I do not understand the jubilation over the establishment of an investment fund to help startups work with the government. Tim O'Reilly is very excited:
I'm also thinking of past and present Code for America partners at the city level. Jascha Franklin Hodge in Boston, Teresa Reno Webber in Louisville, Beth Niblock in Detroit, and Rick Cole, Peter Marx, and Abhi Nemani in LA all come to mind. There are so many people in government who are hungry for new ways of doing things. They went into public service to make a difference, and they want help from private sector partners who are working with 21st century technology and business models.
The outside game has largely consisted of nonprofits like Code for America and Datakind, but now increasingly we are seeing commercial companies who are bringing new ways of thinking to government projects. Venture capital adds welcome fuel to the mix.
That is wrong.
I have said this before, but the problem with government is not that it is too unlike private industry but that it has abdicated core responsibilities to private industry.
The government does not need a sense of Silicon Valley disruption. It needs to stop the fetishization of private industry and take back control of core functions. Constituent service, otherwise known as customer service, is the core of government. Governments are how we collectively build the society we want and how we ensure that our collective priorities are achieved. You cannot do any of that without providing great customer service, and you cannot provide great customer service, in this day and age, without great IT. And you cannot have great IT if you outsource it.
Quoting myself (because I am humble like that):
What this means in practice is that the IT management loses control of the IT outcomes. The people providing the service are not responsible to the IT management. Rather, they are responsible to their management, which care only about the SLAs. This is often compounded by the limited penalties for failure and the constant, ongoing negotiations about what an SLA “means” between the provider and senior management of the customer. Instead of having a tam dedicated to the success of your enterprise, you have a team dedicated to the success of the contract as measured by what their management says the SLAs mean. Instead of people working toward success, you have people working toward a line in a contract. This is made even worse when there are multiple vendors responsible for different systems or even aspects of the same system, as was apparently the case with Healthcare.gov. Integration of systems can be a difficult process in the best of circumstances; it approaches impossible when the various systems are owned by different companies driven by contracts that have very clear and defined SLAs and acceptance conditions — terms that very often have nothing to do with making the whole of the enterprise work effectively.
You cannot trust critical IT functions to outsourcer and expect them to be world class. No matter how good the people you hire, the very nature of the process defeats them.
And we haven't even discussed the very obvious point that government, unlike for profit businesses, is for everyone. Governments should, not that they always do, provide services to all on an equal basis. For private companies, providing a service is and has to be contingent on their ability to make money on the transaction. That is fine when I am buying a book or deciding on a car. It is not fine when I am trying to get deal with a ticket or find out about tutoring for my kids or trying to get help for a sick, elderly relative In other words, most of the stuff that government does is important, too important to be left to the tender mercies of the profit making set. We cannot afford to have it segregated by cost, and we cannot afford ot have profit making entities work to monopolize particular functions so as to protect their cash cows. We don't need more cable companies.
I love Code For America and wish I could participant with them. I love the idea of, for example, people taking government data and making it useful in unexpected ways or to under-served audiences. I applaud anything that can make government better at serving its citizens. But I do not want a government that pretends more "disruptive" outsourcing firms is the solution to its outsourcing caused problems. And I certainly do not applaud a system designed to encourage government of the profit, by the profit and for the profit.