Key ideas
- In addition to implementing eight digital services, the process helped train city hall employees and teach new innovation and public digitalisation skills.
- Guided by a design that focuses on people, the organisational logic was changed, allowing employees to develop the skills and capabilities needed to carry out innovation and public digitization projects
- This methodology has the potential to be scalable to other Latin American cities facing this same challenge.
If there’s anything the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us, it’s that change is the only constant thing in the world. And it is for this reason that the capability to adapt to new scenarios is key. Since the health crisis, the term digitalisation has been installed as an urgent need that hundreds of public organisations and institutions around the world have had to respond to. Whether it is by implementing new and better solutions or by optimising processes, authorities are reacting to deliver effective solutions for citizens’ needs.
It’s that today, more than ever, there is a need for digital public services. Just a click away.
This new reality was detected in 2017 by the São Paulo City Hall -the local government for the largest city in South America, with a population of 11 million– when the City Secretariat for Innovation and Technology (SMIT) was created and worked intensely for four years on the digitization of 500 public services. This was part of a city hall reform that sought to change the way of offering services and thus respond to the city government’s digital transformation agenda.
In order to improve the quality of these processes’ methodology –and in the middle of the pandemic–, the project “Innovation and Digital Government” was created, with financial support from the Latin American Development Bank (CAF). The objective was to strengthen digitalisation processes for these city hall services and bolster knowledge management for innovation and digital governance policies.
Unit joined this initiative as a delivery partner, along with States of Change, to design and implement –together with the SMIT– a program for experiential learning, 100% remote and online. Guided by a design that focuses on people, the purpose of this program was not only to assure the digitalisation of services, but also to change the organisational logic, allowing employees to develop the skills and capabilities needed to carry out innovation and public digitization projects.
To the sociologist Beatriz Hasbún, head of the project on behalf of Unit, this training was key, since it allowed the city hall employees themselves to become involved based on their newly acquired knowledge. “We added public innovation rationales to the previous digitalisation process, since our objective was for it to be not just a modernization, but to truly be able to identify the users’ problems and needs in regards to the services and to be able to redesign them from there. This generated a great value in the mode of operation,” she says.
“On the other hand, if we would have digitised the process without considering the employees, it’s very probable that there would have been some resistance. Besides, valuable information would have been lost, since those to execute the service know what works and what doesn’t. This knowledge must always be heard.”
The project was divided into two cycles: the first was a prototype stage, in which the program was designed and planned through six workshops that were attended by 19 people from five secretariats. The second consisted of the final program, which incorporated the lessons recorded during that first instance and which was carried out through virtual sessions, bringing together 30 participants from five secretariats.
To Beatriz, the work process was very rewarding, since a true teamwork dynamic was achieved together with the city hall’s employees. “I’ve been associated with Unit in training processes for over two years, and this has been one of the most participative and motivated groups I’ve worked with. They would come in with plenty of enthusiasm and willingness to relay what advances had been made during the week. Working with them was a great experience,” she says.
As a general result, eight services were digitised thanks to the project, while there are still two who continue in the process. In addition to this, a formative program was consolidated to generate new collaborative innovation capabilities and tools within the city hall’s teams. “We hope that the skills that the Sao Paulo City Hall’s teams have learned through this program will continue to serve them throughout their careers. And we hope to introduce them to a global community as we carry out the long-term implementation of public service’s ambition: to help and serve our citizens as best we possibly can,” says the executive director of States of Change, Brenton Caffin.
On her part, Larissa Michelam, city hall secretary of Human Rights and one of the program’s participants, declares that the methodology used in the project has armed the teams with key tools for making a difference in their professional duties. “We are using what we learned in the course to improve services in other areas, and we project very promising results,” says Larissa Michelam, city hall secretary of Human Rights and one of the program’s participants.
This digitalisation methodology has the potential to be scalable to other Latin American cities facing this same challenge. That is where its transformative power lies. “This is education that stays with the employees, who after this experience are trained to resolve the next challenges that may come up at their units and secretariats,” Beatriz Hasbun explains. “This is what’s powerful about design focused on users, since it contributes to changing work rationales inside an institution.”
