After sitting on the idea for a year I established bureaucrati.ca as a foothold to try to help bring the app to market (note I'm pivoting on the role of the site, it will now be an outlet for creative writing).
Trying to get an app built meant hitting the streets and talking to a number of established mobile development companies and start ups, it also meant stumbling
on what I think is one of the core reasons why we can't have nice things in government.
As for the reason? Well it's painfully simple.
Plainly put, companies that make beautiful things don't consider enterprise solutions as a viable market. The CEOs I spoke with all cited four reasons why they have steered their businesses clear of enterprise solutions:
they tend to require a bunch of integration work (work that is often different from organization to organization and rooted in its own technological evolution);
integration work is difficult to scope in advance and thus hard to determine what would constitute an appropriate resource level (and thus the price of the contract);
dealing with enterprises often entails hiring a sales guy to do the grunt work. The people I met with are skilled developers and shrewd business people, they don't want to be out shilling their wares; they want to build applications and services that are so beautiful and useful that they sell themselves.
No one wants to invest any effort into the procurement process. If you aren't a big vendor you simply don't have the resources, expertise or established relationships to successfully navigate the world of procurement.
While many of us on the inside already know that there are procurement challenges (ever try to procure a Mac?) I find the fact that the innovators in the private sector feel as though the procurement process itself is so broken that they can easily afford to purposely ignore the entire public sector. In the midst of the establishment of a new Shared Services Canada, I can only hope that those at the helm take a good hard look at the details around how we procure IT resources, because it may just be one of the reasons why we can't have nice things in government.
Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.ca
Below you will find a 5 slide deck that I have embedded if you want to scroll through it for context, I have also broken each slide out as an image below with a few comments. The underlying point that I am trying to make is that senior leaders in the public sector deal with an incredibly complex and nuanced information and influence system that operates around them and that, in order to make the best possible decisions, they need to be properly equipped with business intelligence aggregation devices.
Step by Step Essentially the bureaucratic hierarchy is quite simple: it's a pyramid where outputs flow up for decisions, and direction flows down. The external environment is far more organic. Stakeholders don't always interface with the government effectively because they aren't necessarily designed to do so. However, strict bureaucratic hierarchy is somewhat of a myth when we consider it in relation to external stimuli. Public servants at all levels within the organization consume (interact) with the outside world is some way, shape, or form. Thus the external environment influences both the production cycle and the direction of the public sector organization in ways I think we truly do not yet understand; ways that are far more profound then the media scrums of our political masters and the infamous Globe and Mail test. What I find fascinating is that all of the public sector organizations operate in much the same context, yet largely remain in their own silos. But, given an increasingly complex policy environment and cost-cutting, you think we would be actively investing in ways to improve co-production, co-consumption, and co-direction. After three and a half years in government, I can say with authority that true interdepartmental coordination is always the most difficult thing to achieve. We have difficulty identifying the leads, who should be at what tables, what work has or is being duplicated, etc. I had prepared a full two-page introduction to this premise but have scrapped all of it in favour of one simple sentence:
In order to lead effectively in the environment outlined above, senior leaders need a tool that delivers them real time business intelligence to inform decision-making.
Business Intelligence Aggregation Device
Senior leaders, meet what could easily be your new best friend, flipboard.
The concept behind Flipboard, the personal magazine, is incredibly powerful for any organization looking to make better use of its business intelligence.
That being said, I think this application has the potential to be transformative in the public sector. Information moves so slowly through the bureaucracy that it undermines even the most valiant efforts at being proactive. Forget about Flipboard connecting you to content you care about, think about its potential to connect senior leaders to the business intelligence they need in order to lead effectively.
A Huge Opportunity for Innovation
I don't see a reason why we shouldn't investigate how to implement this type of solution behind an organizational firewall. Simply replace Flipboard's Twitter and Facebook aggregations and “Retweet” and “Like” buttons with business intelligence and actionable items.
Production: a synopsis of what’s being written by employees (briefing notes, policy papers, correspondence, communication plans, etc), sortable by level or business line.
Direction: request in-person briefings with subject matter experts, send delegates to meetings, approve documents for publication, etc.
Consumption: get a feel for what external sources are influencing decision-making and knowledge asset production within the organization
Co-Production / Consumption / Direction: Share and act across organization boundaries when it makes sense.
This type of approach provides a far greater depth and breadth of information than the status quo of briefing binders, red dockets for signing and often out of date telephone directories stapled to cubicle walls.
If we truly want our leaders to lead, we need to equip them to do so. Whenever I look at new pieces of technology and assess their potential value to organizations I find myself reflecting on a statement made by Clay Shirky:
"These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn't when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. It's when everybody is able to take them for granted. Because now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we're all in this together."
That is why I am really interested in this particular idea.
Introducing the equivalent to the "Enterprise Flipboard" into existing organizational structures doesn't erode hierarchies or undermine authority structures. It simply makes better use of existing (but currently opaque) business processes and the social systems that surround them. Back to Shirky's point, "Enterprise Flipboard" really isn't all that interesting technologically; being able to leverage tools like this for data aggregation and decision-making should be the norm; and so should the idea that everyone in the organization is in this together.
If you are interested in discussing developing the equivalent to an "Enterprise Flipboard", let me know, I'm interested in discussing it more.
Last year I wrote about how enterprises could leverage tablet applications like Flipboard in order to change how senior leaders received and actioned their business intelligence. 
