This article is written by Honey Dacanay, Professor of Practice, Master of Public Policy Program, McMaster University. Visit Honey’s Twitter feed here.

For as long as I have known her, Jennifer Pahlka has championed delivery-driven government. She has done so as former Deputy Chief Technology Officer under the Obama administration, where she helped create the United States Digital Service, and as founder of Code for America and the US Digital Response.

Jen’s book ‘Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better’ is about the ever-widening gap between policy and delivery. In Jen’s view, government in a digital age is about a fundamental shift in how the machinery of government functions: policy, delivery and evaluation considered concurrently by multidisciplinary teams of public servants, rather than consecutively and papered over from one team to the next.

In other words, government is failing in the digital age because that shift has never happened. The “policy elites” do not concern themselves with delivery or matters that are “operational in nature”. The result of this gap can be frustrating at best, catastrophic at worst, as government programmes and services continue to deteriorate and never live up to their original policy intentions.

But Jen goes beyond articulating this urgent problem very well. She also outlines what it takes to actually do delivery-driven government:

1. Saying “the website is not what we do” is no longer an option

Jen heard this phrase many times at the White House, echoing the experience of many digital government teams. Jen clarifies that when people say this, they really mean that “the core of their work [in government] is policy” and that everything else is an implementation problem. But this attitude is partially to blame for some of government’s biggest problems. Government is judged on how it delivers and, with the advent of the internet, the website IS what it does.

To put it another way, government needs to wake up to the fact that because we are living at a time when the Internet exists, we are what could be described as “3 am government”. Whether we work in policy or delivery, we have an opportunity and an obligation to catch up not with technology trends, but with people's needs and expectations.

2. The business of government in a digital age requires different levers

Government modernisation initiatives have been underway for a few decades now, as Jen notes, to the point that when Covid-19 struck and the world went into lockdown, the results of those efforts should have been easy to see in action. And yet many governments struggled to deliver basic services at the speed of need, and continue to struggle today, when people have come to expect technology-enabled services.

Whenever government fails to deliver basic technology-enabled services, its typical remedy is to engage Treasury Board levers: more money for technology investments; more committees to oversee projects; more rules and approvals processes for internal teams or vendors.

It’s to this approach that Jen proposes different levers: investment in a skilled public service; fit-for-purpose governance and policies; explicit support for empowered, multidisciplinary teams that work together in lockstep, from policy to implementation and iteration. Jen has written about this before in one of my favourite blog posts of all time, but this book gets at these levers more incisively. Creating enabling conditions for services to work as intended is the most urgent task ahead of us.

3. Cultivating organisational agility by adopting digital-era practices

Organisational agility is about an organisation's ability to sense, respond and adapt to changing circumstances. It’s an organisational quality that needs to be cultivated as a way of being so that it could deliver at the speed of need at a time of crisis. The quickest path to develop agility in government is through sustained investment in digital capabilities at all levels.

But Jen goes beyond talking about recruitment and a robust skills strategy, and also exposes the systematic disempowerment that many public servants face every day, especially those who have the remit to implement or “get the intent of the policy done”. To illustrate, Jen points out that one telltale sign that a team is not empowered to work differently or fix a service for people is the way that it uses data: unempowered teams will use data to react to circumstances after the fact, rather than using it to course-correct or steer. This small detail points to the much harder work that needs to happen in the operation of public administration: setting up the right incentives, going in to fix the organisational design, and not shying away from “machinery of government” problems.

This harder work, going well beyond “policy change alone to cure what ails the nation,” is what Jen is asking urgently of all public servants everywhere: of politicians who are not interested in the business of public administration; of teachers of public policy and public administration; and of students preparing to be tomorrow’s generation of public service leaders. My sincere hope is that all of them will read this book and take the necessary steps to meet this urgent moment of need.

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