Collaboration: the Governance Challenge
Even if you’re just filing taxes, starting a business, replacing identification, or moving back into the workforce after losing a job, dealing with multiple government departments – all ostensibly there to help you achieve your goal – is often daunting. And moving from simple transactions to a more holistic service approach requires a broader look at the outcomes a government is trying to achieve. Prior to the creation of Service Canada, most government officials believed there were no significant barriers to providing better service to citizens. To convince them of the need for a holistic service experience, service advocates began to map the multitude of programs and channels for service delivery by population groupings. The picture that resulted was telling.
The web was a natural tool for building bridges between different agencies. Organizational structure became a more manageable problem because the “restructuring” was now happening virtually. Governments began to bundle services together so that someone who needed a service would be able to find everything in one place. These ‘one-stop shops’ began to evolve into organizations tasked with joining up services across government departments, coordinating information on behalf of citizens.
Building on lessons from such world leaders as the UK government, Centrelink, and Singapore, in 2005, the Canadian government created a whole-of-government organization to deliver citizen-centred service.
Service 2.0: Dealing with Accountability and Organizational Structure
Designing services that draw on the strengths of different agencies and/or governments and wrapping them effectively around a citizen continues to raise questions about accountability and issues of organi-zational structure.
First are the accountability questions: If a number of agencies are working together to deliver a service, who is ultimately accountable for the quality of that service? Is it enough for each agency to be accountable for its part? Or should there be an overseer accountable for the whole service? Which political leader gets to claim success, or be responsible for failure? Who is on the hook for costs? Who gets the savings? From a citizen’s perspective, none of these questions matter. From their point of view, government is one entity, and they expect it to act like one. But the flip side of that expectation is that when something government delivers goes wrong, citizens blame the entire entity – they don’t distinguish among different agencies or service providers. For this reason, accountabilities matter. They define the traditional roles and responsibilities of politicians and public servants. As such, they are hard to change.
Second are the cultural and management issues: Different organizations have different capacities, work habits and norms. Making collaboration work means harmonizing different cultures, overcoming concerns about turf and shared risk, and finding ways to stay focused on a common goal and a common citizen. Managers and staff have been trained to work in their silos, so moving to working productively with other agencies is a real shift. Moreover, classic organizational hierarchies can slow down efforts to improve services for citizens. Layers upon layers of management approval processes stifle innovation. Good ideas can’t get implemented quickly unless senior leadership creates an environment that values ideas at all levels of the organization.
Canada have shown that progress is possible through sustained leadership and learning by doing. But accountability and culture issues have evolved into an obsession with linking organizational structure to hard-wired accountabilities: an overwhelming focus on ‘Who’s in charge?’ instead of ‘What’s the outcome?’. Public servants hide behind nineteenth-century models of organization and structure of government, waiting for political processes to resolve their perceived structural issues. Politicians are seldom equipped to leap over these hurdles to innovation. Without strong leadership focusing on the citizen, service transformation gets stuck.
To leap over these hurdles to innovation, we need a different approach. We need to look beyond our obsession with structure, and seek out the enablers of innovation. And with web 2.0, we now have the tools to do it.
The Institute on Governance has the experience and knowledge to navigate this complicated terrain, and help organizations overcome the hurdles of implementing citizen-centred service. To learn more about how we can help you in this area, please contact us.
