Platforms in Government

Platforms in Government? Is that a thing?

I have to admit thinking about platforms is extremely hard when you don't have a "techy" background. It gets harder to do when you want to extrapolate the concept to government. And it gets way harder when you come from a developing country where a CTO position is reduced to making sure that the servers don't crash (still important but less impressive). 

I try to think of platforms as the necessary foundation for any given development. It's the concrete or abstract structure that supports any given activity. Trying to come up with an example, first thing that comes to mind when I first entered to work in the Ministry of Social Development and Inclusion was the process of applying. They post jobs online and their description, requirements, salary, division, etc. (I never understood why there were independent hiring offices across governments that did basically the same thing.) 

I encountered that in order to apply to a position I had to enter to the application page (a.k.a. platform), subscribe, obtain an user ID and password, and register. After registering, I had to input all of my education information and attach the corresponding documents, as well as my job experience with precise dates and, again, a letter from my former employer certifying the dates and position I had held. 

It was a very tedious process, especially asking that of my former employers. However, is a way to apply online to a job, reducing the cost of going to the Ministry during regular business days and waiting in line to drop an envelope with the physical legalized copies. From what I had heard it certainly was a way to improve the process of applying, which is very tedious in itself. You only had to go through that process if you had been selected for a position after several interviews and then you had to drop off the documents in order for them to verify it. If anything, it was certainly a way to waste less paper, and time. 

I had never thought of this online application as a platform. Especially in terms of human resources, I started wondering why was it that only this Ministry had it. And then I realized that probably the others had it too, but each division of the Government did. Then I thought about how each branch would've had to put out a procurement notice or try to develop it in house. I certainly don't understand why there isn't one single platform across government branches. I could easily come up with a lot of reasons why this save the Government enormous amounts of money. 

This set up definitely divided power between all hiring government branches. However, given that each branch handles their own evaluation of the proposals, I still find little use that the platform itself has to be done in house. Nonetheless, I do recognize the fact that security could be an issue, and if one of the centralized servers crashed it could be bad. There are thousands of hiring processes going on every day across Government agencies, and although delaying them one more day doesn't seem like the end of the world, it could affect greatly already slow-paced institutions. Another matter to take into account is security. Hacking all of the public workers information and also all of the people that have applied, could be done easily, especially taking into account the fact that the Peruvian Government is not very sophisticated with online security. 

Although there are pros and cons I still think even having just one available link that could direct you towards an application could make the process more streamlined. The risks of having a unified platform and preventable. Moreover, the cost of implementation would definitely save the Government a lot of in house operations. The economist in me can only see gains and efficiency. The public-policy-driven-HKS-student in me is very scared about implementing these types of things in developing countries: it sounds like a very typical case of premature load bearing for institutions. 

Expectation v. Reality, always.

Value Proposition Design: National Statistics Office in Peru

As an economist interested in social policy the Peruvian National Statistics Office webpage is a site I've used often since I was an undergrad back in Lima. It has provided resources of information used to calculate poverty rates, estimate demand in education, among many others tasks along my professional career. However, as a user that is constantly accessing the page I have noticed that there is steep learning curve into using this data. Only someone that has struggled several times to access it and knows which databases are available and differences between them can access it quickly. And so I chose this government service for my Value Proposition Design. 

Here is a snapshot of the introductory page to the data available. Once you navigate a little through the National Statistics Office website (INEI, in Spanish) it takes two clicks to arrive here. Notice, that there are two different tabs. One for documentation of the data and the other for the data itself. 

So here is how I thought the costumer profile would look like:

Customer Segment: Young economist working in development in Peru. 

And here is the Value Map:

As it can be expected: the needs of an Economist are very hard to please. 

Right after finishing college I had an offer to work as a research assistant but heard of an offer to work as an intern for the very prestigious IPA in an education project. Two weeks in, I was offered a payed salary for working closely with Government for producing impact evaluation. The project was called “Comisión Quipu”. The goal of the CQ was to promote evidence-based policy through a series of meetings between highly respected local and international academics and government officials. The end goal project and these meetings was to execute the proposals to test a theory of change within the Social Programs.

It failed.

When the proposals were executed, I was to become the Project Associate for said evaluation.

It didn’t happen.

On paper the idea sounded great. Everyone was excited. IPA put a lot of resources both human and financial into making this project happen.

The first warning sign should’ve been how excited the Government was as well.

Our first obstacle when preparing for the meetings was when we found out that the Ministry had strong recommendations of who the academics should be. IPA had selected 6 highly respected PhDs but had to compromise 3 in order for there to be room for those recommended by the Ministry. The cost that it came with was having 3 people with long trajectory in working with the Government but had no idea what an impact evaluation was. This also implied that our team had to work harder than we thought because we had to start by giving a very brief course on impact evaluations and why they were important. Something that wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.

Every week the academics had a deliverable, that started with pitching ideas to the government officials and getting feedback, and ended with the final report about the chosen evaluation. Given that some were not verse in impact evaluations we had to give a lot of feedback and comments to each document. More so than initially planned.

As the meetings started, it was increasingly clear that the Government was distancing itself from the CQ. They called it a good initiative or a starting point. They also said how the evaluations could be executed somewhere in the future. (Not the immediate future as we hoped.)

It is important to know that it was the year the Ministry had just been created by the new Government so their priorities were not focused on testing new ways of reducing poverty (although it should’ve been, in my opinion) but to roll out already thought out Program’s themselves and improve the process. They also were under the public eye because the Ministry had been one of the President’s promises during his campaign.

Now it seems pretty obvious that under those conditions the Government wouldn’t agree to start trying novel things right away, but this was a new type of project in IPA and in Peru so the steps that had to be taken were very unclear. It had never been done before and everyone got carried away with the novelty that no one stopped to try to assess how likely would it be for the Government to finance one of the evaluations.

The Government didn’t want to or couldn’t commit to funds to evaluate certain projects or to launch a pilot just because IPA went to all the trouble to bring international academics to sit with them and discuss ideas – including the founder of IPA. Especially because some of the things we wanted to test had never been implemented before, which made a new Government very uncomfortable. If they failed, they would’ve been greatly criticized. Maintaining the status quo of rolling out programs was much easier for them and less risky. At least that was my impression.

Looking back, it could’ve taken us probably two or three weeks to figure out that the CQ was not going to lead where we wanted it to. Given the political context, especially. But as I said, it had never been done before. IPA wanted to show that they were the leading organization in advocating for evidence-based policy with Governments. And the Government was trying to give an image of being a technically correct institution to its critics.

All that was left of CQ was the paper trail, and a valuable lesson for IPA and myself about how good intentions in Government are nothing more.  

You would think that after that, there would be no more CQ. You’d be wrong.

One year later, they did a second version of CQ. Why? I have no idea. What was the result? Same as before.

I have no (more) words.