Can Google Fix the Government?
Are innovation labs a passing government fad or the path to real change?
In an era of start-ups and agile development, the creation of a massive Homeland Security Department seems a bit at odds with the general direction of things. While the Department can certainly claim some success, it continues to be plagued by low employee morale and innovation ratings.
Defenders say the Department is still in its infancy and just needs more time to work out processes. But in this era of quickly emerging and shifting threats, can we tolerate an organization that needs 15 years to not fully get its act together?
Autonomous vehicles and space flight are easy….
Well here comes Google with the Google Government Innovation Lab. In April, Google announced the launch of its Government Innovation Lab with spots for six jurisdictions in 2015. James Waterman, Google’s regional manager for state and local government, announced that Google will provide state and local government officials access to Google’s suite of enterprise apps, developers and experts. “Each leadership team gets to pick five hard pressing challenges and in a Google-like way, we come together and we bring this kind of 10X, moonshot-type of thinking approach,” Waterman said. California’s Alameda and Kern counties are the first two governments chosen for the Innovation Lab. While the announcement focused on free spots for state and local jurisdictions, the Lab is also expected to be accessible to the Federal government.
The Google Innovation Lab experience is organized around a series of in-person meetings over a six-week period to instill innovation-related concepts and practices. The government team will then focus on describing the problem space that the Google team will build a prototype around over a 90-day period.
The Federal Government embraced the innovation lab movement prior to Google’s announcement. One of the first publicized efforts, the Office of Personnel Management’s Innovation Lab, opened in 2012. While the Government Accountability Office seemed a bit skeptical in its 2014 report of the OPM effort, recent coverage of the OPM lab points to more tangible efforts underway centered on the government hiring system. The organization also agreed with GAO’s recommendations to focus on evaluation measures to gauge impact.
Innovation Labs — all the cool kids have one…
Other Federal organizations embracing the Innovation Lab movement include the US Census Bureau, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, and NASA. US Agency for International Development (USAID) launched their Global Development Lab in 2014 under the leadership of former Google engineer and State Department adviser Ann Mei Cheng. And just this week, we learned of a new DHS Procurement Innovation Lab with the goal of streamlining and shortening the DHS procurement process.
In addition to the innovation lab movement, the US Digital Service was introduced to government. According to the White House website, the initiative was brought about after the challenges experienced with Healthcare.gov. Citizens now have an expectation of an Amazon or Google interface when they interface with the government. The US Digital Service is comprised of small groups that work with public servants to improve key government services. The Department of Veterans Affairs is a current focus. The 2016 President’s budget included funding to introduce digital service teams to all Departments and Agencies. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith (also a former Google executive) said her team is working to ensure recent initiatives such as the US Digital Service and 18F last beyond the current administration. The inclusion of metrics at the beginning of each project may help convey success and ensure a future for the program.
We all want to see significant progress against pressing challenges to include cyber security, disaster response, and terrorism as well as basic government services. And we all want to see progress quickly and cheaply. However, the same practices that can make government such a dinosaur have been built over time to ensure accountability, transparency, and information security. It will be a balancing act and culture shift to encourage innovative solutions while ensuring they are sustainable and don’t inadvertently introduce new problems.
It’s all about the people
At the end of the day, it is individual creativity and perseverance that build better programs and systems, whether those individuals work for Google or for the government. Based on her Silicon Valley experience, USAID’s Innovation Lab leader Cheng describes innovation as, “A lot of…just brute force, experimentation, trying different approaches, testing to see what works, taking risks and accepting failure, and coming up with what is the most effective where there can be huge improvements.”
Before we write-off innovation labs as yet another fad, let’s give full support to OPM’s Innovation Lab as it tackles civil service hiring in order to recruit the diversity of skills and experience needed to improve government. At the heart of innovation are people. Applying innovation principles to how we recruit and retain strong talent is a great starting point.
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