ICT-Driven Public Sector Innovation in H2020: Initial Thoughts
Dr. Julia Glidden, Managing Director, 21c Consultancy
Ben Cave, European Projects Manager, 21c
Consultancy
1. Views on the challenges, opportunities and
vision presented
a.
Challenge
of Culture Change:
i.
The importance of ‘empowering and training civil
servants’ cannot be underestimated.
ii.
The entrenchment of a ‘risk adverse culture’ and
‘business as usual procedures’ remains strong within government at all levels,
creating an inherent obstacle to the introduction of new processes, products,
services and methods that ICT alone cannot solve.
iii.
Leadership from the top of government
organisations, including the Commission, is critical to ensure that government services
evolve at the right speed.
iv.
Rather than attempt to keep pace with change
(which is impossible given the current pace of ICT innovation), government
leaders should promote the principles of ‘Open Innovation’ amongst civil
servants, ensuring a cultural mindset that is flexible, adaptable and
responsive to user feedback
b.
Challenge
of Co-Creation:
i.
Participatory,
bottom-up co-creation of services can create more effective, personalised
experiences but the process increases the burden on citizens to participate.
ii.
Making more efficient, cost-effective public
services must mean more than having the citizen pay for and create their own
services.
iii.
To be maximally effective, government must
provide structured parameters within with to co-create services.
iv.
‘Guided’ service co-creation will reduce the
burden on citizens of participating in service co-creation whilst maximising
the return for public administrations and citizens alike.
c. Challenge of Cross Border:
i.
In addition to interoperability challenges,
cross border service design and delivery also faces the challenge of providing
localised services in a pan-European context.
ii.
To meet this challenge, the delivery of
cross-border services should focus on the creation of templates and standards
that promote applications and services that can be easily adapted to local
conditions rather than a ‘one-size fits all’ cloud-based vision
iii.
For a project that is based upon this premise,
see: http://www.citadelonthemove.eu/
2.
Opinion
of the Objectives Outlined
a.
Open
Government is a strong objective but it is important to identify the areas
in which ‘government as an open platform’ is most likely to reap dividends. Feedback
from non-specialist stakeholders in highly specialised areas such as national
defence or financial regulation, for example, may not help government to
achieve better policies because a) data is highly confidential and b) detailed expertise
is required to provide useful feedback.
b.
Transformation
of Public Administration is a broad objective which seeks to accomplish a
difficult goal. As highlighted above, one of the greatest barriers to
transformation is the reluctance of public servants to change their working
practices and embrace a more open approach to government. EU actions can help
to promote an ‘innovation-aware’ model
by a) encouraging top down policy leadership in this area, b) recognising and
rewarding public sector innovators and c) supporting education and training
that develops the latent capacity to drive further change.
c.
Effective
Public Services is increasingly intertwined with personalised service provision. As digital natives come into their
own, ICT is reshaping the entire mindset that citizens have about their
relationship with government. It is
important for public administrators to appreciate that ‘effective’ is as likely
to mean personalised as efficient to citizens in the years ahead.
3.
Relevance,
Importance and Missing Gaps in the possible areas of Research and Innovation
Activities and Technologies
a.
Future-Proofing: It is essential that the research framework
is sufficiently flexible enough to take into account unforeseen changes in
service requirements or technologies over the period to 2020. Given the rapid pace of change, the framework
should also be flexible enough to move quickly and nimbly on good ideas, and to
abandon bad ones.
b.
Upskilling:
The local government community, outside ‘Smart Cities’, is often the slowest to
adopt new innovation and among the hardest hit by economic austerity. At the
same time, local government often has the greatest impact upon citizens in
their day-to-day lives. Innovation
projects which bring together established local government actors with newer
actors from smaller (often more rural) communities would help to drive
innovation across Europe as a whole, rather than just the metropolitan hubs.
c.
Open Data
vs. Big Data: Expert groups tend
to take concepts like Open Data for granted.
Yet many Member States, not to mention regional and local actors, are
still struggling to come to terms with the meaning and value of opening their
data, let alone how best to do so. This problem will be dramatically compounded
in the years ahead as we move from the Internet of Things to the Internet of
People, or a world of over 50 million interconnected, data creating
devices. Research and innovation
activities are needed to ensure that public sector innovation does not become
overwhelmed (or indeed left behind altogether) by an impending ‘data tsunami.’
4.
Availability
and maturity of technology to facilitate the proposed activities and how short,
medium and long-term research may be able to support this
a.
The technologies to support smart service
innovation have, in many cases, been ubiquitous for some time. Much is made of
social media which, technologically speaking, is a mature and fairly basic set
of tools. Even more complex technologies such as IoT sensors or platform
technologies are mature in technological terms at this moment. The key issue in terms of technology to
facilitate innovation, then, is not maturity in technical terms but maturity in
terms of application to government service innovation. Or, in other words, the maturity of public
administrations to use technology to improve service delivery in a genuinely
open and innovative manner.
b.
The adoption horizon for govern services is of
necessity longer than for private sector businesses due to the simple fact that
government services cannot afford to ‘fail’ in the same way as in the private
sector. For this reason, the key issue
in terms of timeframe is to ensure the research and innovation programme has
the flexibility to respond to short-term changes in the technology landscape in
the pursuit of medium to longer term research priorities.
5.
Other
barriers and possible ways to overcome them through the help of H2020
a.
Bureaucracy: Building a higher tolerance of lower risk
failures than exists under current EU funding regimes would help to stimulate
greater innovation, as would reducing the administrative burden for SME
participation in funded research.
b.
Inclusion: A key potential barrier to the effective
development of innovative services is the dominance of an established ecosystem
of players in the ‘Smart City’ domain. To ensure that public service innovation
truly creates impact for citizens across Europe, H2020 must move beyond the
focus on cities by including rural or suburban administrations where possible.
c.
Trickle
Down: Another potential barrier is
the unwillingness of national policymakers to adopt cross-border services at an
early stage, delaying trickle down to local government. To counteract this
challenge, H2020 might have a track in which national governments conduct
research and piloting into the adoption of these open services into their
national policy framework.
