Open letter to the Mayor of Johannesburg
Turn city bureaucracy into a digital platform for growth with salesforce.com
Mr. Mayor,
You found success as a travelling salesman in the 80’s and may I humbly suggest you play to those strengths as Mayor. Congratulations on a remarkable journey. I was impressed with your predecessor too; so I appreciate your comments about a joint mandate, the voters want our leaders to work together.
You hope to double projected growth and halve unemployment …I suggest to do that brush up your sales skills and leapfrog Johannesburg into the age of digital government.(* For those who don’t know Mr Mashaba here’s a perspective from Canada, of all places, his inaugural speech and his biography, Black Like Me.)
The scholars and the economists alike are going to tell you your goals are unlikely. But trust your salesman’s gut that Johannesburg can do better. Tighter management, better products, more information about your market and you can turn around any company right? That is the message of your biography and I think you can do the same thing in the City.
Growth and employment are a product of a city’s collective efforts; people like yourself in 1980 beating the pavements to make a life. It seems self evident but the research shows again and again how cities that invest in their people (Job training, childcare, community organizing etc.) and their places (Transport, schools etc.) grow. So growth takes endless planning and doing of the highest quality. Johannesburg grew from nothing into one of the world’s most influential urban areas in less then 100 years. Entrepreneurs came, and are still coming, from all over the world. This was kick started as Johannesburg produced over 60% of all the world’s gold. The gold is long gone and as the world transitions to a services economy Johannesburg has evolved into the services capital of Africa. This means skilled and/or connected people generally thrive, but laborers and the disconnected suffer daily. The Johannesburg I love is world’s apart from the brutal experience of so many, Mongane Wally Serote’s words are 45 years old now but no less true or painful…
JHB served it’s white minority and actively suppressing everyone else. The scale and inhumanity of that wasted effort is immeasurable and is everyone’s problem.
The 2016 UN World Cities Report tells us that poverty repeats itself in cities…the townships apartheid planners built in the 70’s are poverty generating machines. Worse still slums have grown across the city; these are townships our people had to build themselves. Some call this ‘social capital’. Mostly we understand it as a resource, we draw on our networks for support and grow together. In slums that network is reversed, everyone is pulled down as resources are so scarce social capital is depleted faster then it can grow a return. How can you pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity when all your energy goes into building your own house, policing your own neighborhood, looking after your own poor and carrying your own water and waste? Oh, and then spending three hours a day and 50% of your income on travelling to work, or to look for work.
In many ways we have wasted the first 20 years of freedom…we have under planned and under delivered. Parks Tau knows all this and was doing good work that I hope will continue. You have spoken about an approach that is at once pro-poor and pro business and acknowledged the perceived contradictions in that. So perhaps even as a libertarian you are aware of the evidence that ditching the RDP for GEAR was a mistake, the wasted years are as much about failed policy and bad global advice as they are about corruption and poor governance. If you encounter resistance please direct people to two recent documents from the very heart of global free market capitalism. The 2015 Inclusive Growth Report, World Economic Forum, and Neo Liberalism: Oversold?, IMF 2016. Both say your approach is not only ethically correct but necessary for sustained growth.
As a student at Harvard myself I wish the designers of GEAR had the information we have now, we could have achieved so much more.
So what does being a salesman have to do with all this? And what is salesforce.com?
The scholarship around growth at a city level boils down to a salesman’s intuition. Money is made in relationships, deals and compromises. And to generate those opportunities you need information, an organised approach and little bit of luck. Growth in a city comes from networks connecting actors across public, private and civil society. The better they are connected and the better their information the better their choices and higher the likelihood of success of new enterprises, innovation, technological advancement and growth. These are the same reasons that poor neighborhoods replicate poverty, their connections are weak or unproductive. A successful city government enhances those networks even as it mines them for information to feed its decisions and learning.
Improving these networks physically takes time. It requires urban infrastructure and improved social and racial relationships through education and institution building. Infrastructure has a long horizon, you can’t make much of a dent in your first term. Similarly social research shows only investment in children under the age of five can stop poverty being transmitted from one generation to the next, so you need twenty years to see a return there.
But the world has new layers now, digital networks between people and institutions. These you can build, test and reshape quickly. You can start building a digital platform for Johannesburg that serves your civil servants and residents. You have the potential to reshape the city for the future even as we live in the concrete prison of an apartheid planner’s pencil.
The city is already playing in this space, it is one of only twenty cities approved to new ISO standards by the World Council for Cities. But that data is hard to access while it could be used by city planners, entrepreneurs and community activists alike in so many ways. Currently every department, from billing to health, manage their own data and systems.
Below are two images that at first glance appear similar but are radically different. In the first a ‘mock’ city department manages four different systems in traditional silos. In the second we imagine an integrated system that removes duplication. I know the city is moving in this direction and it may take years but imagine a scenario where all the data generated in the city is accessible…both for service planning and commercial reasons the city is sitting on an untapped mine of present day gold.
Salesforce.com is the world’s premier Client Relationship Management system, a cloud stored database where you can track clients, learn about what they need and plan how to leverage relationships and make deals. Over the past ten years it has evolved into a platform where thousands of entrepreneurs from around the world develop new applications daily, essentially tweaks to databases that work beyond sales into almost any service from patient management in healthcare to client services for non-profits. Salesforce has moved beyond product into the realm of platform and this why you should think about it for the city of Johannesburg.
While it is privately owned, like Apples’ App. store, anyone can develop products in it. And you can learn how to do it without being able to write computer code. This means as a platform it could meet public financial management requirements, individual projects can still be put out to tender. The city would pay license fees to use the platform but product development costs in salesforce are significantly cheaper then purpose built ones and the city can build it’s own development/ platform management expertise quickly and cheaply. Private firms will be able link up to city information in almost unlimited ways while confidentiality and security standards can be maintained. Non-profits can do the same and they can apply for licenses for free.
The short term benefits will be more integrated management for the city and longer term imagine a city platform where entrepreneurs in Diepsloot can develop the skills and capacity to could compete with multi-nationals. It may seem far fetched but emerging opportunities are unlimited. Software is eating the world, so many of our business and daily practices are now software driven, the world’s biggest companies are software companies. The City of Johannesburg is already partnering with the University of the Witwatersrand on the Tshimologong precint so let us unleash a city wide digital platform for entrepreneurs…
Platforms grow and evolve in the digital space and the danger would be tendering for a vendor to build a giant purpose built platform from scratch. This is not what I am proposing. It would be expensive, slow, and likely fail.
Think of it instead like saying to a fleet of salesman I want you to collect all the information that you use in the field and do it in a way that all the other salesman, and perhaps even other companies, can share. I don’t mind which system you use to collect the information but make sure you put it in a format others can use. Salesforce does not have to be the endgame, technically using salesforce as the platform does not tie the city to always using it. Any newly built system can be scoped in a way that can be exported onto another platform. Existing systems can stay in their current formats but must be tweaked to be accessible from salesforce.
For platforms to work well they must be built simply and allowed to evolve. They must be designed for re-use, not exert too much control and create more value then they harvest (https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/04/gov-20-its-all-about-the-platform/).
Salesforce is ready to go and funding for incremental use will be easy to come by through their own foundation or other donors. Small vendors or computer science students already in Tshimologong could work on such a project. There will be a clamour from other vendors for purpose built systems…reject those for now and start an incremental process in the salesforce environment today…
The danger of power resting with one vendors will be balanced by the diversity of developers that work on the platform and the low start up cost to start exploring…also once you begin you may get some very interesting offers from IBM, Dimension Data, Microsoft and SAP who are investing heavily in Johannesburg already…
Good luck sir,
Let me know if you need any help,
James
(*I have no relationship or vested interest in salesforce.com I present them here as an illustrative example. Microsoft, IBM, Dimension Data, SAP, IS and others can provide similar services but salesforce has the lowest barriers to entry for small businesses to build on the platform. There are city examples where Salesforce is being used in the way proposed but Johannesburg would be evolving something very new and locally relevant.)
