In May 18th there is an update of the Project on Digital Government at the Ash Center directed by David Eaves, civic technology entrepreneur and lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). David Eaves, as director of the Project on Digital Government, analyses the US COVID19 vaccination platform and the relation to government practices and the general institutional framework:
- “A big part of the challenge is we’re now in the era of digital government, where every service you launch will have a digital component to it”
- “The capabilities to build and launch those types of services digitally are not straightforward for organizations that have been around for a period of time — but they are now core to what the government does.”
- Government services are inherently digital, argues Eaves, but governments still lack the personnel and technological capacity to deliver services to a public that expects most simple tasks, such as scheduling a vaccine appointment, to be done effortlessly online.
- These shortcomings have been addressed through the creation of Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age, a consortium of faculty from around the world working to create free teaching materials to build skills for government in the digital age.
The article is available at the following linkPublished on May 18, 2021
"Earlier this spring, millions rushed to schedule COVID vaccinations through a bevy of online portals managed by state and local governments. Instead of appointment slots, however, many were met with an unending string of error messages and broken websites that laid bare the obvious: The government was struggling with tech. In Massachusetts, the failure of the state’s online vaccine scheduling portal brought back memories of the failed 2013 launch of healthcare.gov, the federal government’s health insurance marketplace website. For David Eaves, a civic technology entrepreneur, lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), and director of the Project on Digital Government at the Ash Center, the botched vaccination platform was not surprising. “A big part of the challenge is we’re now in the era of digital government, where every service you launch will have a digital component to it,” he says. “The capabilities to build and launch those types of services digitally are not straightforward for organizations that have been around for a period of time — but they are now core to what the government does.”
Government services are inherently digital, argues Eaves, but governments still lack the personnel and technological capacity to deliver services to a public that expects most simple tasks, such as scheduling a vaccine appointment, to be done effortlessly online. “Technology in government first started as a military application, and then it slowly became a back-end office solution,” he explains. “Government only started communicating with the public online in the 2000s, and the idea that you could perform a transaction online, such as paying a parking ticket or filling out the census, is only a 2010s phenomenon.”
Eaves points out that this digital pivot has beguiled the private sector, too, with no small number of legacy companies failing to anticipate the impact that digital technology would have on their business model. He notes, however, that the private sector fosters a competitive environment that compels businesses to change. “In the public sector, that doesn’t exist. Rather, it’s more of a generational turnover in the composition of the public sector workplace as well as demands of public and elected officials; it just takes longer for [the need to change] to be felt.”
A public policy school like HKS offers the opportunity to train the next generation of public leaders with new skills, competencies, and ways of delivering services enabled by technology. But Eaves notes that across public policy schools and public administration schools, only 16% of MPA programs and 12.5% of MPP programs have a core class that focuses on technology-related issues. As a result, universities and civil service institutions are churning out graduates who are expected to set the pace of change in governments around the world despite lacking exposure to core technology competencies.
So, Eaves reached out to faculty members at other institutions for a series of informal discussions about how they could collectively strengthen technology training for these emerging public sector leaders. “We developed this amazing team of faculty from around the world, who have all been contributing the ways they're thinking about this problem and teaching [about technology],” he says. Together, Eaves and his colleagues then began assembling a suite of curricular materials, including a shared syllabus that is open to anyone teaching government technology skills and competencies.
These conversations eventually led to the creation of Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age, a consortium of faculty from around the world working to create free teaching materials to build skills for government in the digital age. Initially self-funded, Eaves and Tom Steinberg, a British civic technologist who serves as a senior advisor to the project took their work to the Public Interest Technology University Network Fund, which provided support to help build out the suite of curricular materials."