We all know government is facing extreme budget pressure. It’s no secret that more work needs to be done than there are dollars to pay for it. Additional resources to invest in opportunities to improve citizen services and increase operational capability are extremely difficult to find.
However, if we as a country want to keep our competitive edge, we need to continually evolve to run better than ever before. We have to break through barriers, embrace new ideas, and innovate faster than any other country in the world. Taxpayers deserve no less.
Talk to any government leader about the need to innovate, and they’ll always agree it’s vital to the public sector. But ask them how they plan to drive innovation and you get a blank stare.
It’s not their fault either. The perceived complexities of innovation are endless. Too expensive. Too cumbersome. Too big. Too much work. But it’s not true. You can drive change and transform your organization with innovative ideas if you collaborate and look beyond traditional boundaries to do more with less.
We’ve seen that first hand working with one of the oldest cities in America which is innovating like it’s one of the youngest. To avoid this sounding like a sales pitch for that city or us, let’s just call it a Northeast city. A group of our employees at SAP recently collaborated with that city’s employees to uncover technology-enabling innovations through a program called “Innojam”.
The title is as creative as the ideas that come from it. Innojam is an innovation jam session, of sorts. But there are no boom boxes, loud music, and hip-hop dances here. Innojam is a program designed to bring together different perspectives – in this case, employees from this city and our employees, along with analysts, and students – to explore, collaborate, design and build solutions to real problems facing this metropolitan market.
Collaboration is key. No one just innovates sitting in an empty room by themselves. Innovation is driven by group thought and discussion. Unlike other co-innovation programs, the InnoJam program facilitates participatory collaboration around the latest technologies with technical experts, academics and analysts. This accelerates innovation by quickly analyzing the feasibility (both technical and organizational) and value potential of identified use cases.
These Innojam participants began by discussing organizational challenges facing American cities, and then prioritized the most pressing issues. They then split into teams to tackle a specific high priority problem. Technical experts from SAP teamed with each group to digest the requirements and ideas from the participants and work with them to create working prototypes.
Participants then spend the rest of the day working together on a prototype and then each group presents their findings and demonstrates the prototype to select judges. In this case, the judges came from three different organizations: this Northeast city, SAP and an analyst firm. Judging criteria included originality, usefulness, ability to affect change, and public value versus ease of development.
The winning group mocked up a mobile application to help small businesses initiate the permit process, track the lifecycle of the permit, engage in live chat with an employee of this Northeast city, and review any violations they needed to respond to. In less than two days, this Innojam session identified a problem and collaboratively built a solution.
The point here is that all levels of government could and should take advantage of initiatives like “Innojam” to find new ways to maximize public value and optimize limited resources. Public agencies within the United States have the opportunity to solve the previously unsolvable.
Moreover, government executives should consider three specific rules as they drive innovation in their agency:
1. Don’t Settle–innovate selectively by investing time up front to determine if the proposed innovation will deliver both business value and can realistically get executed.
2. Keep it simple–look for “quick wins” first. Implement simple and effective adaptations before moving to bigger issues. This will build the needed confidence to tackle bigger issues.
3. Live and learn–You win some you lose some. The most successful innovators are some of the biggest risk takers. Be willing to take a chance. If it doesn’t work. Stop and try something else. Don’t be afraid to make a bold decision to shut down any innovation that is not adding value.
We need to keep our competitive edge by continually evolving and executing better than ever before. Executives must drive innovation at their agencies or risk dissipating and becoming irrelevant.
Dante Ricci is Public Services Industry Principal for SAP America.