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

by Jennifer Pahlka

“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”

The systems that run our government need to be built on a foundation of bedrock, not landfill.

More importantly, though, waterfall development of government software is a miniature version of a much larger dynamic that pervades all areas of government. Clay Shirky once quipped that “waterfall amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.”

“I’ve spent my entire career training my team not to have an opinion on business requirements,” he told me. “If they ask us to build a concrete boat, we’ll build a concrete boat.”3 Why? I asked. “Because that way, when it goes wrong, it’s not our fault.”

The more trouble a project is in, the more oversight it gets, and more oversight almost always means stricter compliance with requirements, not finding creative ways around them.

We’ve been training our public servants to master procurement rules so complex and processes so drawn out that the technology they buy is outdated or irrelevant by the time it gets delivered.

Government knows how to acquire technology. What we need to acquire are capabilities.

We can’t fix this until we understand that in government, we’re not starting a new relationship, we’re repairing a deeply broken one.

What we need is not more megaprojects but incremental, stage-based funding. Remember, the people putting together a request for proposal for a $600 million project are supposed to say with great certainty what development teams will be delivering ten to twenty years into the future. This is, simply put, impossible. No appropriation should ask for this kind of delusional plan.

Karl W. Deutsch said, “Power is the ability to afford not to learn.”