Denver: Creating Leadership and the Culture for e-Government

By Margaret Browne and Richard Margolies

NATOA Journal of Municipal Telecommunications Policy
Summer, 2001, pages 14-16.

There are different views about what e-government is. Some think it is e-commerce. Some think it relates to transactions, while others say it is a source of information for citizens. E-government requires that we rethink and re-invent what government is for us. Most would agree that e-government is better government using advanced technology and organizational innovation to improve services, economic development and democratic participation. While the latest technology is essential and our technologists advocate impressive projects, we have learned that building our e-government requires even more.

For Denver, the introduction of e-government has meant a redesigning of work processes, reducing bureaucracy and territoriality, while increasing collaboration between knowledgeable people with differing expertise and responsibilities within the government. It has required a shift in culture so that through the use of the latest technology, our employees put the residents and stakeholders first.

Building this new culture has not been easy nor is it complete, though we are able to enjoy our successes, like our award-winning portal DenverGov.org. We have learned that creating the social system to support our vision for e-government has been more difficult than creating the technological system to run it. And, we are in many ways just at the beginning of this transformation of our government. We have learned that in order to create a new social system, the new culture has to be customized to the particular history and political realities of each governmental entity. One approach does not fit every locality. Here is our reality.

Denver government is a strong mayoral form of government with strong budget powers and an active City Council that has line item budget power. Denver is a home rule city with a Charter that defines the structure and function of our government. The Charter can only be changed a vote of the people. The last major change was in 1950, long before the advent of personal computers, advanced technology or a global economy with an emphasis on innovation. Simply put, the Charter did not anticipate moving from an industrial economy to a knowledge-service-learning economy.

For example, Denver’s Charter calls for an elected Auditor, who keeps the books, writes city checks and audits the books. The Charter says that the Auditor must "keep the books in his office." Paper books and the Auditor must sign checks. Obviously there is no mention in the 1950 Charter of digital signatures, online purchasing, or any number of e-government tools.

Given the difficulty of modifying the city’s Charter, the city has approached its e-government issues with the tools available under the terms of the existing structure. For example, in the mid-1990s a technology structure was created through the use of an Executive Order. This group consisted of technologists from across the various agencies, agency heads, strategic leadership and experts on networks, databases, the Internet and other technological support areas. However, having mandated the establishment of this group the Order did not provide it with leadership, process and vision. Without a clear focus and planning the group evolved as a fragmented, disjointed structure.

The Internet has changed the expectations of government and as a result it has changed our work as government leaders. E-government strategic planning is not the same as information technology (IT) planning. The technology is digital, but our thinking about relationships, management and leadership is analog, if not pre-electric.

In moving from the unknown into the role of e-government planners, we are learning important lessons along the way. We are not just creating an IT infrastructure, we are creating a process of interactive and collaborative leaders who plan and develop a faster, easier to use government. Relationships, values, operating principles, leadership, vision — all parts of our social system, our ‘culture’ — must help shape the creation of our technical system. Yet both are necessary. And it is important to remember that those who are expert at building technical systems are not, because of that knowledge, the most capable at building a new social system. It is equally important to remember that strategic leaders who are experts at managing social systems (their agencies) may not know much about, or have much interest in, technology and planning technology projects.

The challenge has been to get the strategic leaders and the technologists working together to create this new culture, and to get them to address a complex plan outside the scope of the current areas of expertise. While each had a natural interest in their individual areas of expertise, they needed to gain a larger vision — one of creating a government that is faster, more efficient, available anytime, and which puts residents and stakeholders first.

This is not a task for those with weak constitutions, nor is it always possible to attack the problems without some external advice and assistance. In an effort to meet the challenge and advance our goals, the city sought the counsel and aid of an outside consultant. This individual interviewed all strategic leaders, some operational leaders, and did a gap survey that revealed what the leaders valued and how far they felt the city government was from achieving their goals. Some of the findings pointed out the dysfunctionality of the group established by the Executive Order. The survey also revealed a lack of understanding of what e-government was, no vision of e-government and a lack of optimal reporting relationships for our technical resources.

As a result, we held a Strategic Leaders Conference to address these problems. The conference clarified the difference between IT and e-government, and explained why and how governments have to change. These strategic leaders created an e-government vision and beginning goals, (this vision was reworded and reaffirmed in March, 2001). It also allowed us to define shared values and operating principles, agreed that a Chief of E-Government was desirable and should be hired. The earlier Executive Order group was reconstituted into two separate groups: one focused on strategic leadership and one focused on operational leadership. Both groups consist of leaders from all the major elements of the government, including the Mayor’s agencies, independent agencies (Auditor, Career Service Authority), and City Council. The result is two collaborative, enterprise leadership groups that now meet every other week for 2-3 hours each.

We also held an Operational Leaders Conference that focused on how to implement the vision of the strategic leaders. Meanwhile, the strategic leaders defined the role, responsibilities, and relationships of the Chief of E-Government and began the recruitment for the position. The City Council established an E-Government Committee. The working groups have developed a process to select and develop projects, which has now been through several revisions. We have also established criteria of criticality and feasibility to guide us on which projects to fund.

We have now created an understanding of how Denver government exists within an ecosystem of stakeholders, including neighborhood groups, the school system, churches, foundations, high-tech companies, universities, the State of Colorado, etc. We began preparations for a Council of Advisors (from these stakeholders), and a Digital Access Committee to address the digital divide.

We have begun our enterprise, collaborative strategic planning process. As mentioned above, projects are assessed based on criticality and feasibility. Agencies have been asked to submit their service goals, to explain how technology will be used and to identify projects they will propose. We have drafted priorities in six categories: service, economic development, democratic participation, internal business processes, enterprise infrastructure, and the social system. These priorities are being written into a strategic plan that will be integrated into the annual budgeting cycle. New proposed projects will have to fit within the plan or have a powerful logic why they should be currently funded. The plan will be updated regularly, as new learning and new technology requires. This rolling strategic planning process is central to our becoming an enterprise-focused e-government with a collaborative, learning culture.

We have begun ‘work process redesign’ (re-engineering) in Construction Permitting to demonstrate that business practices have to be simplified to ‘put the resident and stakeholder first’, before they are digitized and web-enabled. ‘Do not pave the cowpaths’ is one of our operating principles. Soon to be initiated are other work redesigns in Safety (police processes); the Career Services Authority (recruitment); and Public Works (wastewater, street maintenance, and other infrastructure service requests).

We have found that creating our e-government culture requires doing many things simultaneously, and that we are capable of doing them. We live in a complex, constantly developing social and political system, which has to be led by the strategic leaders in a shared implementation process with the operational / technology leaders. Technologists or strategic leaders can not create e-government alone. Denver has found a leadership process that has everyone moving in one direction, collaborating and working toward a mutual vision and shared goals.

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