Small ideas with big consequences

Over the next few days, we’ll be sharing what makes us tick. When we launched FWD50, we put together a manifesto describing what we thought digital government could be, and how we wanted to shape the content of the event. You can read the whole thing on our About page.

Government has finite attention and willpower to effect technological change. To make the best use of our resources, we need to pick simple changes that have wide-ranging beneficial consequences.

Startups and the MVP

In the world of startups, the Minimum Viable Product is king. Basically, it boils down to this: Do the least work to test the biggest risk.

When Localmind, a local information startup later acquired by AirBnB, was launched, they had a single big idea: Ask strangers questions about a place. One of the big risks they identified was whether people would answer a question from strangers. Rather than writing lots of code, or investing in a marketing launch, they took to Twitter. They searched for Tweets from Times Square, and asked total strangers questions: Where could they get coffee? Was there wifi nearby? What was the weather like? Nearly everyone responded. They’d quantified one of their big assumptions in a single day, and were able to move forward.

Everyone forgets the tradeoff between minimum and viable, however. It’s harder than it sounds, because if you don’t build enough of something, you aren’t really testing it. And if you’re building too much of something, you aren’t learning and adapting fast enough. Build only part of a car, and you can’t test it. So the devil’s in the details.

Much of the design of a service has to be about identifying the biggest risks—and not just in the technology, but in the surrounding work of promotion, adoption, resilience, documentation, analytics, and ongoing support.

What’s viable enough for government?

Governments are held to a higher standard for “minimal” than startups, of course. Their systems must be accessible, reliable, transparent, and created in a fair, competitive environment. This necessarily leads to longer design, procurement, and deployment cycles. But if governments are to truly capitalize on the promise of cloud computing, agile delivery, continuous deployment, Devops, and other innovations from the startup world, they need to think in terms of MVPs.

The philosopher Gottfried Liebniz offers an answer. He was once asked why — if God was good — there was evil in the world. His reply is known as the Collect data only once

For an example of this, consider the impact of the Estonian government’s data collection policy, and its far-reaching effects. By making it illegal for the government to collect a piece of data on a citizen more than once, they forced government agencies to implement secure, consistent data exchanges. They also streamlined tax preparation, because the government can’t ask citizens how much they earned — they’ve already been told thanks to employer pay stubs.

As a result, the average Estonian files taxes in under 20 minutes.

More than just bits

Digital government isn’t just about turning atoms into bits. Atoms have cost, and friction. They can’t be copied infinitely, which means they can’t be personalized and adapted to each citizen. Digital systems — from email, to web interfaces, to chatbots — can tailor their behaviour to every person. They can adapt. So simply replacing a static physical interface (such as a form) with a digital one might make the form cheaper to deliver, but it won’t address the underlying issues.

On the other hand, a digital form that can adapt and experiment means the government can learn what’s working far more quickly. Every time the service is used becomes grist for the mill of the next version. We’re not delivering a service once — we’re delivering it continuously. When you think like this, you realize that it’s never too early to ship the first version of something, because you’re simply starting the process.

In Estonia’s case, a digital tax form would have been a replacement. No tax form was transformational. As we rethink what’s possible, we need to have discussions about minimalism, viability, and small improvements with vast consequences.

(And don’t take it from us. The CIO of Estonia, Siim Sikkut, is coming to FWD50 in November for a workshop and a talk on the country’s digital miracle.)