

Manifesto for Agile Government - gtzi
http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20101119/

======
philwelch
There's a very good reason government _isn't_ agile.

"Individuals and interactions over processes and authority", "Empowered civil
servants over procedures and bureaucracies", and "Responding to change over
following a plan" are all fantastic descriptions of a dictatorship. Deadlock,
bureaucracy, process, jurisdiction, authority, barriers and limits to power
are defining characteristics of a limited, constitutional government.

~~~
gordonguthrie
I agree. This manifesto is a recipe for 'capture' of the state by social or
ethnic groups and the creation of corrupt clientistic societies.

~~~
DSpinellis
Strangely enough, Greece (which I had in mind when I wrote the blog post) has
plenty of processes, procedures, bureaucracy, and comprehensive regulations
AND also ranks quite low in the Transparency International Corruption Index,
in part due to endemic clientilism.

------
DanielBMarkham
This is almost up-votable.

The thing that is it missing is, oddly enough, the very thing we see in large
organizations that try agile: accountability. That is, if you have a small
team building a web site for a startup, you either do the job well or you
starve. If you have a larger team working as part of a 1200-team project to
build product X, you just play the game, doing your best to look good and keep
your immediate bosses happy. Organizations have traditionally set up large
bureaucracies -- to manage agile teams. Sounds totally crazy, and it is, but
we have to keep reminding organizations that agile means distributed control
and accountability, not just the same teams doing the same thing inside a
complex organizational structure just with a different name and emphasis on
stuff.

In American government, job responsibilities are purposely split up between
the federal, state, and local government. In addition, each level has three
different branches to handle different kinds of work: making laws, enforcing
laws, interpreting laws. The idea here is that if your local elected official
wants to outlaw bazookas in town, and the townspeople don't like it, they can
march down to his office (or home) and ask him to do something about it.
That's what is called accountability. Governments "closer" to the people are
traditionally given more power over their lives, and those "farther away" --
like in Washington -- are given less control. (This is one of the ways gun
control used to work so well. You lived in a crowded city, local officials can
tell you not to have guns in such close proximity. You live on the open range,
nobody cared what type of weapon you owned. You can continue making this
analogy with other forms of state control, such as abortion or property taxes)
In this way our agile government teams can have timeboxed work and get regular
feedback. Timeboxing and feedback are critical parts of agile. (Also note how
critical timeboxing becomes in government. You don't want _instant_ feedback
-- that's mob rules. You also don't want _no_ feedback. You must have
_regular_ feedback for the thing to work)

The problem is that the federal government is taking control of everything.
Also the districts have been rigged so that most federal elected officials
always get reelected: its becoming like a new nobility. This means that
effectively there are no timeboxes and everything is being controlled from the
top-down. Can't have agile teams in an environment like that. You can have
sales picthes, feel-good meetings, wonderful speeches about change, and
marketing plans, but you can't have agile.

The author's heart is in the right place, though. [People get so worked up
about _what_ they want government to do that they never get around to talking
about _how_ it does it. If the overall structure is bad, the results are going
to be bad.]

~~~
cabalamat
> _People get so worked up about what they want government to do that they
> never get around to talking about how it does it. If the overall structure
> is bad, the results are going to be bad._

This is a very good point that needs to be emphasised. Get the structure right
(the right set of incentives), and the organisation will run well. Get the
structure wrong, and bad results will inevitably occur.

------
known
I think there should be an exclusive Govt department for promoting
_disruptive_ technologies.

------
HerberthAmaral
Is this a new form of anarchism?

