ARCHIVE: ORGANIZATIONAL EXCELLENCE
Technology Empowers Public Sector Collaboration Changes
Keith Langille, Senior Network Manager, Organizational Excellence Winter 2009
New technologies offer very little value to an organization if they simply add to the current workload; the value comes from reorganizing work through the introduction and use of technology, according to Dr. Jerry Mechling of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. At a unique Public Sector Advisory Council meeting—the first of five sponsored by Microsoft Canada and The Conference Board of Canada—the 18 deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers, and chief information officers from three levels of government in attendance readily agreed with this view. Discussion focused on ways to improve horizontal collaboration at similar levels across jurisdictions in the broad public sector. These senior leaders see technology as integral to fostering a culture of collaboration. Although most organizations face similar demographic, fiscal, and technological challenges, the leaders at this meeting feel that many organizations operate in isolation. Some informal collaboration occurs, and organizations are interested in learning from others’ best practices—when they know about them. But collaboration is too infrequent, limited to too few officials, and too random. Some existing interprovincial coordinating mechanisms function well; however, they are limited in scope and many lack coordination. A more comprehensive collaborative effort—such as undertaking pilot projects and sharing results—would reduce the current practice of continuously reinventing the wheel. These top public sector officials see their leadership role changing in this networked world. They feel that the broader public sector needs to recognize that demands for change will likely arise not from any single major event, but rather from pressures or opportunities coming from major partners, clients, or internal organizational functions. Public sector leaders must gain staff and management buy-in for new processes made possible by current and evolving technologies. This engagement is critical if organizations are to achieve superior outcomes with reduced resources. Key Issues to Address To enhance collaboration and improve integration of public sector service delivery, leaders must address a number of issues. - Social Networking and Collaborative Tools: Virtually everyone of the generation now entering the workforce uses social networking tools. Rather than shutting down these tools in the workplace, organizations need to better understand and embrace them. To proactively address privacy and security concerns, organizations can experiment with using social networking tools within pragmatic guidelines that will evolve along with the technologies.
- Governance Frameworks: New governance frameworks based on collaborative networks must be developed and expanded to eliminate traditional vertical and horizontal silos. That is a vexing challenge for most public sector organizations, because accountability structures are entrenched and do little to support collaboration. Organizations need new thinking and mechanisms to transcend these boundaries.
- Innovation Strategy: Just as the private sector is changing at a rapid pace, many approaches and processes that will be part of public sector service delivery in five years have not yet been invented. Public sector leaders indicated that they need to allocate resources to create an organizational culture that is positioned to respond to this future state and to undertake transformational change.
- Common Technology Infrastructure: Instead of proprietary information systems that inhibit collaboration, all levels of government must move toward open standards and interoperability in their information technology architecture.
- Business Process Standardization: Organizations can find efficiencies by reducing the vast number of unique business processes they use to several standard approaches and by selectively increasing the level of information integration. For example, Cisco cut the number of its internal survey processes from more than 50 to just a few, significantly enhancing the speed of their deployment, lowering the cost of their application, and increasing the comparability of their results.
- Talent Management: Organizations must understand the differences among generations in the workforce and integrate these variations into business, technology, and talent management plans. Both enterprise-wide and localized approaches will be required to ensure quality service delivery. Organizations that take innovative action locally to meet specific requirements will fare better than those that always impose an enterprise-wide solution.
As their joint effort to enhance horizontal collaboration in Canada’s public sector continues, Microsoft Canada and the Conference Board will convene four more of these discussion sessions in 2009 and 2010.
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