Part 7: The Future of Governance for Digital Platforms (2018)
[Report] The 2018 State of Digital Transformation
This piece was written by David Eaves and Ben McGuire, HKS MPP 2019
From June 12–13, 2018, digital HKS and Public Digital convened public sector digital services teams from around the world at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Teams and experts from nine nations shared stories of success, talked about lessons learned, and discussed the challenges they face in transforming government.
Across the next few weeks, digital HKS will be sharing the most important takeaways from the convening through our blog — and we will also publish the collected learnings as a physical text later this year. We started with an introduction post explaining the full framework; in this post, we propose a preliminary maturity model for public-sector digital services. Please also consider filling out our survey about this maturity model — and how it maps to your organization.
Introduction
The largest remaining hurdle to successfully reaching the platform digital services North Star is not in technology; the underlying technical structure for shared digital services integration, testing, and continuous deployment are mostly well-understood. In contrast, we have yet to really address a larger social and scale challenge: models for oversight, accountability, and management of shared digital platforms. Early adopters have identified some new benefits as well as risks around governance, and pinpointed best practices of which digital services teams should be aware. But big questions remain ahead for digital service teams as they work out systems of control, access, and management — and begin to tackle the implications of platform services for democratic processes and the organization of government.
Governance Lessons from the Field
Platforms change the nature of new service investments, which helps agencies be faster and more user-centered, and also makes it easier to sunset programs that are no longer necessary. At the same time, putting cross-government services on shared platforms also changes the nature of risk. A single point of failure concentrates all political risk on the platform manager, and also raises the impact of a cybersecurity breach or attack which could immobilize services across the government.
The benefits of platforms derive mainly from their ability to more quickly and easily build and iterate services that meet the needs of users. By creating a shared digital infrastructure that all agencies can leverage rather than having departments constantly build from scratch, a platform approach can dramatically reduce software spending and maintenance costs (e.g., it could be cheaper to develop security protections once for a platform than deal with myriad department-level approaches). But reduced cost and time to build means that platform services also change the incentives for creating and sunsetting programs. New tools can be designed and rolled out much faster, slowly changing the orientation of agencies to be more user-focused. Thanks to a common payments platform in the United Kingdom, creating a new service to collect consumer payments takes just a few minutes — doing the same job five years ago might have taken weeks. At the same time, services that are spun up faster are also easier to sunset, because they don’t involve the same investments of time, energy, and people. In Estonia, the digital services team is finding that conversations about turning services off and reform are getting much easier and productive, because agencies are less worried about making up sunk cost investments.
New risks accompany these new benefits. If the value of consolidation and a shared-service infrastructure is efficiency, the process also creates a single point of failure for all kinds of programs and agencies across government. Whichever team is responsible for managing the platform now bears all of the political risk for disruptions to services which could affect millions of citizens. The political consequences from the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov in the United States would pale in comparison to what would happen from downtime in a platform that supports services across a nation. There is also potentially higher danger associated with a cyber security incident that affects a platform shared across many departments. Platforms might contain many types of sensitive data about citizens, making the platform itself a tantalizing target. In addition, a disruption to the platform will also be very costly for government, making security investments a priority.
We’re still in the early days of platform government digital services, but early adopters can share some advice on governance from their successes as well as mistakes.
Make It Easy for Departments to Use
One of the most important lessons that teams in the UK during the development of notification and payments platform services was that in order to get other groups interested in using a shared service, it had to be extremely easy for them to use. In the payments platform, spinning up a new government url with a payment link takes less than five minutes with the appropriate authorizations — which means that getting payments through the platform will almost always be faster and easier than building or buying a department-specific tool.
Become A ‘Sales’ Organization
Once a platform exists, scalability will remain only theoretical until departments are willing to link up — and that means digital teams need to develop a competency in ‘sales’ to drive adoption. Leadership in Estonia and the UK have had to re-orient their departments to identify teams that might benefit (i.e., through lower costs or improved outcomes) from switching over to new platform tools. They then proactively go out to meet with those units, explain the services that exist, and pitch the benefits. Most departments will see little upside in changing the way they operate without active explanation and translation — and digital teams will need to develop sales skills to move those conversations forward.
Work Toward Resilience and Sustainability
Great digital services teams which are successful in building platform services launched their work with a focus on sustainability and long-term staying power. When hardware and software refresh dates were identified in other departments, they looked for opportunities to shift projects to a shared platform service. New fiscal years and agency leadership turnovers became chances to codify platform migration as a shared goal and priority for the next chunk of time. In Estonia, digital leaders also have fought to move platform software out of the capital expenditure budget (where investments can be subject to political headwinds or changing budget priorities) into the operating expenditure budget (where perennial spending and critical functions are housed). The capital-to-operating budget shift helps to demonstrate the importance of platform tools for other stakeholders — and also makes that spending much harder to kill for political convenience.
Four Hurdles in the Future of Platform Governance
Teams were excited to share these lessons, but stressed that there’s still a lot that they have to learn. For example, one of the biggest challenges facing platform tools is what to do about cross-border and international data sharing. All of the struggles over data management, formatting, and technology that happen inside a country’s borders are replicated at huge scale when two nations need to be able to integrate information.
More importantly, we’re still coming to terms with how to make sure that platform services remain responsive to democratic processes. Incorporating user-centeredness helps ensure that citizens are constantly considered as part of service development, but who should own and manage platforms — as well as rules about access and control — are still open questions. The first nation to truly embrace and invest in platform digital governance will have a huge opportunity to deliver services at scale, cheaply. The challenge has four key components:
The future may break the social contract between government and citizens: At the moment in the Western world, many people are comfortable sharing with government on the implicit understanding that government is too legally restricted, organizationally siloed, or inefficient to link data together to learn about them. What happens when government services can efficiently link data across agencies is anyone’s guess. If security services can get access to healthcare records and track down undocumented immigrants in the hospital, will marginalized populations still be willing to participate in life-saving services?
Whoever controls the servers will control the government: Agencies that own core APIs for cross-government services may be able to control access to tools and microservices. If one agency (or one central leader) didn’t like how an agency was carrying out its mission, might it be possible to deny access and arbitrarily control the shape of future development?
Whoever owns services shapes the future: Bureaucrats that sit atop canonical servers and services will set policy — controlling the guidelines for product roadmaps, integration, and allowable features. Those who build the system will have the ability to constrain the actions and opportunities of all who come after them.
Which services and datasets should be shared?: Aadhaar services in India can authenticate phone and banking services, which simplifies things for consumers and companies but also hands a lot of control to government. Those who push for efficiency and shared services today might worry if the balance of power shifts to a set of actors that don’t share their approach to governance.
The question we face is how to build new public works matched to the problems and opportunities of the 21st century. It requires new governance models, lots of public buy-in, and a new commitment to responsible use of shared digital platforms that we haven’t yet begun to tackle.
