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Demos has recently released a joint paper with the State Services Authority in Victoria on "agile government". By this, it means governments should be able to make decisions quickly, allocate resources flexibly, take appropriate risks, access high quality data to understand the environment, and balance short term responsiveness with long term management of uncertainty. Overall, governments should "scan, respond [to] and shape" the environment.

It's an interesting piece — indeed, its purpose is to "provoke" — though I am not sure how the definition of what an agile government should be differs from what government seeks to do as best it can. Perhaps the biggest difficulty with the concept of agility is that, though it makes perfect sense in the world of business, it does not encourage confidence in an environment such as that occupied by government where decisions should not, as a norm, be made quickly and where risk is not always appropriate.

Where the benefits of a profit motive for the service of the public good are often ignored, so I may be ignoring the concept and benefits of agility — as it applies to successful businesses — in the sphere of government. I remain skeptical, though, as to how much different agility really is to what government sets out to achieve on a short-, medium- and long-term basis. In its provocation questions (p.19), however, the paper seems to partly acknowledge that there's more to be done on importing the concept of agility to government, so it's an idea to keep an eye on and an ear out for.

Tags — Society