The wisdom of civil servants

“The Power of Us,” published by BusinessWeek describes the developing phenomenon of mass collaboration and how large businesses, which didn’t grow large by being dumb, are taking advantage of the wisdom of crowds. 

Eli Lilly & Co. and Hewlett-Packard Co., for example, are running “prediction markets” to extract this knowledge. Prediction markets let people buy shares of future scenarios. The results of those purchases help these companies predict future events, to work smarter.

Yochai Benkler, a Yale Law School professor quoted by BusinessWeek, studies the economics of networks and sees what he calls “peer production.” Peer production in his view is a completely new way of doing business that does not rely on the market or firm, the two traditional sources of organized knowledge in pursuit of wealth-creation. Now the organizational power of the firm can be had by individuals in free and open communication with other individuals.   

Ross Mayfield, who is active in social software developments, adds this bit of insight as to why peer production is important: 

We are in the early stages of an increase in human freedom in business, an important a change in business as the change of democracy for governments. The reason is it is now possible to have the economic benefits for very large organizations and at the same time have the human benefits of very small organizations: freedom flexibility and creativity (emphasis supplied). Lower communication costs mean many people have enough information to make decisions for themselves.

Able to create this knowledge base AND plumb its meaning, the crowd can now “get it” long before the experts. 

State government has the unique problem of being a big business – in size and revenue – that is also purely altruistic in motive: it exists solely to serve and protect the public. In other words, mass collaboration on behalf of a higher calling is its mission. 

So what is the growing preoccupation these days of the technology professionals for whom I work? Security.

It’s absolutely essential to the government enterprise. If government can’t be trusted with the digital bits of our lives, it can’t be trusted. Period. Information and communications technology professionals have got to get security right. And they are working hard at it.

Having said that, there is another pressing problem. The same technology that equips the dishonest empowers the honest. Unfortunately, existing command and control bureaucracies trap a great number of talented people in slow moving and hidebound institutions, which are slow to acknowledge change. Yet the individual exchanges flowing between people freed by information technology can see change on the horizon. Combined, those individual observations could lead to real solutions to wicked problems because the network conforms to us.

According to the BusinessWeek story, Lilly has created InnoCentive Inc., which taps a network of 80,000 "self-selected 'solvers'" around the world to crack problems for some of the nation's largest companies. Smart organizations free the knowledge sitting in the cubicles as well as the executive suites.

In state government, that knowledge is too often wasted by institutions, rules and work cultures that equate rank with right. 

Government is in transition today, from a purely command and control hierarchy, where the boss can tap specialized knowledge, to a flatter structure where civil servants, who can access a huge base of pooled knowledge, know more. The organizational charts don't reflect that change -- yet. But I think there are big changes afoot.