The impact of mobile computing devices on Government can be divided into three areas of focus:
- Improving, or at least changing, the nature of IT infrastructure and organizational operations
- Revising the delivery and implementation of Government services
- Changing the relationship of Government to its citizen customers and because of that potentially revising what exactly Government is trying to accomplish.
It is this last issue that I want to briefly touch upon while discussing the term co-creation.
The term co-creation, mostly used in commercial environments, focuses on a firm and customer, together, generating value.
In a sense, this has always been true conceptually. If a company manufactures a tractor, the resulting value is not just the tractor but also the combination of some farmer using the tractor.
In the same way the Internet has influenced many transactional activities, it has done so here also. It was not possible to receive customer input during the design and manufacturing process very easily before the existence of the Internet.
Companies would at least potentially pay attention to customer complaints or comments. They would often do market research and/or conduct polling to attempt an understanding of what customers wanted. They might form customer advisory boards to get input. In all of these cases, the feedback was often after the fact and passive.
With the Internet and the rise of social networking, these relationships changed. At first, this merely meant that customers would react more aggressively and more quickly. The bigger change started when the customer created content started to become part of the offering. For example, while letters to the editor were something that had existed for many years, the comments added to news stories have become part of the news story. These days what customers write on Facebook or tweet about something is often included as part of a news report.
Internet based offerings allowed customers to participate in a more aggressive fashion. The YouTube offering is, in a sense, just a warehouse or display cabinet that allows users to easily showcase their own created videos. Customers create all of the content. Facebook follows a similar model.
Government is just starting to dip its toe into these waters. For example, a number of Government organizations are using crowd sourcing to supplement their offerings. NASA has asked citizens to provide input on Mars exploration; NOAA has an app to crowd source weather reporting where they do not have weather instruments in place or to help differentiate types of weather that instruments have difficulty with (e.g. sleet versus rain).
There is an interesting report relating to this subject produced by the IBM Center for The Business of Government about Engaging Citizens in Co-Creation in Public Services, http://www.businessofgovernment.org/sites/default/files/Engaging%20Citizens%20in%20Co-Creation%20in%20Public%20Service.pdf, which is worth reading.
It the long run, it is this last impact of mobile technology, empowering citizens to be co-creators of Government services, in partnership with Government entities that I find most interesting.