- December 5, 2018
- A New City O/S
This is part of a series of features to highlight key lessons from A New City O/S by Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman.
Key Insights
- Government has long been construed as a highly routinized organization, slow to evolve with shifting conditions. A new digital O/S is agile and responds quickly with rapid-cycle processes that produce dramatic benefits.
- Few areas demonstrate the need to “act in time” as much as regulation. Currently, permits, licenses, and inspections are handled with check-the-box protocols and rely on systems that ultimately cost citizens both money and time.
- Regulation is essentially about assessing risk, and old systems are inefficient at discerning different risks. Using new technology and a distributed approach allows government to identify risk more accurately and quickly, thus improving health outcomes for citizens.
- The new O/S calls for a pivot from uniform approaches to a system of data analytic tools that can identify problems, potentially concurrent work on requests, automating data sources, and support for frontline workers making the decisions.
Quick Tips
- Cities should apply a metric of elapsed time spent and factor this into productivity reports.
- A new system called Reg✓, based on TSA PreCheck, should be instituted to evaluate permit seekers such that official reviewers can fast track those with good histories and less complex requests.
- Various opportunities present a way to hybridize existing regulations with reputation-based sharing economy information sources.
Potential Problems
- Regulatory processes require periodic review, especially those captive to strong interest groups that create barriers to entry.
- Regulations that are too high or too onerous will foster noncompliance.
Please visit https://anewcityos.org for more.