First-order syndrome - shorterm vs. effectiveness
Demand-driven or Command & Control?
We can create exactly the kind of digital systems & processes, we want - they are 100% designed with no "human" unpredictable aspect. And here lies the problem - people can adabt, systems cannot.
The design-to-adabt obligation mean that we ourselves are responsible for designing, how systems change, upgrade, adabt and improve according to the individual needs.
In other words how innovation & individual value per sustainable ressource constantly improve in the public sector.
And here is the problem - a problem that is essentially scaling the core Command & Control Economics problem:
An ICT project may believe to make a small improvement (e.g. "automate" a manuel process) but when did you see a public sector ICT project plan with constant change and change in many parallel directions simultanously to cover different & increasingly more individualised needs?
What we get is "First-order syndrome" - the shortterm investement for a claimed benefit that create legacy and make further innovation more difficuelt, more costly and the entire system gets less and less effective over time.
Even worse when we consider Public Sector infrastructure/ICT Architecture projects that affects a lot of ICT projects & services.
Small mistakes, bottlenecks or weaknesses scale exponentially - especially if these infrastrcuture/middelware projects require follow investments that bind various ICT systems more and more to eachother.
Digital Public Services are presently approached as 100% central control with a surface of "citizen co-creation" mainly as "outsourcing" of some data-entry tasks, but no fundamental change as to the pre-internet "mainframe" paradigme.
Now cross-border public sector infrastructure scale this problem exponentially by interlinking national public sectors to this kind of thinking.
Whereas there is not doubt that we both have to define clear security & other validation requirements for public service transactions, but here is nothing that say that this structure has to be or will benefit from central interlinkage and control of everything.
On the contrary - the almost deterministic outcome of present thinking is a public sector becomming less and less effective and more and more costly to operate.
This is not sustainable. We cannot have a public sector that gradually drain more and more ressources for less and less value undermining overall competitiveness.
I have elsewhere raised the suggestion that true Citizens Empowerment means real process isolation for the sake of demand-driven innovation. The effective way to ensure this is through the identity identity , ie. eliminate shared identifiers. The purpose is effectively to provide a solution to the Command & Control problem.
We talk about a gradual shift to loosely coupled systems components that gets integrated & combined from demand-side instead of buiding legacy from central command & control.
In the Research Project HYDRA, we did a lot of the basic work on creating inclusive middleware for model-driven and onthology-supported dynamic resolution.
This could act as a motor for an alternative approach but the problem is that the mainfraime thinking is an exlusive and non-interoperable paradigm.
Citizen Empowerment will have a lot of other aspects in terms of e.g. solving the cloud problem but also - as there can be no backdoors - requiring new solutions as to how to do e.g. research.
Similar it will creat new oppurtunities for true ICT value creation not just focussed on sales and targetting through Central Command & Control-style analysis of Big Data.
If citizens have all data available and only the citizen herself can combine non-realted contexts - a question is which tools do citizens need as many will not be willing or able to "manage" this personally.
There have to be a lot of built-in "automation" if that with poroper open interfaces will create massive innovation.
This stired what I experienced as a massive resistance to change claiming all sorts of motives and fears on my behalf.
My fear is very simple - the unavoidable pressure of globalization affect all aspects of society - unless the public sector pick up innovation speed significantly and exponentially, European ruin is almost deterministic.
The only alternative is "Greek solutions" with massive cut-backs which will just create another form of meltdown.
So - to those that see e.g. Stork and the Central Command & Control paradigme it represents - I ask the same question, I tried to resolve. How do you move beyond rethoric of "trust" and exponentially create real value ?
Group audience:
Comments
Hi,
Hi,
N.B. Orginal thread here. http://daa.ec.europa.eu/content/more-eu-action-enable-citizens-co-creati...
Thought I should let things settle down after the talk fest as everyone gets a bit exhausted "getting terribly excited" rushing from one to the other. I try to attend as many of these F2F's virtually, just to see how many times the same words are repeated. As yu say "Citizen Empowerment will have a lot of other aspects in terms of ... requiring new solutions as to how to do (something) e.g. research. This might be a nice place to start, especially as Paul was hinting at, with the 'prediction (of) market' approach, "I guess a condition is to have a wide stakeholder participation". Our EC friends have quite a challenge.
One of the problems with ALL research at the moment is that we do have so many of these talk fests going on. PLUs invite PLUs (People like us) to F2F meets, and those who are good at giving the 60 sec sound bites get the attention. As for the (so called) social media, it never really gains legs because "broadcast and be damned" is the old media formula. This has reached an inflection point in the research world, where the authors of white papers are boycotting the old publishers. You can see my interest in many of the the things you express, like the over-managerialism which is rife in our VERY efficient institutions. I'm just approaching the change from the perspective of an old media buff watching broadcast and interactive come together.
We needn't go into the talk about the fact that the public sector "endgame" is upon us. That's so perfectly obvious blind freddy can see it, especially now Spain has joined the National sovereign's soup kitchen's queue.
So firstly, help me out. You're writing onthology a lot and it isn't in my vocab. The closet I get is this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology We talking about this or something else?
There are a bunch of other comparisons i could make to the short-term vs. effectiveness. (Treat the) symptom vs. disease being the most obvious. I just don't see the command-and control though. That only works when people take responsibility for something, and no one does that in the EC. They're called "staff".
So let's have a quiet chat to talk a few things through. It's hard work with this platform, especially as I can't point some of my foreign correspondents directly at a reply. But have the same bitch at most .gov forums. Seems like they think they are in the business of government rather than just trying to share a learning.
As to Command & Control
As to Command & Control ineffectiveness - a public sector employee cannot evalute value on behalf of a citizen more than a waiter can decide what you would like to eat. He can recommend, advice and follow rules - but none of these amount to value optimzation.
It is not the same as public sector employees being lazy/unproductive (another question and easily turning ideologic which is not my intention - on the contrary).
You can be very busy and feeling very stressed but doing the wrong things wrong creating only little or even negative value - if the system works against you as it has no meassure of value.
If the economic systems cannot tell you otherwise, you might even think you do good or that even a well-intended change is for the better even though the opposite is true (E.g. Digital by Default used to introduce unflexible monopolization instead of enabling change & empowered free choice).
Agree, I doubt that we will solve or even define problems further in this forum. Both due to the forum and due to the complextity and interrelatedness of issues. Progress require F2F and further carefull analysis & planning. Getting the public sector up to speed and re-gainning the lost competitiveness in the private sector is a monumental task - strong empowerment is mainly about eliminating barriers, we still have to come up with good solutions and each strive to be the best we can at what we do.
Ontology - correct. As the means for data-driven global or local semantical understanding dynamically across different ICT systems. Not logical bottlenecks like Stork or e.g. X-roads as in Estonia where citizens are reduced to managed targets instead of effectiveness drivers as in Empowerment.