The issue is changing that culture, Michael Wilkening, special adviser on Innovation and Digital Services in the Office of the Governor, said during remarks Tuesday at the California Digital Government Summit in Sacramento. Government differs from the private sector in its constraints, relationships and expectations — and it should, Wilkening said, emphasizing that point. But, he added, the state can learn a great deal from private business.
“Those are things we should be thinking about not just adopting, but really thinking about 'How do those work in a governmental context?' And rethinking what we should be doing. And that is culture change,” Wilkening told audience members. Among the takeaways:
• It’s too soon to discuss the projects underway at the new Office of Digital Innovation (ODI), because the state is still in the process of “bringing that office up,” Wilkening said. The state is also still seeking an ODI director to lead the recasting of “the relationship of Californians with their government,” he said, calling it a very simple mission but “incredibly difficult to achieve.” Newsom will choose the ODI director, and Wilkening described the type of candidate he’d like to bring to the governor: people who have tried, failed and “figured out how to pick themselves up and re-engage.”
“And I’m looking for people that have figured out how to work with the bureaucracy rather than just to direct the bureaucracy or to fight the bureaucracy. They need to partner,” he said.
• Bureaucracies and silos will likely always exist, but both need to be bridged — not destroyed. The key, Wilkening said, is to not focus on departments or programs, but on people, whether they’re working in the organization, providing services or receiving services. That’s “fundamentally the job” of ODI, he said: making it “about people,” and getting to a user-centered approach. The state recently brought in advisers to examine the website ca.gov and begin reconceptualizing it to be service-based rather than program-based, he said.
Wilkening, who was California Health and Human Services Agency (CHHS) secretary until March, pointed to his former agency’s work in data — standing up the state’s first agency-level open data portal — as evidence of culture change in its use of partnership, not intervention. At CHHS, said Wilkening, chief deputies and directors are encouraged to come to its innovation office with problems and challenges, “especially those that crossed departments.” In doing so, leaders commit to actively engage on solutions, dedicate staff resources, and “make that a priority of the department."
• He praised modular and agile approaches to procurement as letting officials “be much more honest about the assessment of success.” The special adviser also noted the tendency to term half-billion-dollar projects a success despite their shortcomings, “because that’s the way that things work.” The modular model, he said, with multiple vendors handling smaller project pieces, “has allowed us to be much more honest about the assessment of success.”
“It allows us to learn when we have failures, because you can actually have a thoughtful conversation about a $20 million failure," he said. "You don’t tend to have really thoughtful conversations about half-billion-dollar failures. You instead are reacting.”
