Reduce, reuse, recycle: Improving California’s public sector technology through collaboration
This post is part of a series created by the California Public Technology Roundtable. Read more about the Roundtable, see a list of all participants, and learn more about our first meeting here.
Governments operate with different constraints than the private sector. Unlike businesses, governments can (on most functions) freely collaborate. Governments don’t compete with one another, and often provide services that are very much alike, even though the specifics of service delivery can vary widely. Governor Newsom’s newly proposed Office of Digital Innovation (ODI) can have an important role in promoting collaboration and reducing duplication of effort across California’s thousands of government entities.
For example, governments throughout California have decided that there’s a public benefit to requiring dog owners to license their pets. It provides assurance that dogs are vaccinated against rabies, and can be funding source for animal control functions. But in some parts of the U.S. dogs are licensed at the County level, in some at the municipal level. In some locations the Animal Control department licenses them, in others City Clerks, and some governments outsource licensing functions to local Humane societies. Unfortunately, far too often, governments have developed or purchased standalone systems, with each paying a disproportionately high cost for technology to support this common function — one that could be shared. In some large counties in California, there may be as many as 20 different local systems and methods for licensing dogs.
“Regional and local governments should be incentivized to collaborate and jointly procure technology and services… By aggregating demand and developing standards to meet common needs, California governments can save money while deploying better public technology.”
-California Public Technology Principles (bit.ly/californias_future)
California is the perfect place to show that technology for government can be developed or purchased differently — where the burden of supporting excellent digital services technology is shared across governments, rather than paid for individually by each. In order to work for the real world of government operations, technology for government has to support flexibility and customization at the local level.
The ODI can begin to lead the field in encouraging government organizations to increase efficient reuse of technology. The current system at the State level and across local governments in California, where there is little reuse and repurposing of technology funded by public money results in wasted funds and significant, unnecessary duplication of effort. When every county and municipality has a standalone tech system fulfilling the same functions, we’re wasting precious public resources. And when those systems are wildly divergent, it makes it close to impossible for the State to easily aggregate up information to understand the current state of our communities, and plan effectively for the future.
Many cross-governmental organizations (Councils of Governments, for example) may not be prioritizing knowledge-sharing and reuse around technology. That is slowly changing and organizations like the Southern California Association of Governments (“SCAG”) have shown leadership in prioritizing digital technology through their Future Communities Framework and the Sacramento Council of Governments is exploring collaborative technology for permitting. The ODI could take the lead by convening leaders from across state agencies and local governments to discuss opportunities for collaboration and reuse of existing best-in-class, successful technologies, whether they be developed in-house by governments or as commercial products.
Unfortunately, many incumbent technology companies leverage their resources (lobbying, ability to sponsor mainstream government technology conferences) to discourage this type of knowledge sharing. One of the core challenges in changing how government technology is purchased is to encourage unbiased evaluation of commercially available technology tools, and increase the capacity of government leaders to critically evaluate when it’s best to purchase existing technology, when it makes sense to reuse, adapt, or repurpose an existing technology solution that another government has already created or developed on a commercial platform.
Cooperative procurement can save governments money when they buy common assets like aerial imagery and avoid situations where taxpayers pay multiple times for the same thing. The ODI could serve as a neutral evaluator of technologies for the state, and potentially expand their focus to recommendations for governments at all levels. Building a “peer review” culture for technology projects and products could significantly improve efficiency and outcomes.
One important role for the ODI is to critically assess existing systems, with an understanding that “sunk costs” shouldn’t be the only consideration when contemplating future directions, and with the understanding that there are significant financial and opportunity costs to maintaining existing technology solutions that are outdated, inflexible, and ill-suited to reuse and repurposing.
The growth and power of software as a service (SaaS) applications are helping to create the conditions that can facilitate reuse and repurposing of existing technology, even for governments with limited internal technical capacity. Governments that are too small for in-house IT staff can use new SaaS tools to create digital services without needing to manage local or virtual servers.
Additionally, new regulations that facilitate collaboration and digital services, such as policies that support cloud-hosted data and require machine-readable, open-by-default data can help promote collaboration and reduce the advantage of incumbent, inefficient technology providers. One of the potential roles of the ODI could be to surface, develop, and promote standardized regulatory and statutory language that could be adopted by governments throughout California at all levels. This is consistent with the recommendations put forward by a collaboration of California’s Code for America Brigade leaders in their Public Technology Principles.
Here are three recommended technical options to reduce the amount of duplication of effort and resources between government organizations. The Office of Digital Innovation should support and model each of these:
- Collaborative development
- “Forking” open source projects for local needs
- Using commercial tools that encourage, rather than prevent, shared services
Collaborative development:
Instead of building products alone, government agencies can convene to identify common needs and fund a collaborative development project. Ideally these projects can be built as open source tools to encourage reuse, or created as common platforms that multiple jurisdictions and agencies can access. GetCalFresh is an online data collection/ application tool for food assistance built by Code for America that will soon be available for residents of all counties in the state, The ODI could take the lead on building collaborative tools with other states, and promoting California-driven efforts that involve a combination of open source tools and shared data standards. For example, LA’s Mobility Data Specification has inspired open source tools built by Santa Monica,and Austin TX that are available for any other governments to reuse. GovOps’ Code California is the beginning of the infrastructure for these types of projects and should be supported and expanded.
Open source projects:
For larger governments with in-house IT teams, it’s feasible to “fork” or customize existing open source tools to reduce duplication of effort and increase consistency across jurisdictions. This may be the kind of functional reuse that the Office of Digital Technology can encourage for the appropriate agencies, and promote for local governments across the state. One example of this type of project is the state’s existing Web Standards codebase. It would be great to extend this to digital services tools, and there are projects in the works at the state to “fork” some code originally developed at the federal level. However for many smaller local governments, the capacity to deploy an open source solution just doesn’t exist. At times, public sector nonprofits like Code for America (CfA) can help augment governmental capacity, for example through ClearMyRecord, where CfA is providing a combination of services and technology to multiple counties in the state, with the core elements redeployed for each instance.
Commercial tools that encourage reuse:
Any technology need should be evaluated by staff with significant expertise in technology procurement and development to determine whether custom development is required, or whether an existing, low-cost software as a service (SaaS) product is available to fill the need. Commercial solutions that encourage governments to reuse the work of other governments, like CityGrows, or leverage collaborative purchasing and standardized contracts should be the first choice. As an example, the City of Monrovia developed a Home Security Rebate program on the CityGrows platform. Another local government (the City of Paramount) was able to clone and repurpose Monrovia’s workflow, launching their own digital service for rebates in less than 2 weeks and with no up-front cost for either municipality. (I am completely biased here of course, since
is my startup.)While the Office of Digital Innovation will no doubt have many goals and functions, its ability to promote, facilitate, and celebrate government reuse, repurposing, and sharing of technology across jurisdictions will create cost savings, efficiency, and impact across the state.
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, , as well as , and the many participants in the first Roundtable event.If you’re interested in learning more about future Roundtable events, please complete this form.
