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WeThink: Its Time People Started Getting Fired For Buying IBM

Posted by Brian Reich on Apr 7, 2010 in Innovation, WeThink | 1 comment

Here is the next piece of the WeThink project, our effort to explore new ideas and promote solutions to the challenges that our society is facing. The project is based on the idea that we need to re-think the way we create, support and sustain ventures as well as how we innovate. Next up: Government Procurement.

Dominic Campbell, a digital government and social innovation entrepreneur with a background in policy, communications and engagement, writes in the opening of his article:

For too long in government, organizations have rewarded risk aversion over risk management, process over outcomes and structures over common sense. Nowhere is this more clearly manifest than in government’s procurement processes.

As you might imagine, the procurement process is clunky, arcane, and seemingly anything but innovative. But Campbell is optimistic. He thinks/knows innovation is possible within even the most mundane of government operations. He writes:

But that’s not to say there aren’t people on the inside willing to take risks, it’s just that they are strongly discouraged and certainly never rewarded for it. Instead government procurement culture squeezes the life out of the precious few enterprising public servants who try to innovate and push the boundaries of service delivery using procurement in creative ways to seek best market solutions.

Read the whole article. You’ll learn something for sure. Then tell us what you think.

WeThink – IBM – Final

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Brian Reich

Brian is Managing Director of little m media which provides strategic guidance and support to organizations around the use of the internet and technology to facilitate communications, engagement, education, and mobilization. He is well known for his expertise in new media, web 2.0, social networks, mobile, community, ecommerce, brand marketing, cause branding, and more. Reich, the author of Media Rules!: Mastering Today’s Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience (Wiley 2007). He blogs at Thinking About Media and contributes as a Fast Company Expert. Previously, Reich was a principal of EchoDitto, one of the most successful online communications agencies in the nation, Director of New Media for Cone Inc, a brand strategy and communications agency in Boston and a Senior Strategic Consultant and Director of Boston Operations for Mindshare Interactive Campaigns, an interactive public affairs agency. From 2000 – 2004, Brian ran how own strategic communications firm, Mouse Communications. Reich has worked in and around politics, including helping to direct dozens of campaigns across the country. He spent two years as Vice President Gore’s Briefing Director in the White House, handling both official activities and activities during his 2000 presidential campaign. Brian serves on the board of Investigate West, independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to the art and craft of investigative and narrative journalism. Brian served as an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University in Washington, DC and is currently teaching a course on consumer behavior and marketing at Columbia University in New York. Brian attended the University of Michigan and is a graduate of Columbia University. He and his wife, Karen Dahl, live in New York City with their son, Henry.

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http://www.theconnectedrepublic.org Paul Johnston

Hands up who thinks the government procurement process is great? I don’t think I have ever met anyone who likes it either inside the public sector or outside it. But it is not as though people have just noticed the problem. Like you, I am not an expert on procurement but the creation of the Office of Government Commerce certainly seems to have been inspired by the desire to speed up the procurement process and deliver better outcomes for the public sector. And as I understand it, the most concrete improvement you suggest (having a qualification stage and then working with a small group of potential suppliers to develop the specification and test in practice their ability to deliver what is needed) is an option currently open to public sector procurers and used in a fair number of large procurements.
The underlying difficulty in the public sector is the need to be fair and be seen to be fair. And of course nowadays that also means being fair and being seen to be fair to all European Union countries and not just your national companies. So lets innovate, but lets recognise the constraints and lets see some thinking that actually shows how we could improve the current way thinks are done.
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