Silos can confuse the NDP vision
HISTORICALLY, governments, their departments and agencies are structured as hierarchical organisations.
And it will remain that way into the foreseeable future. They are typically funded and governed in silos, that is the nature of the beast. It’s meant to provide visibility and accountability on how taxpayer dollars are spent.
But when governments start to open up, become more innovative and inclusive, that hierarchy, those silos can become a roadblock. It can throttle the great work being done to advance the nation, often presenting major hurdles when trying to create greater value for our citizens.
Last week this column asked if there was an elephant in the room when comparing the new National Development Plan to the 2017 National Development Plan and if the new National Development Plan (NDP) would deliver.
Today we discuss the challenges presented by siloed areas of focus.
But first here’s DPM and Minister of Finance Prasad’s take on the previous NDP.
“Obsolete… just to create hype”
Speaking on the Fiji Village program Straight Talk with Vijay Narayan the Deputy PM and Minister of Finance, Prof Biman Prasad explained the rationale for scrapping the previous National Development Plan:
“Just before we came into Government, we looked at the 5 year and 20-year development plan the Fiji First government had done, and in the six months before the budget what we found was that it was actually obsolete.”
He added “partly because of lack of comprehensiveness, partly because there were no specific targets, and we realised that this plan probably was done just to create hype that there is some sort of plan.
And so, in the budget we made it clear that we would formulate a new National Development Plan and that any such plan would be done with proper consultation and dialogue. We are doing this with a consultant provided by the World Bank and two other people. We also set up the National Strategic Planning Office”.
New NDP to create value
There can be no doubt that the new National Development Plan (NDP) is a concerted effort to create value for our people.
Consultations going on far and wide under thirty-eight separate chapters each with its own area of focus. They will inform the new NDP, a Whole-of-Nation development plan over the next 3, 5, and 20 years.
National Digital Strategy to enable the NDP?
We should reasonably anticipate coordination and strong and meaningful collaboration with the National Digital Strategy (NDS) currently being developed by the Ministry for Communications with consultants from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and digitalFIJI.
Most nations’ NDS’ include digitalisation, and the all-important areas of Cybersecurity and Data Strategy which should be part of the two super silos, NDP and NDS — critical areas of development to enable strong economic growth.
The NDS, the national digital strategy, must support the effective execution of NDP initiatives or it would be reasonable to question the motivations for development of either.
Just a red-flag, but let’s get back to the NDP, its execution, and the criticality of breaking down silos, which this column is about.
38 “focused” areas of consultation
The 38 chapters appear to be separate silos of information, at this stage capturing information and raw data that will inform the eventual NDP. We can assume the final NDP will have dissolved the invisible boundaries of silos to produce an integrated and cohesive plan.
It is imperative to the successful delivery of the NDP that the boundaries, or silos, inside governments, between government departments and agencies, and between government and the private sector are dissolved, broken down in the pursuit of creating value for citizens.
“Unify the nation”
In the words of DPM Biman Prasad “unify the nation and create a blueprint for the future… facilitate practical solutions to the social and economic sector to ensure Fiji’s lasting progress that will result in fostering lasting national unity and shared vision to advance our nation.”
“National unity and shared vision” are key words that make breaking down silos an imperative, a vital shift that will have broad and deep impact.
If we are to learn from the private sector and indeed some leading-edge governments with transformative initiatives, they are moving from hierarchies to networks to enable whole-of-government collaboration to achieve planned outcomes.
Singapore dissolving silo barriers
Silos are being eliminated in areas such as data, funding, and the public service in order to pool scarce quality resources and capabilities.
In this time of complex challenges, public service and business leaders are partnering and nurturing collaborative ecosystems to take advantage of shared knowledge and unique strengths to drive practical solutions.
Governments are increasingly working toward cross- department cross-agency approaches to delivering services to their citizens.
Singapore has used shared funding models to encourage inter-agency collaboration.
The prime minister’s office coordinates whole-of-government initiatives supported by a team of senior officials from several ministries and agencies.
Ministry of Civil Service, PMs Office
Something similar had been convened under the permanent secretary (PS) Civil Service Pramesh Chand, PS Education Selina Kuruleca and several other permanent secretaries to look at transformative possibilities for a small, focused number of “crosscutting” intra- ministry processes to better serve constituents.
Experience dictates that starting with like-minded and innovative people should be prioritised to start with cross cutting processes and funding models under the Ministry of Civil Service, Prime Minister’s Office.
Assuming this group of senior officials has continued the effort, their deliberations would make for a great use case and case study in support of execution of the NDP supported and enabled by the National Digital Strategy.
Mapping those identified processes to the NDP chapters would be at least interesting, likely very productive.
Pooling capabilities can help agencies enhance service delivery and is a cutting-edge approach needing proactive collaboration as already initiated under this group of executives.
The NDP 38 can restrain DPM Prasad’s vision
The ongoing NDP consultations, whose draft of each chapter provided to prepare for consultations is quite well structured and informative. With public feedback it should result in good plans for each of the areas.
With no intention of taking away from the merits of the separate areas of consultation, the 38 silos present challenges in execution of the plan to realise DPM Prasad’s vision of lasting national unity and a shared vision to advance the nation.
Some of the challenges: Enabling cross-cutting initiatives
The group of senior public service executives mentioned above are probably best positioned to adapt and execute process oriented, cross-cutting initiatives that are citizen centric, outside-in, from the customer perspective.
Our people don’t really want to know which ministry or department or for that matter which chapter of the NDP looks after what.
They just want service from a government that gets their stuff done. Inside-out silo thinking, and execution just shunts people between and across the silos.
The longer-term plan would be to redesign the public service to become more flexible, skillsbased, and collaborative. When it comes to human capital, and talent, increased agility is the name of the game to achieve an effective workforce now.
It has to be future-ready and embrace models such as internal talent pools, and on-demand talent.
Detailed and specific job descriptions and position requirements are in the early stages of becoming obsolete and are transitioning to a skills-based approach as in private sector professional services organisations.
Funding cross-agency, cross ministry
Inter-agency, department, ministry collaboration due to the historical hierarchical structure has been a perpetual challenge for governments.
Shared funding mechanisms, based on outside-in, citizen focused processes have huge potential to successfully tackle whole-of-government, boundary-spanning problems. Not insideout, but from the citizens perspective.
If we consider climate change, gender equality, inclusivity, we already appreciate this is not a silo specific issue but definitely spans silo boundaries.
Equality for example for the purpose of successful execution of plans should be embedded in every process, irrespective of ministry or department.
And that needs a shared funding approach. When funding is isolated to silos it can restrict innovation.
Shared funding is on the rise to incentivise collaboration between departments and agencies.
Other show-stopping silo challenges:
Personalised services: to improve the citizen experience and promote equity. Individuals are unique, as are their needs and requirements, and traditional onesize-fits-all government services have systemically disadvantaged various sections of the population.
Data sharing: Historically, the government has huge amounts of data stored in multiple storage facilities. For decades governments have been leveraging data to solve problems and improve lives. The public sector has access to data which, if used to its potential, can provide whole-of-government, ministries, departments, and agencies with insights to make informed decisions.
NDP consultation silos
Challenges created through silos are numerous and touch every aspect of a business or government, no less the challenges that the new NDP data gathering exercise will present, too many to cover here.
In the context of effective gathering of information for the new NDP silos seem to be necessary. Dissolving those silos, sharing and integrating data in many instances can provide leverage way beyond allowing them to remain as silos.
Consider the Tourism Industry with the potential to data share, with the right data governance, to collaborate with Immigration, Education, Labour, Social Welfare.
Dismantling silos is a slow, frustrating process so why build new ones.
The new NDP may be an opportunity to integrate and collaborate across whole-of-government by design.