Together with Ali Guenduez and co-authors, we just published a new article on the institutional work that smart city managers conduct. The smart city concept itself is in practice mostly a buzzword and under its umbrella, many different types of transformation efforts are summarized. While we know a lot about the theoretical framework and the projects that are publicly funded, we know relatively little about the actual work that public managers have to do internally to implement smart city initiatives:
From interviews with international smart city managers, we identified three different types of institutional work practices:
1) disruption, especially to increase support for alternative processes, tools, methods, and ways of working, 2) creation to foster innovation, strengthen citizen-centricity, build capacity, encourage the use of technology and data, mobilize resources and support, collaborate and build networks, legitimate smart city development, and 3) maintenance: adhere to existing power structures and rule systems, enable the continuous use of the existing IT infrastructure, and reproduce existing norms and belief systems.
The article is available in open access format at the journal of Urban Governance:
New article alert! I am happy to share my sole-authored article titled “Social Affordances of Agile Governance”. It was published today in the journal Public Administration Review.
In this article, I use insights from civil servants who are asked to implement agile project management practices and combine them with their administrative routines. This is a highly relevant topic in several countries. In the German context even more so: the current coalition agreement states specifically that the German public administrations will become more agile: “The public sector should become more agile and digital. It must focus on interdisciplinary and creative solutions to problems. We will consistently think from a user perspective. We want to overcome silo thinking and will equip permanent cross-departmental and cross-agency agile project teams and innovation units with specific competencies. We will enshrine proactive administrative action in law through application-free and automated procedures.” In addition over 11,000 municipalities are supposed to implement the agile governance model. Other countries are working on similar public management modernization efforts.
It is therefore important to understand how line-based organizations with bureaucratic work routines can integrate agile work practices. What is necessary is to understand the opportunities for different ways of working. I therefore use the concept of social affordances which focuses on exactly these perceptions of the positive effects that a new behavior can have on the work environment. Next, I generated focus group data in one city from all stakeholders to extract the perceived, hidden, and false affordance to agile governance and theorize how the findings might apply to other public administrations in which a similar phenomenon is represented.
You can download the paper for free here. Please use it for your own work. The full citation is at the moment: Mergel, Ines (2023): Social Affordances of Agile Governance, in: Public Administration Review, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/puar.13787.
The Agile and Digital Governance Research Colloquium continues during the winter semester 2023-2024. Feel free to sign up to our mailing list here.
The research colloquium is again co-organized by Greta Nasi (Bocconi University, Italy), Rainer Kattel and David Eaves (UCL, UK), and M Jae Moon (Yonsei University, South Korea). Everyone is welcome to join us!
📚 This week, I participated in a book sprint for a new co-authored book I am working on with two colleagues from the University of Konstanz. A writing trainer guided us through the process. We adopted the Scrum roles: developers as the editorial/author team, a project manager as the Scrum master who timeboxed us.
📑 The sprint started with a meeting to agree on how we wanted to work together as a team. We then worked on the manuscript during the writing times, editorial meetings, work meetings, and reviews of what we accomplished and what we needed to do next. In each phase, we adopted specific roles and tasks.
🤼♂️ At the end of each day, we conducted a retrospective about our individual and team progress.
💥 The big accomplishment: at the end of the (short) 2-day book sprint, we submitted the exposé of our book idea to the publisher.
My research group, the “Digital Governance Lab” at the University of Konstanz has an Instagram page now. We are posting about our research group members, the newest presentations and publications, as well as about some of the agile teaching innovations.
If you are interested in using our free, open educational resource “Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age” syllabus in your own class, come join us for our 5th masterclass. Sign up here!
We set out to understand how the newest wave of the implementation and use of technologies in public administrations is actually digitally transforming their processes. Our expectation was that there must be transformative change that is happening and that we can trace this is in the existing research published in academic journals.
For that purpose, we analyzed the empirical evidence and included a total of 164 articles. Our aim was to trace the type of change that is digitally induced in public administrations. However, the surprising finding is that 2/3 can only be labeled as incremental change and only 1/3 can potentially be labeled as transformative change.
Based on this analytical exercise, we developed a theoretical framework that shows how digital transformation can be studied in public administrations.
We are happy to announce the start of the “Agile and Digital Governance Research Colloquium“.
Together with Professor Greta Nasi (Bocconi University), Professors Rainer Kattel and David Eaves (UCL), and Professor Jae Moon (Yonsei University), I am collaborating over the next few months to create a forum in which we can share our newest research and discuss them in a constructive way.
We will circulate the papers a week ahead of time and will assign a discussant to each paper. That might be one of us, in case the paper falls into our area of expertise, or we will recruit someone from our network to provide helpful feedback.
You can see the lineup of inaugural speakers in the attached poster.
Robert Krimmer and I brainstormed about the differences between Germany and Estonia and summarized our ideas in an article for practitioners that was published in “Innovative Verwaltung” earlier this years.
What Germany Can Learn from Estonia’s Transformation
In research and practice, the administrative context in Germany is often regarded as too special for Germany to be able to learn anything about the digital transformation of administration from countries like Estonia. This article questions whether this is really true.
More than 900 German delegations have visited the e-Briefing Center in Estonia to learn how digital transformation of administrative processes can work. However, delegations from Germany are already legendary in Estonia. The colleagues who prepare the delegation visits joke in advance: “The Germans always make the same exclamations: We can’t do that anyway! We’re not allowed to do that! They can only do that because they are so small! If we could have started over on a greenfield site, …!”
Back home, digital tourism seems to be manifesting itself in precisely the opposite way than expected: So far, only a few citizen services in Germany have been digitally transformed. The digital provision of the 575 administrative processes cannot be implemented by the end of 2022, and in general, a mood of being overwhelmed by the pressure to digitize is emerging. Germany, as one of the richest industrialized countries, is a leader in Industry 4.0, but prevents implementation by allowing itself long coordination processes and thus slipping further down the e-government rankings every year. Because of this obvious discrepancy, we want to shed light on what Germany could really learn from Estonia.
De-bureaucratization in practice: “Keep it simple, stupid! German delegations often experience a “shock-and-awe” treatment when they hear in the Estonian e-briefing center that all administrative processes are now digitalized. As a German administrative person, one often experiences this as digital Disneyland. It’s hard to imagine that so much magic could ever find its way into German offices. German data protection is often the killer argument. A “golden plating” is expected within the framework of Estonia’s own zero-error tolerance, which it introduced a long time ago. But what exactly is behind this? Estonia learned early on from the mistakes of its “big brother” Finland and acted from the outset according to the motto “Keep it simple, stupid!” A good example is the per diem rules for travel abroad: Here, a flat rate of 50 Euro per day applies. The effort is easy to manage and there are no exceptions. Similar is the case of tax filing, which for most Estonians is sent out pre-filled by the tax office and only needs to be confirmed by SMS. This de-bureaucratization is done hardcore with simple digital processes, no exceptions. The result: Data structures have also been simplified.
This is quite different in the German administration, where processes and their implementation have become more complex with each new exception. This has resulted in a legacy structure that can no longer be overlooked, and which apparently needs years to be cast in digital processes. With their flagship digitization project, the Diia mobile app, the Ukrainians are also focusing on simplification: First, MVPs (short for Minimum Viable Product) are tried out. The aim is to find out what is needed in order to be able to start simply on a greenfield site. The existing processes are then checked for their digital suitability and, if necessary, adapted. The German reaction: “We’re not allowed to do that anyway.” If the OZG remains as it is, around 20,000 decisions will have to be made per process, and we will still have decades to start. Here, the German administration can take its cue from the Estonians ‘ Zero Bureaucracy’ initiative and bring about targeted efficiency through simplification. In Estonia, this has led to the Accelerate Estonia Project, which has been able to systematically reduce administrative burdens through Reporting 3.0. This is an approach that could also be of interest to the Standards Control Council, for example.
Small does not mean that other countries cannot learn from the principles It is repeatedly emphasized that Estonia was only able to implement the digital transformation because its population is only as large as that of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg. In fact, Germany, as part of its own history – the Wende and reunification – also had the opportunity to redesign bureaucracy and administrative processes on a greenfield site just two years earlier. Both countries started with so-called legacy systems: Estonia rigorously rethought Russian processes, and Germany, on the other hand, decided that the West German approach should remain the correct one and transferred all existing administrative processes and regulations to the new states. In fact, Estonia had taken Germany as a model at the time and even pegged the Estonian kroon to the German mark. In the meantime, however, Germany has become a negative example, an impression that seems to be reinforced by each of the more than 900 visits.
Consistent user-centeredness in digitization projects In Estonia, every investment in and further development of digital services now begins with a survey of actual usage. Only those processes that have a high number of hits are consistently developed further. How is this approach possible? The prerequisite for this is a digital identity, which Estonians can use to carry out online interactions. This results in user statistics that can be analyzed anonymously: The average Estonian has made around 1,000 digital signatures in their lifetime, which corresponds to around 50 digital signatures a year. This shows that digital identities are not only used for administrative purposes, but also for business processes. Only actual use leads to the realization of which digital services are interesting and useful for citizens, precisely because they are regularly carried out online. And only the data generated by the users themselves and its evaluation by the administration puts Estonians in a position to recognize the needs of the users. In this way, the very low level of financial resources compared to Germany and the time required are focused on highly effective administrative services and processes.
However, the success of administrative digitization is not just an existing digital process for the sake of digitization: Administrative digitization leads to profound societal improvements. The introduction of user-centered, flexible parental benefits has led to a more equal society in Estonia: Usability Labs figured out how to rethink life events using proactive e-government services. The result was the flexibilization of parental allowance, which parents can use during the first year of the child’s life either to stay at home or to pay a nanny and continue working flexibly (for 1 year, e.g., working from home 1 day per week). This creates a high level of family-friendliness and allows women in particular – if they so wish – to remain in their jobs and flexibly reconcile family and career. With a rigorous reduction of administrative hurdles, parents can, in agreement with the employer, change the parental allowance administratively until the 30th of the previous month. According to a recent study, this approach has led to a ten percent reduction in the gender pay gap.
Estonians are using the high media impact of both administrative failures and successes to improve their feedback loops. One example of this is the successfully implemented online elections in Estonia: what initially convinced only two percent of voters is now used by around half of eligible citizens to cast their ballots 15 years later. Often, it was online voting that allowed citizens to try out their identities for the first time. It was “the” interesting application that aroused the population’s curiosity to try out digital.
Incentivize the use of online public services Like Denmark, Estonia started early providing incentives for citizens to start using online administrative services. For example, it pushed the use of eID in banking, requiring all transactions of 400 euros or more to be made online. This useful application has convinced first-time users recruited through online election to continue using digital identity for administrative procedures on a regular basis. The successes in online banking have led to the digital administrative infrastructure being equally securely established, and all basic registers being able to exchange data securely with each other. This required the digital recording of land register entries, company registers, civil registers, and other registers. While Germany is only just beginning to modernize its registers, Estonia has already thought ahead and docked the corresponding citizen services so that the administrations can also use digital registers.
Enabling citizen access worldwide
The Estonian principle of administrative digitization is based on the fact that Estonia has been occupied several times in its history by Russia and Germany, among others. Digitization, therefore, has a very pragmatic component for Estonia: Digital identities and access to digital administrative services should also be available in the diaspora. In the event of repeated occupation, as is currently happening in Ukraine, or during potential oppression, citizens should be able to retain their civic identity as Estonians, even across national borders. o this end, Estonia established data embassies in Luxembourg at an early stage of development. Estonian children can attend Estonian Sunday schools anywhere in the world. Thus, citizen services are not physically bound to one place but are accessible worldwide.
History teaches that many of the pretended exclamations of impossibility are not so impossible after all, but have come about primarily through conscious decisions, actions, and path dependencies that can be derived from them. Nevertheless, the basic evil of German administration remains: despite the now-closed OZG digital labs, German administration fails to rethink processes from the ground up without asking itself the question: How can we make it simpler for ourselves and for citizens, so that we do not prevent access to citizen services, but simplify it?
Five learnings from Estonia
So what does it take to implement a digital transformation similar to that in Estonia in Germany?
Create a digital mentality and digital identities: It must be ensured that everything (i.e., every subject and object) can be clearly identified numerically. This applies to people, buildings, companies, and the streets. Germany’s identity management system, which keeps assigning new tax numbers when people move to different tax offices, must end. This must be accomplished in a way that is comprehensible and transparent in terms of data protection. To achieve this, however, it is necessary to understand how computers and databases work to establish trust among citizens.
Register modernization means that registers have unique data, and there is no reason why non-personal data should not be publicly available. For example, the same streets must be written in the same way, and the data must become interchangeable through common interfaces.
Designing user-centric applications that are also used on a daily basis and use the same infrastructure as banks’ digital services.
Identify and focus on high-traffic services rather than 100 percent total implementation of all OZG services to create feedback loops, so that lessons can be learned from the services that are used frequently and willingly to make the technology operational.
There is also a need to simplify administrative processes so that they can be easily implemented digitally, rather than being difficult to digitize.
Together with Noella Edelmann, I published a new article that looks at the types of competencies that are necessary to support the digital transformation of public administrations. In this article, we talked to Austrian digital transformation experts. Austrian is an interesting case because they rank relatively high on the DESI index and invest in lots of innovative “lighthouse” projects that receive prices and awards.
Here is the abstract of the article:
Digitalisation has changed society, and, as a result, public administrations are required to undergo significant changes to satisfy emergent societal needs. These changes impact all areas of the public sector, including the development and provision of digital services, the design of processes, and the development of policy. To implement the digital strategies and transformation requirements, public administrations must rethink the competences that their workforce as well as the external stakeholders may need. To understand how one nation implements its digital strategy and upskills its civil servants, we conducted a qualitative analysis of 41 Austrian expert interviews. The research shows that different stakeholders require a variety of competences to participate in the digital transformation of its processes and services. The results demonstrate the high level of diversity and the need for a holistic approach to tackle the complexity of the digital public sector, where leadership plays the most important role. In addition, the study shows that the use of competence frameworks for measurement and monitoring needs to be adapted to the local context.
Agile in the Public Sector 