e-Government in San Francisco

Mobile and social media implementation for delivering effective e-government

Authors: Musangi Muthui and Patrick Ward 

Experts in the past have called California ungovernable (Economist, 2009). However, the promise of Gov 2.0 seeks to provide citizens with tools that empower them to interact, influence and even change the way politics is done. Whether through video conferencing to connect city staff and residents who need help, or crowdsourcing to discuss the city budget, technology is changing the way we think about — and participate in — government (Reset San Francisco, 2011).

Under the direction of CIO Jon Walton, the City & County of San Francisco (CCSF) sought to implement a mobile and social media strategy as a means to lower citizens’ cost of interacting with the government, and increase government transparency. In this report, we discuss aspects of this evolution to e-government including the trend towards open government, and the CCSF vision for social media and mobile implementation.

The Promise of e-Government

In January 2009, newly elected President, Barack Obama, issued a memorandum to deliver recommendations for an Open Government Directive within 120 days. In this memorandum, the President noted that openness in government “strengthen[s] our democracy and promote[s] efficiency and effectiveness in Government (Lakhani et. al., 2010, Exhibit 1). The vision was to promote public trust by opening information maintained by the government, which was considered a national asset, and this would in turn drive the public participation and collaboration necessary to maintain a healthy democracy.

The memorandum highlights three core values as part of the vision (Collins, 1996) for the Open Government Directive:

• Government should be transparent to promote accountability and make citizens aware of what government is doing;
• Government should be participatory to leverage the positive effect public engagement has on the 
• Government’s effectiveness and quality of decisions; citizens in the work of the Government and gather valuable feedback (Lakhani et. al., 2010, Exhibit 1).

Expecting a city to be run like a private corporation is unrealistic. For that to happen, it’s not so much about the technology; there needs to be a major culture shift. I struggle to see how a government can be run like a corporation and still benefit the public.

John Walton, CIO, City & County of San Francisco

In March 2009, Vivek Kundra, who had previously launched open government implementations in Arlington County, Virginia, was appointed as Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Federal Government. In May 2009, the first iteration of Data.gov, the technology implementation to support the core values, was launched. The underlying premise was that “if there was no good reason data had to stay secret, it should be published in a machine-readable format so others could easily do whatever they wanted to with it” (Lakhani et. al., 2010).

While transparency is typically a welcomed construct, and was well received after the public announcement, breaking down silos highlighted several issues including the lack of technology administrators to make this data available to the public; the careful balance needed to protect national security while also publishing Government maintained data; and, the need to change a culture that had applied a broad brush stroke to data security in order to play it safe (Lakhani et. al., 2010).

Since local governments may find themselves sharing more data with the Federal Government over time, it makes sense to align with a digital data strategy to streamline future collaborations. The CCSF is also taking heed of the Data.gov project from the Open Government Initiative in attempting to deliver a more efficient, transparent and ultimately better government to its citizens (Data.gov, 2010). 

In the context of making government more accessible via the Internet, CCSF rolled out mobile applications utilizing the SaaS aspect of cloud computing (e.g. a mobile app for paying parking meters) (GovTech, 2011). The other converging technology is that of the mobile devices, and the ability to use said devices to access services that are hosted in the cloud. Through the use of social media to make the government more participatory and the use of mobile applications to ease citizens’ interaction with the government, CCSF is delivering on the promise of more accessible and participatory government.

Market Trends and Emerging Technologies

All too often, organizations fail to watch market trends that seem otherwise peripheral or unrelated to the theory of their business. These trends can include changes in consumer aspirations, attitudes and beliefs, goals, social interactions and behaviors in ways that may not be obvious, such as how the digital revolution overall has led people to value tools that provide instant gratification, and multitasking capabilities (Ofek et. al., 2010). By missing these trends, firms risk falling behind competitors by adopting a wait and see approach, or pursuing product features that “only superficially address a trend’s impact on consumers” (Ofek et. al., 2010).

The market, in this case, is other local and county governments, and the actions they are taking to provide government services online, through social media and via mobile devices. The CCSF can look to other technology adoption and usage, as is the case with the CCSF. 

The ease of use of smartphones, for example, does not match the perception of government, which is not traditionally associated with ease of use. Some industry critics feel that government initiatives for open data have not gone far enough. Social engagement and two-way collaboration have not been factored into the process, but instead the focus is on one-way communication out for Government procured and managed data, and one-way communication in for citizen engagement (De Maio, 2009). This is where emerging technologies can help to grow government capability for citizen engagement.

There are two convergent emerging technologies that are relative to the CCSF effort to provide government services both online and via mobile devices. First, social media is being used by CCSF to maximize transparency and accountability and to allow citizens the option to more fully participate in government decisions by increasing outgoing communication (Thomas, 2013). Social media are the platforms that enable the interactive web, or Web 2.0, by engaging citizens to participate in, comment on and create content related to their interactions with government services, as well as and activities within the government (Cohen, 2011).

CCSF is striving for Gov 2.0 in which “government is a convener and an enabler — ultimately, it is a vehicle for coordinating the collective actions of citizens” (O’Reilly, 2009). To accomplish this, the CCSF has leveraged several Web 2.0 platforms to increase communication and engagement:

• YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/SFGTV) to broadcast city council hearings;
• IdeaScale for people to make suggestions on budget-making efforts;
• Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SF) to keep citizens up to date and informed on recent CCSF activities;
• Twitter (https://twitter.com/sfgov) so that citizens can follow city events and get updates.

CCSF sees social media as a means of increasing government transparency (Bertot, 2010). Perhaps, the best example of the CCSF use of social media can be seen in their web site (sfgov.org, 2013). CCSF also has a blog and RSS feeds for citizens to track government activities and find out what key government personnel think; e.g. about solar energy, public safety, and infrastructure improvements: http://www5.sfgov.org/sf_ news/. SFGovTV (http://www.sfgovtv.org) and is also a means in which citizens can watch public broadcasts of their government in action.

Vision for CCSF

This shift to open government exemplifies what Amit et. al. (2012) describe as business model innovation where “how companies do business will often be as, or more, important than what they do.” In an open government, the content, structure and governance are all transformed. Content is no longer just gathered by agencies, but must also be shared digitally, and made accessible to developers by way of real-time capable APIs. 

The structure of the open government activity system, or how its activities are linked and in what sequence, as well as governance pertaining to who performs activities (Amit et. al., 2012) shifts some of the innovation and development needed to achieve transparency, participation and collaboration to the private sector. The visionary goals that CCSF can pursue through open government and emerging technologies would be to:

• Make engagement with government services a fully digital experience citizens can engage in from the comfort of their preferred location, anytime of the day or night;
• Never have to circle the block or sit in gridlock looking for a parking spot;
• Attract the best and brightest business owners and neighbors by being the most well connected and digitally progressive city in North America.

Outlining the vivid story to support CCSF’s digital vision helps to shape collective ambition, and is an opportunity to build and strengthen the organizational glue. This is also a chance to launch enterprise-wide change initiatives, which require disciplined execution — the grease (Ready et. al., 2011). Our audit of the collective ambition for CCSF is as follows giving them a total score of 33, which highlights the need for more public articulation of clear goals about how IT will deliver on the big goals for its citizens:

• Does your company have a clear and meaningful statement of its core at all purpose—why it exists? 
• Is your company’s vision compelling and aspirational yet achievable, motivating employees to contribute their very best? 
• Has your leadership team gone through the hard work of identifying targets, milestones, and metrics that ground the vision in reality? 
• Has your company ruthlessly prioritized the choices it will make to build the capabilities required to win on a sustainable basis? 
• Does your company’s brand promise capture the experience you intend to deliver to stakeholders (customers, communities, investors, employees, and business partners)? 
• Do your company’s articulated values represent what you stand for as an enterprise and as a group of people working together? 
• Do senior leaders’ day-to-day behaviors reflect the leadership behaviors that you say are critically important to your company’s success?

Diagnosing Risk

CCSF has several unique challenges when it comes to assessing the risk of using emerging technologies to deliver a mobile platform for applications that interface with the city government. The first of these is that the city needs to keep its business processes running and recovering quickly from interruptions. For example, people still need to be able to check out library books even if the computing system is down, and the computing system should be able to quickly recover from any service interruptions.

The second is that the city services need to be accessible in that the right information is provided to the right people, and not the wrong ones. For example, people and businesses need access to their own utility bills, but not someone else’s. The third is that the city services need to be accurate by ensuring that information is timely, complete and correct. When the city is accepting monies for mobile payment transactions from parking meters, the city needs to ensure that payments are accepted in a timely manner and credited to the appropriate parking spot. The fourth is agility in that as the city progresses to move an increasing number of services online, the systems ecosystem must adapt with appropriate speed and cost for each new service that is brought online (Westerman, 2009).

Dealing with Change

Change initiatives often backfire because managers apply one size-fits-all approaches (Kotter et. al., 2008). To mitigate this, the CCSF needs to apply a different approach for each application that is to go online. By gaining a quick win with moving the parking meter payment system to mobile, the CIO can set a precedent for successfully moving a simple application online.

It is important for the city to realize the resistance that the city employees will have when the applications that they work on are moving to an Internet platform. One way that the city can meet the resistance is by having the CIO demonstrate that the mobile applications are actually saving the city money and consequently jobs. Mobile applications also enable city employees to have more challenging work as they are the only ones able to work on the exceptions that mobile applications and online applications are not built to handle correctly.

The other important thing to consider is situational factors. For example, the city revenue may fluctuate because there may be a decrease in the amount of business taxes collected. The city would have two opportunities available here: one would be to further decrease business taxes to encourage more businesses to come to the city and the other would be to figure out how to cut costs in other areas.

The other concern in the city is the ratio of people collecting benefits to those paying into the system. The city needs to be able to provide cost-effective services so that they are able to serve more members of the community and still be able to provide services on-line that are of the same or better quality as those services provided off-line. This way the city will ensure increased revenue and adapt to change.

Creating Short-Term Wins

The challenge for the CCSF CIO is not so much as for him to prove himself, but prove that the city can go online and be both cost effective and cost efficient. He has to be able to communicate a clear vision, develop the capabilities of the people that work for him, be willing to learn from any mistakes that are made along the way and pull everyone together to make the project of moving the city online a success (Kotter, 2002).

The CIO must prove to the city that making government services available on the Internet adds value, is feasible and has a collective positive impact on all stakeholders (Van Buren et. al., 2009). A good example from the reading of “The List on the Bulletin Boards” points to the way the CIO can make the project a success. By focusing on a few key areas: parking meters, library services and utility services, he can achieve successes with little cost, high value and demonstrate to city managers that CCSF can go online and lower costs while also providing provide better service to its constituents.

Conclusion

The emerging technologies of cloud computing and mobile computing enable the CCSF to deliver government services more cost effectively. With total expenditures and revenue in excess of $6M in fiscal 2007-08, it was in CCSF’s best interest to cut expenditures (Wikipedia, 2013). According to the CCSF’s Five-Year Financial Plan for fiscal 2011-12 through 2015-16, the CCSF plans to continue to make significant financial investments in its online presence (CCSF, 2011). Even the library plans to not only increase free citywide public wireless internet access, but also to have online learning podcasts (CCSF, 2011).

In 2011, the SFMTA launched SFPark, an initiative using real-time parking demand data, online and cell phone payment methods for drivers, and market-based pricing (CCSF, 2011). This initiative will help with the estimated $19M loss in parking revenue (CCSF, 2011). This and other e-government, social and mobile initiatives have helped to save the CCSF operating costs each year, and will continue to do so for the projected next five years (CCSF, 2011).