must be agile.  Agility and adaptability are critical to effective and innovative governments. Successful governments are able to organize themselves to marshal public and private resources quickly to address challenges. As important, governments must be able to “de-”organize themselves when specific structures and processes are no longer needed. This requires an agile workforce, made up primarily of highly skilled knowledge workers with broad problem-solving capabilities and armed with real time data and business intelligence – working in teams and networks often with private sector partners. Agility and adaptability include organizational structures and processes, service delivery models, civil servants and others employed in government work and flexibility in regulatory and legal structures Government must be streamlined.  Government in the 21st century will be marked in many countries by reductions in the size of the civil service. Just like diets, in many cases these “crash” workforce reductions only prove successful in the short run if at all. Virtually all governments are reducing staffing levels, most often without any real reduction in service levels. Carefully planned workforce reductions coupled with the significant organizational, technological and workforce advances inherent in FAST governments result in slim and streamlined organizations that can thrive in the new world order. Adaptive governments that share services, labour and resources through networked approaches and Gov 2.0 strategies can remain slim while still delivering on their mission in effective and innovative ways.  DRAFT: for discussion Government must be tech-enabled and tech-savvy.  Governments of the future must be fully tech-enabled with a tech savvy workforce. Policy, legal and regulatory frameworks and processes must be redesigned to align with the dynamics of the networked world. Information infrastructures must support new modes of collaboration, information intensive governance. Even in the poorest areas of the globe, for example, brilliant examples of service innovation have been driven through the use of cheap mobile and wireless technologies. FASTer governments are more likely to attract and retain a new breed of civil servant who thrives on problem-solving, results and innovation.  As governments become FASTer, the next decades of the 21st century will witness a renaissance of government and public service, when the “best and the brightest” seek out public service — whether through government agencies, civil society organizations or businesses working in the civic sector

The Civil Service in the 21st Century

In most countries, the civil service systems of today’s governments require a major overhaul. Current civil service systems are relatively structured, rigid, inward-looking and based on outdated competencies. As stated elsewhere in this brief, governments need to network and collaborate increasingly, be more transparent, more flexible and participatory. A number of measures to align civil service systems to these new characteristics are required. Pressure to decrease the size of some countries’ civil DRAFT: for discussion service should not be confused with the need for modernization as these issues are separate. Updating the legislative framework. In most countries, legislation governing the civil service dates back several decades. Such legislation in most cases does not provide the civil service with the authority or flexibility to share information or to engage with business and the non-profit sector for the co-production of public goods. Reforming organizational structures and processes. Civil servants operate in very pyramidal public organizations and their work is organized in compartmentalized silos. Procedures and practices are cumbersome and inefficient and do not provide scope for initiative and innovation. Structures and procedures need to be simplified and streamlined to provide civil servants with the ability to network among themselves, with other actors and to innovate. The main challenge in this respect is striking a balance between offering flexibility and guaranteeing accountability and integrity, particularly in the areas of financial management and procurement.  Changing organizational culture and civil servants’ mindset. Civil servants learn quite early to work in organizational compartments. Information and knowledge are jealously kept within individual organizational units. Rivalries exist between different agencies vying for recognition and/or funds. In many organizations, initiative and efficiency are frowned upon, particularly among frustrated and disillusioned tenure staff. Management styles are often traditional and either paternalistic or authoritarian. Modernization, therefore, requires special programmes that teach public management and staff to work proactively and collaboratively.  Promoting the sharing of information. “Open government” initiatives should be introduced to promote the sharing of information and increase transparency. The sharing of information and knowledge facilitates the involvement of other actors in the delivery of services and also enables civil servants to take advantage of information resources through “cloud computing”. The creation of common data platforms to be shared among various agencies would facilitate information exchange and sharing among civil servants. Overhauling recruitment, advancement and remuneration systems. Recruitment systems, including examinations and interviews, should be modernized to facilitate the recruitment of staff with new competencies and skills. Selection methods should assess not only knowledge but also attitudes and behaviours. Job descriptions for posts should not be a rigid framework within which management and staff cannot operate with flexibility and initiative. As advancement in the public sector is very often linked to seniority, criteria that reward efficiency, effectiveness and initiative should be given more importance in the promotion of staff. Also, remuneration systems should be able to reward those civil servants who are particularly effective, innovative and engaged. Most civil service systems are fairly rigid when it comes to the ability to exchange staff between the public sector and the business and non-governmental sectors. Governments of the future should draw from all sectors of society, particularly at the managerial level, and should facilitate the movement of human resources from and to the civil service and other sectors.  Modernizing public administration education and training. Public administration schools and institutes offer a strong curriculum in traditional disciplines, such as political science, economics and social sciences, but are extremely behind in developing newly required competencies and behaviours. Their curriculum should DRAFT: for discussion also focus on building competencies in collaboration, networking, public-private partnerships and citizen engagement. Competencies in using social networks and current information infrastructure should be embedded in core curricula. The same can be said for pre-service or in-service training programmes offered by civil service schools or training departments. Major challenges. At a time when civil service systems require a major overhaul, many governments are facing a serious financial crisis and are forced to reduce the costs of the public sector by eliminating programmes and/or freezing recruitment and salaries. Under these circumstances, great creativity and innovation are required to carry out the necessary reforms. Greater efforts must be placed on re-training existing staff, introducing non-monetary incentives and promoting partnerships between the public and other sectors for the delivery of services. Given the complexity of the issues to be addressed, the governments of the future require staff who are highly specialized in various disciplines. At the same time they require staff with flexible skills, able to perform various functions and to move from one position to another during their career. These apparently contradictory requirements need to be reconciled through well-designed and implemented recruitment, rotation and training systems.

Future Government Architecture

The emerging Information Age, which is notable for widespread use of ICT in all spheres of human activity, brought two new trends into the development and functioning of government. One trend is related to improving efficiency and reducing costs in implementing the functions delegated to the government in order to serve the public interest. Another trend is associated with the transition to citizen- and business-oriented state governance when government is primarily regarded as a services supplier to the public, enterprises and civil servants themselves. In this case, the use of ICT not only improves the traditional processes of public administration, but also opens up new opportunities.

However, recent decades have also demonstrated the inefficiency of a large number of e-government projects in several countries. The traditional approach to building e-government based on the use of ICT to support activities of separate government agencies with further integration and interagency interaction has not led to significant changes. The reason is that the traditional functioning of public administration does not put at the centre

the government’s interaction with citizens and citizens’ involvement in decision-making processes. The key to an effective state governance system takes its point of departure from citizens' needs and takes into account their interests at every stage. The metrics of citizen perceptions of services is a powerful toolset for this purpose. Only such strategy for the public administration system, synchronized with the massive use of ICT, can lead to quality improvements that will be used by citizens to produce public value.

An Enterprise Architectural Approach e-Government may be thought of as a complex socio-economic and human-machine system, which has begun to be explored and developed in recent years with the use of the Enterprise Architecture (EA) methodology. This approach encompasses a generalized representation of the subject domain structure and the subsequent formation and use of the principles and guidelines that define the system architecture development management over time. One of the important advantages of this architectural method is the availability of tools that allow a government (or any organization) to synchronize a complex system development strategy with opportunities carried by ICT.

The use of EA methodology allows government decision-makers to overcome the drawbacks associated with traditional approaches to using ICT to improve separate agencies’ activities aimed at performing their functions or providing certain services. An enterprise architecture approach to government development allows public managers to represent the structure of today’s and future e-government as an integral system, with its components and their interconnections, and their relationship to business processes. Based on EA methodology, one can present the fundamental components of e-government, sufficiently detailed so that one can manage their generation and development processes as well as create a set of reference models and tools, which determine a coherent and interrelated development. The main purpose of constructing e-government architecture (e-GA) is to provide opportunities for

more effective enforcement of public authorities’ powers; execution of functions and provision of public services for citizens and businesses through the use of common approaches to the creation of government information systems; and identification of opportunities for shared use of information systems, ICT infrastructure and best practices. Formulating some basic principles, developing guidelines and setting priorities in building e-GA is largely dependent on the set of social and economic specifics and needs because the architectural approach involves the simultaneous development and linking of several levels: business architecture (public administration functions and services), system architecture and technology architecture

.No less important is the consideration of particular aspects of e-GA that pierce the architectural levels, including:

Information and data architecture, which determines the composition of data necessary to support administrative processes

Performance architecture, which characterizes a set of key effectiveness and efficiency indicators of public services execution and provision of services to citizens, businesses and other public authorities, based on ICT)

Information security and confidence architecture, which takes into account the need for adequate protection of information and ensures users’ trust to ICT)

Integration and interoperability architecture, providing electronic interaction between different information systems and taking into account the legal, organizational, semantic and technological compatibility

ICT Infrastructure

.A necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the development of e-government is the availability of accessible ICT infrastructure to overcome the distances and remove restrictions on time for the public services to citizens. Ubiquitous access to ICT infra structure in today’s information society is becoming one of the elements of social justice and social welfare. The digital divide between regions, countries, communities, genders, age groups, etc., starting with the Okinawa Charter on Global Information Society and the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva and Tunis, has been one of the most pressing problems of the new century. Measures taken by many states and international organizations in recent years have been aimed at building a global ICT infrastructure that is needed, i.e. for full-fledged use and development of e-government technologies. There are different ways to develop ICT infrastructure, based on modernization and new ways of using existing telephone and cable television networks. However, the future development is unequivocally associated with the use of fibre -optic networks that allow for more broadband access than traditional cable infrastructures. Rapid development and reduction in cost of mobile new-generation networks have become a trend of recent years and allow their use for broadband data transmission without fixed infrastructure. Mobility has given rise to a qualitative change in the development and use of ICTs; one can observe massive utilization of users’ mobile terminal devices with reliable broadband access to providers’ services and data, including those provided by the government. This trend will be dominant in the coming years and will become a real embodiment of the principle “ICT as commodity”, which cannot fail to influence the current technology of electronic government.

Open Government Data

In the course of its operation, the government collects huge amounts of data necessary both for the functioning of government itself and for the provision of public services. Government data are usually located in isolated information systems of departments and are difficult to access, and often they are simply inaccessible for other agencies. And even more so–for citizens and businesses that have the right to know what their government is doing. It is not only the requirement of “transparency” and “accountability” of the government, but also the possibility to reuse the data, including analysis and presentation in visual form. Data are an important resource for socio-economic development in the information society; so, while opening the public data, the government promotes the development of innovations in business and the development of social entrepreneurship. Finally, the disclosure of government data not only promotes awareness of what the government is occupied with, but also provides opportunities for broad citizens’ participation in decision-making affecting the interests of the society. The projects initiated by the US government and implemented recently to disclose collections of public data in machine-readable format received broad support in other countries. They are aimed at improving government accountability and at providing data that enable the government, country and world to operate more efficiently. Non-governmental initiatives and projects to develop new services based on available public data have become even more important. In fact, real public-private partnerships have emerged where governments provide access to datasets, and representatives from business, civil society and/or academia develop socially significant services on this basis. It is extremely important to use modern ways of presenting data in machine-readable form, primarily based on the Semantic Web principles developed by the W3C, when disclosing government data. This opens up the possibility of repeated use of data for resolving various tasks of public administration in an automated mode to link different datasets with each other, which is especially important in the provision of integrated public services. Disclosure of datasets in machine-readable form occurs in several phases that characterize a level of maturity. At the initial stage, it is simply about the availability of data on the Web, but with an open license for use. The next level encompasses the availability of machine-readable structured data (in an ideal case published in a non-proprietary format). If, in addition to the above, open standards (e.g. from W3C) of data description are used to identify entities, it is believed that this is a higher level of maturity.The highest degree of maturity in data disclosure consists in such (linked to each other) data, which allow description of the context of the subject area. Open government data are also often accompanied by metadata describing the datasets, and catalogued to provide easy search and navigation.