Productivity in knowledge work?

Productivity in public sector is, in principle, justified. Everything financed with tax refunds must constantly be under critical viewing: can things be done more effectively, with less resources - perhaps even outsourced?

But. A big BUT. Time to stop to think!

The mechanistic models of measuring financial efficiency were based on scarcity in industrial production processes. The quicker you can get the product out of the line, the better. Do these laws apply in society, to people or knowledge workers?

Helsingin Sanomat (26 Aug 2010, page D1) featured an article about mental hospitals and their hard measures in treatment. However, an Imatra model came up: their statistics always looked better than elsewhere, their patients kept coming in but were also let out easier than elsewhere. Others were stunned: why do you what you do?

The answer is beautiful in its austerity.

Imatra looked at its health care system as a financial entity, like a zero-sum-game. If mental care closed their doors, ie. ceased treating patients with early symptoms, their life gets worse. Later those same patients are bound to need help, this time only more drastic and definitely more expensive measures.

The problem in sectoral management is, that all departments optimize their "sub-costs". Imatra, a blow away from bankruptcy at that time, resorted to the good old common sense. They reviewed total costs. When help is needed later in another section, child welfare, schools or social services, their costs exceed dramatically those of early stage intervention's. True leadership!

Researcher Ilkka Tuomi continues on same lines (HS 26 Sept 2010, page C14). Productivity laws that apply in mass production, can severely twist decision making in information society. Value is born in social networks from innovation and production of new meanings.

How do we speed up these processes? Think faster? I don't think so.

Leadership faces enormous challenges when organization's entities entail both physical products (tax returns), process developing (services, education, communications) and ICT (customer applications and office tools). Money is the scarce resource that they all are competing for. Without true leadership and solid vision sub-optimization is a real threat.

Organizations and decision making must be built on interaction. Sharing knowledge is essential. Collaborative tools and a new mindset enable Enterprise 2.0 and Society 2.0, accordingly.

Becoming a knowledge worker does call for a small revolution.

What then happens is nothing but magic, as Oscar Berg, a net friend of mine, beautifully put it: It's actually pretty simple.

Previously on new ways to work:
Work 2.0 comes with a revolution
Work 2.0 is collaborative
On the way to Information Society

Too big to fail?

Recent Fiscal Times introduced me with Pres. Reagan's former budget director David Stockman. This "enfant terrible" shocked in his time by admitting: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers’’.

Our public sector is now in the phase of building bigger and bigger entities of services. In doing so, I've come up with a similar thought.

Economy of scales may also carry a side effect. As things grow bigger, the number of those who can really understand what is going on grows smaller. Failures and misbehaviors do slip through, giving room to delusions of being too big to fail, so victorious nothing can harm us anymore.

In service chains covering the whole of society also their financies tend to complicate.

Open economy and eternal growth

In the times of regulation the economical ecosystem was (somewhat more) controllable. Now the whole world is an open economy, and a rapid growth or shift in consumption in one corner is bound to carry an effect somewhere else. Whoever tries to foresee the future developments judging by the numbers in recent history, truely needs to be quite a genious.

Stockman, like our ministry of finance a few years ago, Mr. Niinistö, calls for debt deflation, downsizing and a rise in national savings.

The principle is chrystal clear, let's just recall our studying years! If you gain 200 and have no assets to liquidate, 200 is what you can spend. After that, you are in the loan market. If you can prove a future revenue, you may discount that promise for a loan at the present. - I believe the whole world now knows, there is an end on that road of getting into debt..

Streamlining processes lowers expenditure

The Finnish way of cutting back public expenditure is to streamline processes. Up until now we've done that because of scarce human resources, a problem common to the aging western world, sometimes even for the benefit of our customer.

However, the next step must be unifying the common pools of data, gathering data only once at the source and sharing those data pools between government agencies. Some of that thinking you may read in my recent post.

The principle of open data (F) adds to transparency of government and optimizes the use of common data. Nowadays there are many government agencies whose funding is arranged solely on the revenues from distributing data. On government budgeting this means blurring image of the entity and complicated finances.

In practice, government agency A has budget means to buy data from B, also a government agency. B, however, is granted government funding for only part of its functions, so it needs to budget on revenue basis. This all results in a financial cobweb, sometimes impossible to audit trail.

In order to make things more reasonable and transparent, the core function of supplying the original data will be funded by the government. Distribution of that data between government agencies would become free of charge, or be done at cost pricing at the most.

We Finns do handle many areas already quite effectively. But I wonder how many brilliant solutions there are in many other areas, just waiting for us to find.

Disclaimer
These thoughts are mine and do not represent views of my employer, Finnish Tax Administration or the Finnish public sector, either.

Productivity: quantity or entity?

In some public sector strategies the aim is to improve the productivity but there is also anticipation of a new leadership.

In public sector offices instructions used to be signed by one man and then all the public and personnel obeyed. Budgeting was supposed to take these offices to a more business-like supervision.

Certain problems still prevailed. There seemed to be little or no connection between the annual actions and their budgeting; change management and project-like financing arose a problem time and time again. One thing is common in both private and public sector: sub-optimization.

Productivity is haute couture in the Aging Europe

Anja Alasilta blogged about result-based rewarding in emergency call centers (F). Quantities and rewarding seem to be an equation with few solutions in all public sector.

Productivity states that its measure should be, say, phone calls per call center worker. That rate will thus get improved only if "You just talk faster to the customer"?!

Tax Administration took the customer in the focus by early 2000's. Niche experts needed to broaden their horizons, and all of a sudden there was no point in counting bits and pieces. The real issue was to track the whole customer process. What happens to the quality of a tax return if our guidance is A, B or C?

We began to talk about the impact of our actions. Instead of viewing our own doings alone, we now search impressiveness in customer's process.

We talk about the new leadership as something that is insightful and participative for our personnel. We are looking for ways to support innovations and their dissemination. How do you do that?

What kind of organization would best support innovation?

Processes are universal

Developers in the 21st century are very privileged. With seats in the front row, we are equipped with apps and tech and knowledge our ancestors only dreamt of.

But what counts the most in our ability to create new, is our ability to apply and enrich what has already been done.

In ICT "that old" often seems to be an impediment. But the deep fulfillment in life comes from beating the difficulties, solving the problems and climbing over the mountains of obstacles.

Enough with the chitchat, what I wanted to share with you today, is a notion I'd call the fourth step in developing eServices.

Developing ICT-based services is like..

Me and my colleague developers and visionaries have often envied the "new" Eastern European countries. They had a fresh start, building everything from the scratch, being able to align everything at once, at least, so it seems. More mature ICT-countries suffer from the burden of the past. Our systems are partly old technique, and combining that old with something new and very different can be tough, costly - sometimes even impossible.

..building with blocks?

What I've learned, in my networks of different branches of the society, is to look at things like blocks or Legos, if you like, and then share the same blocks whenever possible. It seems to me that building something new can only start at the ground level - obviously! For the most efficient outcome, it also needs to be modular, done with blocks.

In public sector, my fear is that we're always trying to build something else.. something that "can't be built with these old blocks, so let's build a brand new something else" - only to find out that we can't get rid of that old one, either, because this new one needs bits and pieces of that old one. Or, that old one still carries a bit of the old process and the new one takes care of only part of the entity.

For higher productivity we would need solutions that truly make it possible to let go of something old. Otherwise our empire keeps eternally expanding.

Data as the smallest joint particle

When you can isolate data into the smallest mutual factor, you can look at any process as a flow of data. The real productivity can only be achieved with wisdom: sharing information, combining processes whenever possible and starting with the customer / citizen. A few great examples on this road to Real-Time Economy



are eInvoicing, Fully Integrated Accounting (F) and Unified Reporting Code.

eInvoicing takes all the information electronically, from system A to system B. It is the green way, the productive way and the most efficient way to work. And, thanks to development alongside SEPA, eInvoicing with its ISO20022 standard will also enable carrying that data of the financial transaction directly to accounting.

Fully Integrated Accounting can thus entail data from the eInvoicing, via an electronic accounting reference. Further on, data on actual payments and the different particles, split payments, of the total amount can also be verified by the bank.

Overlapping use of data needs..

Accounting, however, is only the halfway. Closing the books starts the marathon of a multitude of reporting. Businesses need to file in their tax returns, report to statistics, file their financial statement in the trade register, to name but a few. All those "sub-processes" demand skills and further calculations.

Now, with our previous thought of joint data as building blocks, Unified Reporting Code (F) has now split certain items of information into smaller fragments in a way that enables more automatic reporting in Finland.

..harmonization of concepts

Essential blocks are the steps toward more Real-Time Economy and higher productivity. What public sector needs to do and has now started to do, is unifying its core concepts. Definitions and meanings must be unified, in order to ICT to co-work, mingle and be integrated.

With meta data, relations and data models taken care of, a real ontology will one day enable semantic web and enormous savings in overlapping workload, vain searches and loss of information.

In the meanwhile - let's work together.

Work 2.0 comes with a revolution

Our minister of communications Suvi Lindén blogged (in Finnish) Arjen tietoyhteiskunta on building the information society, responsibilities of her ministry and accountability.

The National Audit Office (NAO) wrote in its surveillance report 9.6.2010 (F) about the missing results in information society.

For some reason we're good at planning, strategies and all that other stuff on paper - but we don't seem to be able to move on to concrete results. What's stopping us?

The missing communications

NAO pointed out the missing communications: " The site Arjentietoyhteiskunta.fi (F, some content also in English) has been updated quite passively and there is no information on the work of different working groups." (translation mine)

I'd point out missing target groups, too. My experience is that a new site only comes to my knowledge in three ways:

a friend recommends it to you

it pops up in Google results (no matter what you search)

the link has appeared on one of the sites you visit regularly

These three need to be taken care of in communications. Of course, things are already quite a lot more "findable" and open than just a few years back.

I can still recall the day Ota kantaa (F) was introduced in our office. What a thrill: this is the beginning of an new, open era! But then, the discussions grew thinner and thinner. The topics stayed somewhat distant (even for a fellow civil servant). So what can you do; if it's not your thing, there is nothing that would draw you back.

Today the site looks good and the topics are interesting. Moderated discussions are off, at the moment.. Anyway, let's take a look (at the links that unfortunately are solely in Finnish).

"Discussion is closed" -page has a link to .. project site.. at the site of the Prime Minister's Office. There's a loooongish text.. And there! On the right you have Read more -link to.. a third page, with a pdf, press release and - this is good - a video release.. And on the menu bar on your left there's the Web discussions -link.. Nope. Nothing new there: it takes us back to the press releases..

Although I pretend to be pointing out things with my finger, my wish is that together we are able to improve the user experience on these sites. It's no good to seminate links and web pages unless the entity is meaningful and takes the surfer to the goal that has been promised.

Do I have all the Right Answers? Of course not. But I do want us to begin the search for the better together. The main thing is to talk about all this, so that more and more citizens find in to our mutual search.

Missing openness in communications

Communications in public sector is missing timeliness and openness. It often feels like the only signals of life are official releases (missing the concreteness) or registered requests for official statement on this or that. The subsidiaries then come to attention and start churning out the official mumbo jumbo with high respect.. Is this level of interaction acceptable in 2010's?

On the other hand, openness and activity are on the rise in the Facebook. A few hundred fans support Vertti, virtual master of the Ubiquitous Information Society Facebook page (F).

The person / function / ministry behind this Vertti creature is quite bashful: he or she doesn't want to come out. (THE topic at the moment: should public sector officers give out their names in the social media or not).

On this page you can discuss anything about the information society. Do share your suggestions, ideas; give a prop, challenge us, make a comment or an argument. The forum is yours. -Facebook - Data (F, translation mine)

Quite an encouraging message! Yes please, I'd be happy to participate. Here are a few top links I've found eg. on Gov2. Are you guys with me; or what do you think? No answer. Silence. For some reason Vertti really is shy.. Perhaps we haven't been introduced properly?

I can't help it: I would so love it if the Official Oracle of the site would, in the spirit of the social media, make even a small nod stating: "I heard you". Because, that is the only way to have a dialogue. I talk - then you - then I respond - your turn.. connecting, communicating!

We must remember, though, that IRL (in real life), all the representative meetings between different ministries or boards are still far from spontaneous communication. It is perhaps the tradition (not noblesse) that obliges civil servants to behave like a bunch of mummies at a cocktail party. Or, even worse, like in a play where loyal servants race to praise the prevailing circumstances as if there is nothing to improve anywhere in life..

Just like in that fairytale of the Emperor's New Clothes! Only.. if it's not proper to point out the failures, there will be no change.

For a revolution you need..

It's not that we don't have networks: we do know each other, we do business together. Email is floating with stuff to and fro. The point is that it is oddly missing the hottest topics, the ones that are in the middle of the change and demand crowdsourcing in order to improve further.

Is it possible that the civil servants still don't dare to communicate in a less official way? "I have no authority to be the one to talk about it, yet", is that it? There are just the home page to be updated in a somewhat passive way and the official press release to be published.

Why? Is it unclear responsibilities? Undefined content? Lack of courage? I say, Work 2.0 needs a revolution for

Civil servants to have courage for unofficial communication

Platforms to entail sharing (Like this, Share this)

Networks to work together intentionally

Communications to become continuous: no pain, no gain!

Without the new approach, communications is like a relay where no one told the runners whether they're running 4x100 or 4x400 tracks. Bound to drop the baton, eh?

Disclaimer
This writing is an intentional wake up call. Even though I've *gathered this evidence* as a representative of my employer, the opinions and poking questions are mine and mine alone. Thus this post does not represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer.