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Civic Innovations

Accountability and the Challenge of Government Technology Reform

In his book “The Unaccountability Machine”, author Dan Davies introduces the idea of an “accountability sink” — a construct where responsibility is deliberately diluted or dispersed so that no single person can easily be blamed for a decision that gets made. This concept can be a useful lens for understanding some of the biggest challenges facing government reform efforts advocated for by those in civic tech – changes that will enable governments to adopt new technologies more quickly and more efficiently.

Intuitively, we understand that accountability is an essential concept for how governments works. But It’s also sometimes why governments can not work so well. A number of key government processes are deliberately engineered to distribute or insulate accountability, as an attempt to protect against bias, favoritism, or potential corruption. But in doing so, these same processes can also create barriers to speed, flexibility, and innovation.

Government procurement processes are often criticized for being labyrinthine, cumbersome, and poorly suited to selecting the best technology partners. And this is fair criticism—these processes often result in outcomes that seem arbitrary or unreasonable. But that’s largely by design. The procurement process is an accountability sink—intentionally so. Its structure is meant to minimize the role of individual discretion in awarding contracts, ensuring selection through formal evaluations of documented past performance, capabilities statements, and structured steps like coding challenges. People often rightly point out that government procurement processes are not set up well to identify talented vendor partners to support government agencies. But they often miss that they are intentionally set up in a way that is meant to be fair and even handed – a structure that reduces individual accountability, and also individual discretion.

Another favorite whipping boy of the civic tech community is the Authority to Operate (ATO) process. This process is structured the way it is for the exact opposite reason—not to dilute accountability, but to pinpoint it. ATO’s ensure that there is a clearly identified individual (the authorizing official) who formally accepts the risk of launching a new system into production. It’s precisely because the ATO process concentrates accountability so sharply that it tends to move so slowly. Authorizing officials have strong incentives to demand detailed documentation of new systems, thorough (sometimes lengthy) reviews, and careful assurances from system owners before signing off. They know that if something goes wrong, they are the ones that will be held accountable.

Both of these examples show how the idea of an accountability sink can help explain why some government processes often seem illogical (or broken, to use a common refrain from the world of civic tech) when viewed purely through the lens of efficiency or innovation. These processes weren’t designed to move fast. They were designed to manage risk, to try and ensure fairness, and provide clear lines of responsibility — critical values in delivering public services.

That’s why reforming these processes can be so hard. It’s not enough to simply make them faster or more streamlined. Any effort to reform these processes must grapple with the fact that these systems are designed intentionally to dilute or concentrate accountability. The difficult, often overlooked part of any reform effort isn’t just simplifying the process. It’s building new processes that maintain the balance of accountability that the old processes were designed with.

Government processes often move slowly, and this can often impact the way in which new digital solutions are adopted by government agencies. However, understanding why processes are structured the way they are is critical if we are going to reform them.  It isn’t accurate to view these processes as “broken,“ they were designed with intention and they work largely as designed.

#AI#CivicTech#government
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Flipboard Tech Desk

Recent news that Amazon has pulled back on datacenter leasing deals has concerned some AI investors - especially on the backs of a similar Microsoft pause. But the company says it's nothing more than "routine capacity management." Read more at @theregister. #Amazon #Microsoft #AI #AWS #Datacenter #Tech #Technology flip.it/YBhYZ0

The Register · Relax, AWS reassessing colo lease talks is just 'routine capacity management'By Dan Robinson
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