Crossing the Great Divide

Peter Drucker in The New Realities wrote, "Even in the flattest landscape there are passes where the road first climbs to a peak and then descends into a new valley. Most of these passes are only topography, with little or no difference in climate, language or culture between the valleys on either side. But some passes are different. They are true divides ... History, too, knows such divides. They also tend to be unspectacular and are rarely much noticed at the time. But once these divides have been crossed, the social and political landscape changes. Social and political climate is different and so is social and political language. There are new realities."

By the year 2020 the world will most surely be looking backward across the last great divide -- the information and communications revolution. Historians will be evaluating the successes of those public and private organizations that capably planned their future. Likewise, they will evaluate the failures of those organizations unable to unlock the full potential of the tools of change.

Neil Postman, New York University communications theorist, in his 1993 book, Technopoly, asks, "Can a nation preserve its history, originality and humanity by submitting itself totally to the sovereignty of a technological thoughtworld?"

In contrast, I question whether a nation which has grown to depend more heavily on its governmental institutions than on individual responsibilities -- and which moves too quickly to respond to the availability of new high-tech tools without long-term, business-based planning -- can survive the journey across Drucker's "great divide."

It has taken us a half-century of post-World War II malaise, bureaucratic compartmentalization, and process orientation to reach the stage of government organizational ineffectiveness so readily apparent today. Simple government services, carried out by competent, caring public employees, can take days, weeks or even months from request to delivery. Lack of communication and common interest between departments often further confuse the service delivery process.

REAL CHANGE
Given the depth and breadth of our bureaucracies, it is reasonable to assume the reengineering movement of the 1990s will not result in real change in the near term. One hopes, however, that emerging commitment to real change will provide many successes for historical evaluation. Such commitment must be created now among dedicated and informed public servants. Those who set policy and those who carry it out must soon begin to show results.

In a 1993 speech before the San Diego Communications Council , Michael J. O'Neill, past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and author of Roar of the Crowd, stated "Popular expectations, stimulated by mass media and market-driven consumerism soar beyond fulfillment. Aroused masses, awakened at last to their value and power, demand more than governments are prepared to deliver ...

"The velocity, volume and sheer complexity of change are pushing life to the limits of personal and social tolerance. For the communications revolution not only spins the world faster than ever before, it also shortens the time for social adjustment. Great transitions that once took centuries are now compressed into decades, years or even months. The result is that troubling new trends now have to be caught at much earlier stages if there is to be any chance of altering their course and affecting outcomes. Yet again, just as in the 1920s, the institutions of society respond too slowly and too little."

Today we are moving at warp speed into some very ill-defined concept of what government should be. As we hurtle ourselves into the technological revolution, we must rethink and redefine the most valuable constructs of government as a foundation for change. Reality dictates that without committed government leaders shaping this quick journey, it is likely bad government systems will deliver today's public services at tomorrow's lightening speed, through superficial application of technology.

New tools afford us the opportunity to build significant, new infrastructure on top of an already massively ineffective infrastructure, trapping us during this next quarter of a century into more entrenched bureaucratic process -- more debt and less service. Or, these new tools afford us the opportunity to remove and replace the old, crumbling foundation with a restored structure capable of delivering needed supportive services, but focused on preserving the personal freedoms and sense of community deemed necessary by our founding fathers.

EDUCATION
The public's questions about expenditures for goods and services that do not add value to the end product of government should already be changing the definition of traditional government institutions. Yet few politicians and public administrators are approaching the issue from this business perspective. While public debate ensues on social issues, internal governmental process remains apart from open and challenging discussion.

In our educational institutions, for example, in spite of limited financial resources and inadequate educational results for today's families, we continue to plan, build and maintain massive physical plants. Costs inherent in managing this physical infrastructure drain the direct education dollar. In some communities the budgets for duplicative administrations, grounds maintenance, correcting disrepair and vandalism, installing crowd control and weapon detection systems -- and the cost of busing students across cities and from remote rural areas to central educational facilities -- are higher than the direct costs of providing education at the same facility.

We're facing an ever-increasing dilemma in education about how to produce highly skilled, thinking citizens capable of continuing to guide this great experiment of a nation. Yet most of our resources go to processes which are extraneous to individual learning.

Until we rethink the most basic delivery mechanisms and properly address how to best use our educational resources to meet the basic mission, we will continue to apply technological tools wrongly, and will fail to produce the desperately needed educational outcome.

We are at a crossroads throughout government. It's hard to extrapolate the potential of exponential change if our existing bureaucracies can be guided toward redesigned systems supported by proper use of technological advances. Fifteen years ago we were projecting limited acceptance of what was called personal computing. The Internet served only the most sophisticated of scientific and military communities. E-mail and fax were new concepts to imagine, and large-scale, broad-based, end user computing was a gleam in the eye of only the bravest futurists. Today, use of these technologies is commonplace, except in the depths of government's internal processes where they could yield the greatest results.

The last two years have witnessed remarkable progress, but applications to date are narrow, serious risk-takers are few, and for the most part, government leaders who must guide this progress in the interest of government's customers and stakeholders are poorly informed and poorly skilled. Frequently, only surface issues grab the greatest attention and the greatest investment of money and energy.

However, as the average citizen can access within seconds information databases from auto mechanics to medicine, and retrieve knowledge from library resources around the world, his/her expectation about how government services should be delivered will become more exacting. Momentum will grow for addressing government's business needs differently. Changes in how society works and plays in this new technological environment will by necessity begin to be reflected in how government works.

The challenge of the future is very great. The new technological world, properly applied, has potential for self-fulfillment and restoration of a spirit of community and national cooperation. If our current policy setters are able to divorce themselves from rhetoric on historically unsolvable social issues which serve to divide our diverse nation, and instead focus on moving quickly to replace today's institutions with redefined, efficient and effective government services deemed valuable to the nation as a whole, we will perpetuate this great political experiment, journeying safely to the other side of the great technological divide.

Rita Kidd provides commentary and analysis on human services and other large-scale automation efforts in state and local government. Her experiences as former deputy director of Merced County, Calif.'s Human Services Agency, and as director of MAGIC -- Merced County's welfare automation system -- provide valuable insight into the complexities of welfare automation and approaching welfare reform. She is now a government reengineering consultant residing in Cathey's Valley, Calif. E-mail . Her opinions are her own, and not necessarily those of GT or its editors.