Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

by Jennifer Pahlka

now widens the gap between policy intentions and actual outcomes is the messy task of implementation through digital technology, and the ways government makes working with that technology uniquely complex.

your time is spent answering questions and writing reports for other people inside government, it’s mighty hard to be focused on the people outside government you’re supposed to serve.

These dysfunctions derive from core issues that are human rather than technological, complex rather than just complicated.

hierarchy.

times it almost seems that status in government is dependent on how distant one can be from the implementation of policy. There is a debilitating distance, too, between the people creating government systems and the people who use them. The

nowhere in government documents will you find a requirement that the service actually works for the people who are supposed to use it.

Delivery is how the intent of the policy gets done.

When systems or organizations don’t work the way you think they should, it is generally not because the people in them are stupid or evil. It is because they are operating according to structures and incentives that aren’t obvious from the outside.

In a waterfall organization, on the other hand, data functions less like a compass that helps you steer and more like an after-the-fact evaluation, a grade you get that says how well or poorly you did on something that has already happened.

It was permission—permission to disrupt the waterfall.

public servants are trapped between two distinct systems of accountability. In the first, politicians will hold the public servants accountable for outcomes: whether the website works to enroll people or whether benefits are actually getting to claimants.

In the second system of accountability, various parts of the administrative state—the agency itself, the inspector general, the Government Accountability Office—will hold these same public servants accountable to process.

Today’s hottest tech employers promise work-life balance and flexible schedules. Ironically, it’s the public sector, with its “Marge Simpson’s sisters” image problem, where these kinds of unsustainable heroics are necessary.

Product management is deciding what to do in the first place—and also, as in the case of the benefit screeners, deciding what not to do.