In a global context marked by “great transitions” – ecological, demographic, digital, migratory, territorial – no area of today's society will be immune to such a far-reaching and impactful transformation.
In the case of the "State-administration" organization, in addition to the legal changes that reforms always entail, I believe that a major transformation will take place in the organizational culture plan under the generic motto "From the State-Silo to the State-Platform", under the pretext, precisely, of the technological and digital transformation that is already there and that will have an exponential development in the near future.
The reform of the State-administration
The reform of the State-administration has many angles of approach, starting from its organic and statutory configuration through, for example, privatization, merger and extinction of services, measures of deconcentration and decentralization, changes in civil service regimes and even , constitutional reforms. Most likely, legislative and regulatory policy will adopt a combination of all these reforms. But that's not what this is about now.
Faced with the Great Technological and Digital Transformation and in view of the new generations of digital natives, a change in organizational culture in the structure and functioning of the State-administration will not be limited to converting an informatics-state into a digital-state, but will seek to convert an organizational culture from an “industrial silo” in an organizational culture to an “interactive platform or turntable”.
In the end, services to the public will not only be offered in multiple technological formats, but also “co-produced with the public” through platform and application engineering appropriate to each situation. Likewise, the financial coverage and price of each service will vary depending on the device used.
We are, however, taking the first steps in this new organizational culture with a more collaborative and distributed root. It is enough to observe the content of the current public debates on administrative decentralization carried out by the Assembly of the Republic on a purely legal-administrative basis, to realize how far we are still from this structural reform. In fact, many obstacles, and so many challenges, are ahead of us. If not, let's see:
– There is, for the time being, no structured thinking or a guide for action, nor do we even know if this will exists within the State-administration at the highest level, despite the existence, in Portugal, of a deputy minister with competence in the area of modernization administrative.
– There is a huge accumulated liability, as in the last 30 years we have frequently used services under the outsourcing which gradually led to the declassification of the services of the State-administration and the professional profiles of the civil service.
– The IT business took the lead, in the form of tenders, awards and public markets; the incremental innovation and associated planned obsolescence are excellent business for the State-administration's IT clientele.
– An aging civil service, with careers and salaries frozen for nearly a decade, conservative in terms of assessment and acquired rights, most likely means that the conditions are not met to welcome a new organizational culture that undermines logic acquired rights and the security of careers in the civil service.
– A new organizational culture based on “collaborative platforms with the crowd” calls into question not only the classic missions of the State-administration, but also the very perimeter of the State's administrative action, and even the very notion of “public function” as they are conventionally conducted and reproduced in the silo model, in addition to implying much more public investment in the digital coverage of the territory.
– One of the central aspects of the new collaborative and participative organizational culture is the degree of digital literacy of the population in general to deal with a new generation of “services to the public”; this transition from computer culture to digital culture is full of consequences for the education system in general, but it needs to be taken on with rigor and honesty.
– Another central aspect of the new organizational culture of the platform-state is the “free access, under certain rules and conditions”, to the data held by the various sectoral structures of the State-administration; first, horizontal free access by other public sectors, then free access, under rules and conditions, to other actors and agents, and provided that the transparency of public data does not affect the privacy of private information.
– It is hoped that this opening of public data can create a large area of interface with civil society and be the missing pretext to make the platform-state grow, in multiple collaborative platform models and formats and paving the way for new categories of goods and services under a co-production regime with the user.
– It is expected that this regime of co-production and extension of services to the public will be accompanied by incentives for innovation within the administration itself, in such a way that innovation centers or “start-up internal to the administration”, desirably in close cooperation with start-up outside the administration.
A more desirable and flexible geography of the territory
The silo model created zone-territories and budget drawers to manage areas and activities of a clientele and corporate nature. The ministerial team is at the top of this silo model and its legitimacy is nourished by this clientele provision. In each area of government, a value chain is formed where facilitating agents and structures for consultation and negotiation are accommodated. Nobody seems to be very concerned about the internal inefficiencies that are generated in the interface zones between sectors and areas of activity, since negative externalities are generally covered and socialized by the taxpayer.
Let us have no illusions: in a country where public policy is usually confused with the publication of a legal diploma, it is not an easy task to set up a shipyard of small innovative centers within the public administration in close connection with university research centers and others startups and, from there, generate a movement to reform our public administration. I confess that I am not seeing civil servants becoming intrapeneurs, to form small teams and to develop the seeds of an organizational culture of transition to the Platform State.
A new organizational culture is not, however, limited to the modernization of institutions and training of its personnel. Equally important is the call smartification territorial cohesion. We are talking about smart and creative territories and their connectivity and interaction, for example, through the formation of networks of small and medium-sized cities in the interior.
This polycentrism of networks in small and medium-sized cities requires a more intensive digital coverage in order to bring not only the various “business areas” into contact with each other, but also the green infrastructures and, above all, more effective planning of new multipurpose and itinerant common goods and services to the population.
In this way, we will have more cities in the countryside and more countryside in the city, that is, a much more effective green economy, in terms of production or recreation. The digitization of the territory, using various geographical location technologies, also allows us to add “augmented and virtual reality” to the existing territory and, in this way, expand the symbology of territorial distinctive signs that underlie a “geography more desirable and flexible part of the territory”.
Higher education institutions as a platform-institution
Everything we have said before is directly related to the reform of higher education institutions. Indeed, higher education institutions can play a fundamental role, all the more so as they are distributed practically throughout all of Portugal's districts.
Notwithstanding the transformations that have already taken place, and because of the great transitions that will mark the near future, it is practically impossible for higher education institutions to escape a profound transformation of their missions, functions, structure, processes and procedures and financing.
Due to its specificity, especially the networking of their teaching, research and development subsystems, higher education institutions are particularly suited to being able to function as platform-institutions of excellence. Let's take a closer look at some characteristics of this platform-organization, taking our own higher education reality as a reference.
– First, the university will increasingly be a polycontextual, polyarchical and peer organization, operating in an open channel with the crowd.
– Secondly, the university will increasingly be a turning point of problems, projects and collaborators that interest the different communities of citizens, hence the need to be endowed with great organizational agility.
– Thirdly, the university is an organization open to the world, sharing knowledge and funding with the platform crowd, in multiple forms and formats of crowdsourcing, crowdlearning e Crowdfunding, hence the importance of paying special attention to its communication policy, on the one hand, and to financial engineering, on the other.
– Fourthly, the “university is increasingly univercity”, that is, the university must increasingly merge with the city and its problems, above all, in a growing perspective of smart city and territorial.
– Fifthly, the “university is increasingly pluriversity”, that is, there are no areas of work outside or outside the platform-university, in the exact measure that the university feeds on this bank of problems that is the pluridiversity of situations and opportunities.
– Sixthly, the organization of the university-platform should follow, in my opinion, the rule of the third: one third of training, in person and at a distance, one third of problem solving and a third of action research; these will be the beacons for the university's new missions, which, for this purpose, will have to find a new point of internal, organic and functional balance, in accordance with the principle of organizational agility.
Under the aforementioned terms, due to the knowledge and competences that it gathers and convenes, the university or polytechnic institute, but also, for a majority of reasons, the regional network of higher education, are in excellent conditions to become a kind of regional meta-platform. In other words, the university/polytechnic/regional network not only constitutes its own teaching-research-extension platform, but is also a meta-platform for its region, establishing, if we wish, a kind of Regional Big Data for its territory.
In fact, no other regional institution has the international connections and technical-scientific skills of a higher education institution, not to mention the equipment and infrastructure that we can find in its spaces and facilities. In addition, as a regional meta-platform, the higher education institution is invested in the quality of the main actor-network in the region and, in this condition, as the center of rationality par excellence in the regional development policy.
Final Notes
As we said, the silo model created zone-territories and budget drawers to manage areas and activities in a clientele and corporate manner. The silo model resists the formation of a flexible geography and a collaborative digital culture made up of decentralized and distributed platforms.
For the most part, it is not compatible with the achievements that are essential to embody the challenges of “great transitions” and, in particular, to a new architecture of territorial cohesion and enhancement of the interior. Furthermore, it is necessary to create “favorable public space” around a desired and flexible geography. It is here that higher education institutions have an advantage, as they bring together enough skills, youth and energy that are absolutely essential to recognize the distinction of a territory, facilitate a principle of identification and initiate a movement of reconstruction.
One last reference to the so-called “digital transition” that will be imposed by the strength of the IT business. Political centralism, in Brussels and in the capitals, rejoices in the digital transition because it facilitates the “liquidity of the system”, that is, its administrative and algorithmic regulation.
Likewise, higher education institutions are obliged to prove their lives and, in particular, to use the challenges of great transitions to design bold plans of achievement in "interactive mode with the crowd" and, from the outset, "general studies courses” that can continue the programs of the “technological and digital schools” of the last cycle of secondary education.
If they don't reveal this reformist ambition, don't be surprised, one day, in the next recessive phase of the economic cycle, they could be swallowed by the “adjustment program” that follows. And time is pressing.
Author António Covas is a full professor at the University of Algarve and a PhD in European Affairs from the Free University of Brussels
Comments