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The “Reinventer” reinvents

Dropped in briefly and at short notice to an excellent Cisco public-sector summit in Stockholm.* Met former Australian privacy commissioner Malcolm Crompton, of whom I suspect more anon.

David Osborne spoke about the price of government. The author of reinventing government has a neat idea about budgetting. Instead of incrementalism, cuts, padding and deception the process should be turned on its head.

People think bureaucracy is just the way government is...that’s just not the case

The better process is:

1. Decide how much you want to pay, ie what % gets spent on public services
2. Specify the outcomes you want, and prioritise them
3. Decide how much of the fixed sum you want to spend on each
4. Invite bids and ideas on how best to deliver.

...and nothing else.

This is extremely radical, but he argues persuasively that it’s better than tying people in red tape then ordering them to improve. He defines “customer” as “the intended beneficiary of the outcome”, which solves that problem very neatly.  “When you’re riding a dead horse,” he says, “the best strategy is to dismount.”

* Thanks Simon!

Published by William Heath on 11/12/05 at 8:10am

Comments

1. That’s odd, I wonder why this was not reported by the UK’s mainstream media? Could it be that Murdoch-Blair does not agree?

   WIBBI: How about the BBC making space at “prime time” for reasoned discussions about issues and choices?

   (On Freeview, I now get four BBC TV channels, more than ten BBC radio channels, but all are full mostly of trivia, commercial sport and imported rubbish. Similarly, I get four ITV channels, four Channel4 type channels and countless commercial TV & radio channels: Mostly, I switch OFF and read a book!)

   Reply by Richard S  on  12/12/05  at  6:40 pm

2. But also worth noting that there was a challenge to how useful this technique was likely to be from Laurence Millar (http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le21/le34/nobel/2005/popups/millar.html) of New Zealand, who argued that the NZ government (which has gone further in this direction than almost any other) was finding it very hard to move beyond improving outputs (in effect, greater efficiency of existing approaches) to improving outcomes, not least because there often wasn’t an easy link between the intended policy outcome and the inputs of an individual public agency.

   Reply by sherpa  on  12/12/05  at  11:44 pm

Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

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