Transparency

On January 15^th, I was part of a panel for the Countdown show hosted by Francis Rose on WFED, 1500 AM, here in Washington DC.

The premise of the panel is that every Friday, Francis asks three people from the ‘community’ to each select three news stories having something to do with the Federal Government. I selected three Information Technology related stories.

You can hear the panel which consisted of myself, Jon Desenberg, President of the Performance Institute, and Jeff Sural, a former DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary, and now of Alston and Bird at:

http://www.wfed.com/index.php?nid=17&sid=1865007

I thought I would summarize and perhaps expand a bit on why I picked those stories and what they meant, at least to me. In this entry, I talk about the first story:

Transparency, public input to guide IT policies

http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20100113/ACQUISITION03/1130306/1009/ACQUISITION

 The emphasis of the current Administration, and in particular CIO El Jefe Vivek Kundra, has been great. As many have said sunlight is the best disinfectant.

But like many good things, transparency has some complexity to it.

The first complexity is we can use the term transparency to apply to at least three different kinds of data.

We want to expose data that the Government collects and potentially uses in a transparent fashion. The value of doing this is that we increase the chances of getting public input as to the quality or makeup of the data. In addition, by exposing the data we allow people and various organizations to make use of it quickly. The Apps for Democracy competitions, http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/, ended up with applications that took government data, used the data very creatively in ways that were unlikely to happen anytime soon.

We also want to expose data about the processes the Government is following. Many of the dashboards that were created through the leadership of Karen Evans under President Bush as part of the President’s Management Agenda, and adapted, modified, and expanded under President Obama, aim to accomplish just that. By using the classical green/yellow/red ratings or something similar it is possible to capture the status of various Government projects, whether they are meeting schedule and/or spending goals, and help to identify those that need fixing.

Finally, we want to expose data about the results of the Government programs and their associated impact. In fact, ultimately it is this kind of transparency that can have the greatest impact. The goal of transparency is not; if I may use sort of an anti-tautology, just to be transparent. It is to allow something good to happen that would not have happened without being transparent. It is the ‘something good’ we are aiming for; transparency is often just the intermediate step.

One other point regarding making data available, as Vivek has pointed out, if you are going to expose all of this data on the web it is important to format the data in a way that external users can easily make use of it, download it, and manipulate it. There are the associated issues of data standardization and consistency which I will talk about sometime in the future.

The second complexity is that what is good for the organization is often not so good by those we depend on accomplishing that better good.  Creating the systems or enhancing the data flow to expose it on the web takes resources. I know of few if any agencies or departments who feel they have lots of resources sitting around, whether we are talking about money or staff time. When investments are made to accomplish these important projects it typically means something else is not getting done. However important these are (and I think they are very important), the positive impact may not be immediately obvious while the incremental pain of not completing other projects will hit immediately.

Also, when first exposing data, there almost inevitably is going to be some that will be embarrassing for one reason or another. For example, data may be made available before it is actually clean; or it will become obvious that some of the data sets are incomplete or poorly constructed. While the result may be positive, cleaning and creating better data, the short-term impact of news articles or in a worse case, Congressional testimony, is not a way to have a great day.

The point of this is that not only is it important to establish goals and set deadlines, but also to at least spend a little bit of time thinking through to the extent possible about the benefits that will accrue to the people responsible for the implementation. The more the career staff support these initiatives because they think it is a good idea, as opposed to just a required one, the better the results will be.

The third complexity is how to keep in place these improvements over time. I would suggest there are two important ways to make it more likely to stick.

The first is to continue what is already being pushed, publishing the data externally in the most public fashion as possible. If data is exposed to the public and external interest groups, then when the data becomes stale or disappears altogether, someone is likely to raise a public red flag.

The second is to make sure as much of the data is created and published automatically as part of the normal course of events. This is as opposed to having a staff person take data and manually manipulate it and create some kind of table. The reason is that over time if the data is created manually, eventually the staff creating the data will get reassigned to some higher priority project. This is particularly true when there is significant change in senior staff. If the system produces the data automatically then it will stay current and available.

What I see happening thus far at locations such as http://www.data.gov/ and as exemplified by the Open Government Directive, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment/, are very positive steps in increasing the interaction between Government agencies and their external stakeholders. It will be important to pay attention to the operational details to keep these projects moving forward.