Achieving Better Government Service at a Lower Price

This week’s topic is focused on how the government sector could dramatically improve customer service and reduce IT costs.  For fiscal year 2020, the federal government is projected to spend over $87 billion.  Spending for all other governmental units is projected to be $111 billion.  In both cases, much of this spending is done to maintain older systems and develop replacement software.

There are two fundamental changes that would produce major improvements.

1. Service sharing should dramatically increase between jurisdictions.  

Currently, most jurisdictions run their own IT operations and software.  Most of these operations could be done on a shared services basis either by a third party or having a limited number of jurisdictions serving many others.  The redundancy of every jurisdiction essentially doing the same work and spending resources on continuing software development and support for themselves is a waste of resources.  

A great example would be the fifty states.  Each one needs to have an enterprise accounting and financial system to manage their budget and finances, each state has a driver’s license and motor vehicle system, all of them have human services systems to provide support to parties in need, and all have their own tax software to receive tax returns and tax payments.  All of these could be consolidated into more integrated and shared cloud based systems.  

One of the main objections to the shared services idea is that each jurisdiction wants their independence and has unique requirements.  The unique requirements can be easily addressed within a reasonable range of options.  The independence objection is the tougher issue since it is based more often on political and bureaucratic concerns rather than on the substance of the system.

In the private sector, the concept of software as a service (SAS) has been accepted for a long time.  One of the first and best illustrations is Salesforce.com.  This company has been around since 1999 and is the leader in the nation for customer relationship management software.  Start ups are being created all the time to bring new SAS offerings to the market.

In Michigan, we actually provided support to another Midwestern state in the human services area.  They paid for our solution since they received a better product at a lower cost than doing the work on their own. We then had additional resources to reinvest in improving our system, which also benefited the other state.  This sharing should happen hundreds of times more often.

2. Move to a citizen (customer) centric model for database management.

Most governmental units have dozens of software systems to maintain.  Think about your life when you change your address.  How many times do you have to update the governmental jurisdiction you live in?  Generally expected places include your driver’s license, and your tax filings.  If you hunt or fish, there is another one.  If your water, sewer or trash is provided by government agencies, you can also include these areas.   In human services and workforce development, there are  between thirty and fifty programs in each area. If you fall in these categories an address change has a whole new level of significance.  Missing one of these places to update could have a dramatic negative impact on your well being.

Many of these government programs are creations of the federal government and run by the states or local government.  The federal government generally imposes specific information requirements for a person to participate in each program.  Often, these requirements are quite burdensome and may require people to prove the validity of the information provided.  But, these requirements are common between all of the participating state and local governments.  Instead of collaborating on a common system, each governmental unit builds or buys their own software package to manage the relevant program.

For years, I have viewed this world of redundant systems by our governments as wasteful. However,I understand why we ended up with so many different systems.  We started with a smaller government sector without an IT function.  As we grew as a country over the past hundred years, new programs would be added to address a new need.  Without editorizing on whether this growth was good or bad,  we have ended up with a government methodology that slices individuals into program participants rather than treating them as real people.  Often, these programs may be providing help but don’t truly address the person’s underlying issues to permanently improve their life.  

As governor of Michigan, I recognized that our current system is inefficient and less effective than it should be.  I directed our IT leadership to work toward building Mi Page.  Instead of having dozens of various IT systems which separately track our population, let’s reverse the model and build our database around our ten million residents.  Our residents are our customers and they deserve better service. Each citizen should have one master record for interacting with the state where they can easily make changes, update information and see what is being provided or not provided to them.  This is a win for the people we represent.  Also, as a government, we can see how we are helping ten million people vs. having people showing up multiple times in a variety of systems.

My long term vision was that if we got this working for Michigan, why not invite local jurisdictions and eventually the federal government to use the same system.  Although this program wasn’t fully implemented in our state, we made progress in that direction and found like minded people in other jurisdictions.   It is important to mention a concern about moving in this direction. The need for good cybersecurity and privacy protection is even more critical.

With the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic distress facing our nation, the two concepts above can help us reduce the cost of government while providing us better service.  Let’s get started.

Remember, Relentless Positive Action in your life will help you and others. So, I wish you RPA every day!