City of Burlington, Vermont

As I’ve written in the past, buying new software or an entire new system thinking it is going to solve your current problems is a recipe for missed expectations. Technology alone will not, and cannot, solve your organization’s problems. So, if technology alone isn’t the answer and is only a tool in the process, what can we do to improve public services? The answer is aligning the people of the organization with better processes that, when working together, can leverage the technology for better outcomes. This isn’t easy because change isn’t easy. Change is uncomfortable, but the only way we can grow, the only real way to improve, is to go through that discomfort, examine and update our processes and coach people through the change. In the end, that alignment of technology, people and process will show results. So how do you get there?

First, it is important to address your processes from the perspective of who they are supposed to be serving: your residents. It is so important to include all your stakeholders when looking at your processes. What works? What doesn’t? What must be done legally? What can we change? Answer all those questions from the perspective of your stakeholders. Work at understanding their requirements. Work to create more consistency across your organization. Then, make the changes to your processes. Remember, success is more likely if you don’t customize the software you’re trying to use– configure, don’t customize.

In reality though, this is only the beginning. What needs to happen next? A great model for this kind of alignment is ‘The Path to Public Innovation Playbook,’ developed by the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University. In that playbook, municipalities looking to improve public services follow the path of aim to design to activate to sustain. Looking at your processes, figuring out where they aren’t working and designing them with the people that use them would be considered the aim and design stages. Now the hard part comes in: activating your changes and sustaining them.

When everything is truly aligned, your government will be easier to work with, more responsive and deliver better services more effectively.

With this approach, people are central to success. If you engage people to help define and design your process, it is even more critical that those people are involved in activating those changes. Employees are key here, and so are residents. This is where the technology and processes get tested against reality. Building understanding and ownership around the changes is important. Getting stakeholder feedback is important. Changes may make a lot of areas better, but they can also make things worse. And digitizing a bad processes doesn’t make it better; it just makes it digital. Involving the people who will use the new technology in testing, training and continuously improving is probably the single most important thing you can do to ensure you are successfully aligning the people, process and technology.

The alignment effort doesn’t stop once you’ve released the new technology with the new processes. Sustaining that change means regularly revisiting the changes. Getting feedback from the users like residents and employees, looking at metrics and making changes that continually improve the processes and the outcomes. The process should define what needs to happen, people on both sides of the process should know and own, their part and technology should make all this easier to accomplish.

Ultimately, we need to make sure the technology is just a tool, not the transformation itself. Aligning technology, people and processes is not about becoming a more technologically advanced organization, though that is often a result. It is, though, about becoming a better public-service organization. Our goal, then, should not be the technology itself, but how we align that technology with the people and the processes in such a way as to deliver a government that works better for the people, we serve. When everything is truly aligned, your government will be easier to work with, more responsive and deliver better services more effectively. True alignment is the real measure of a modern municipality.