As California and states across the nation struggle with gaping budget deficits, it’s probably a good time to return to basics and ask some essential questions. One I’ve been contemplating: How much does it cost us to maintain a creaking, outmoded mid-twentieth century Industrial Age governmental structure well into the second decade of the twenty-first century Information Age?
The eight-hundred pound gorilla of this question is civil service, an antique way of paying government professionals that, like our pension system, is completely out of alignment with the rest of our economy. If we want our government to perform economically, then we need to pay its employees for how well they perform—like we do in the rest of our highly competitive global economy.
That is grist for a longer discussion; today I want to consider a more modest idea that I heard suggested that will be linked to setting performance standards and pay: internet government services ratings.
E-Bay offers it; Amazon offers it; hundreds of private sector providers offer—and in fact welcome—a chance for their users to give feedback. In addition, independent web sites like Yelp!, Angie’s List, and the Better Business Bureau offer customers a public forum in which to post reviews on thousands of businesses. It’s a now-standard method (at least in the real world) of assessing customers’ perceptions of the quality of one’s goods and services. This is not only because customers are communicating directly with providers, but also because competitors can see the same inputs on the Internet.
Why should government be exempt? Offering everyone who has interacted with a government agency—from EDD to the Air Resources Board to the DMV—the opportunity to rate and comment on the experience would provide immediate and continuous feedback about what’s working or not, and provide management the opportunity to improve the product.
Like rating information at sites like Amazon or Yelp, the data should be public. So not only would the agency know what its customers think, taxpayers, news organizations, and policy makers alike would have the same information.
Government is the quintessential monopoly. The competitive forces that cause businesses to continuously improve their goods and services are missing in the field of government services. Perhaps, on the other hand, there are other pressures that can be brought to bear that mimic, however poorly, competitive forces. One of these is the unrelenting glare of public scrutiny. Requiring agencies to use the Internet to offer and publish users’ ratings of their services would have the salutary effect of galvanizing management to fix problems immediately, because everyone—journalists, legislators, citizens—would be aware of customer feedback.
If we want twenty-first century government, we need to apply the tools of the Information Age to government performance, and force it to do its job effectively and economically. Internet ratings of everything government does, while no panacea, would begin to change the incentives that it responds to. Performance would be regularly and frankly reviewed, and how agencies react would begin to demonstrate to the citizenry the folly of an employment system that rewards showing up rather than results.
With politicians and campaigns setting up Facebook pages and the Vatican approving I-Phone apps for confession, can application of these democratic methods of broadening transparency in government be far behind?