Today, everyone can be instantly connected. There are over a billion Web sites, and no one is in charge of them. Around the globe, walls are down between nations. James Madison was a modern, too. He might have seen the information age as proof that "the extensive republic" is the best form -- precisely because it is inclusive. Nobody has excessive power or, anyway, can get it easily. Special interests, which Madison called "factions," are, as he said, "sown in the nature of man." Ambition, he said, "must counteract ambition." Madison might have concluded that the governance of the Internet is best left to the free market. We need the brilliance of a Madison now to figure out how our governmental institutions, in which delay and obfuscation are veritably a way of life, can function in the information age.
Governors are scouring the country to "silicon-ize" their economy by attracting e-business. But, they also need to gut and re-format management systems for educating our children, find jobs for poor family heads, help families cope, manage medical services for the poor and the elderly, keep tabs on probationers, and monitor the care of abandoned children in foster homes.
Management of public services is the unexplored frontier of the information age. The application of technology is the short suit of state and local governments; these governments are crucial to creating the networks that tie people and communities together -- and make life livable. Unfortunately, the most automated program of most state governments is their lotteries.
In 1998, a group of experts began a "Working Seminar," organized under the auspices of the U.S. Government Accountability Office and the Rockefeller Institute, to study management systems for human services. Originally focused on technology and how computers can link and track human services for needy families, the seminar branched out to consider broader structural and operational reforms of human service systems. Several things became clear. Most importantly, it is very hard to reform human services systems. There are good examples, but not a great many of them. Paraphrasing Tip O'Neil, the business of reforming human service systems is local. Government reform at the local level is intrinsic to the way American domestic public policies are made and executed.
Picking up on the last point, the pluralism of American domestic policy has produced the "siloization" of human services. Fragmentation is built into the heart of American government. In area after area, there are complaints that programs aren't connected, managers of related programs don't know each other, and that the ultimate losers are citizens who have such a hard time dealing with government.
Taking the long view, there is reason to resist hand-wringing about this fragmentation of social policy. Advocates who care about the amounts of aid for the poor and needy often come to realize that the existence of multiple programs is an asset. The more programs there are, the more constituencies they can mobilize to support aid to the needy, a purpose which generally does not have a lot of backing.
It is not easy to effectively integrate human services. But, it is needed. Mark Reagan of the Rockefeller Institute has studied efforts to integrate services in income support programs in local offices in 12 states. One manager told him, "The only people who like change are wet babies." Nonetheless, the leadership, program managers and staff in the offices studied expended time and effort to build better service-delivery systems. They are heroes of information-age governance. While many efforts met with resistance, the best among these managers and staff told us that they would never go back to the old ways of doing business. As Mark put it, "The principal finding of this study is that service integration is not a single strategy involving only caseworker and client interactions. It is a combination of strategies and critical success factors that, while facilitating improved client outcomes through more effective and efficient provision of services, involves changing service delivery networks?connecting the stovepipes, creating true systems."
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Mark Reagan worked for more than 25 years at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. For the last five years, he has been a senior fellow at the Rockefeller Institute. He was the researcher for the 2002 Rockefeller Institute study on service integration in income support programs. The study results were published in a series of case studies and a report that summarizes findings from all of the sites, including analysis of the various strategies implemented at the local level to integrate and coordinate services. They are available at www.rockinst.org/quick_tour/federalism/service_integration.html.
Feedback
Needed: Willingness and CommitmentWell respected government observer Richard Nathan comments that government could indeed make great strides in social service delivery through better use of technology. This reminds me of my literally decade-long effort to effect a simple proposition: that professionals who deal with troubled children could make better decisions if they knew more about the child and his family.
I have argued that school social workers, juvenile probation and police officers, and child welfare workers often operate in isolation, unaware of other problems in the family, or at school, for instance. Before the ubiquity of the Internet, communication of this information was impossible, for it required synchronous contact. After e-mail and then Internet connectivity finally made their way to these offices, security, privacy, and system compatibility became common excuses for officials who requested everyone else's information, but were not willing to give up any of their own. After a decade, when the Internet, middleware, password-protected information, and rule-based access systems took hold, top officials in Indianapolis--often over the objections of their bureaucrats--effectuated a system that, through information sharing, allows human services professionals to more frequently help troubled children.
Nathan has it right, with one major addendum: The power of technology to solve social problems does depend on the willingness and commitment of public officials. Furthermore, this type of investment requires the vision and strength to focus on potential gains, while balancing the demands of more immediate concerns.
Stephen Goldsmith
Director
Innovation in American Government Program
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.
