The Other Side of the Counter
When I initially imagined building software for city government, what I was most excited about was the opportunity to build user-centered websites and applications for city residents, and to share and advocate for modern development practices like code review, testing, and automated deployment. I’m still excited about those things, but over the last couple months of working inside the City of Austin, I’ve started to realize that reaching those goals of software quality and sustainability can only ever solve part of a problem, and that improving the way a city uses technology has as much or more to do with improving the city as it does with improving its technology.
On my first day on the job, our Chief Innovation Officer, Kerry O’Connor, talked about “the other side of the counter” — the idea that as citizens, we only see one side of the government “counter.” From that side, it can sometimes look like government is an indifferent and inefficient maze of paperwork and bureaucracy. To a software engineer like me, that seems like a perfect opportunity: how better to reduce paperwork and improve efficiency than through great software? That’s the promise of technology — to fix everything — right?
But since coming over to this side of the counter, I’ve started to recognize that while government has some things in common with other large organizations, it’s also significantly different. A government has to meet needs at a broader and more inclusive level than most private companies, which means that any given service tends to be just one facet of a much larger mandate. From the citizen side of the counter, it looks like the opportunities for improvements are mainly at the individual service counters, and it’s easy to dream up solutions for delivering X or Y service better. But inside the government, it’s clear to me that what happens at the counter can’t be separated from the complexity of what’s happening behind it. Propping up a shiny new website at the counter isn’t going to fix anything, long-term, unless we’ve understood (and solved for) both sides.
If solutioneering seems easy on the citizen side, the truth is that it’s no less tempting on the government side. We see the confusion and difficulty that a resident faces when they need to get a permit to build an addition or even just a shed, and we get excited about building a website that will answer their questions and give them next steps. That’s great — and there’s a way for that website to thrive — but it’s equally important to recognize that we’re looking at one corner of a process that involves a host of separate departments involved with everything from the safety of South by Southwest to building a skyscraper to cutting down a tree. The website we build can’t only make the resident’s life easier — it needs to make life easier for the people who have to think about all that, too.
I think our team is on the right path to get there, and I’m more excited than ever to help do it. It’s both sobering and rousing to begin to appreciate that the users I’m designing for are not only city residents, and not only the developers who will build and maintain the city’s software, but the thousands of other people on this side of the counter, too. The challenge seems larger now, but so does the potential to have a lasting impact.
Interested in helping us? We’re hiring.
