Unit 2
How David Eaves teaches Unit 2 (part 1)
An Introduction to Government as a Platform
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 2 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. Read how part two of Unit 2 is taught here.
This page is part of a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in a range of contexts. See here how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit.
Who is this page for?
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
Class Overview
The goal of this class to outline a vision of government as a platform.
For the public – and certainly for innovators – Government is often is structured into functional departments, each with their own firmly defined bureaucracies, policies and culture. This structure facilitates accountability within the structure and makes collaboration across and outside of government difficult. Moreover while individual agencies may have distinct missions and policies, many of the underlying functions they perform - such as validating the identity of a citizens, collecting or distributing funds - are shared. Could these common functions be architected in a way to make it easier to collaborate across government as well as lower the cost for any given part of government to achieve its mission? This is the core of platform thinking.
To convey this idea, David draws the parallel between government systems and highways to explain the benefits, opportunities as well as the drawbacks and risks, of platform thinking in the public sector.
This Class' Learning Objectives
By the end of this lecture students should be able to:
Explain that digital systems are made of components which are connected together to solve problems.
Outline a vision of Government as a platform.
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡 This class touches upon each of the eight competencies, but has a specific focus on four of them:
Assigned Reading and Practical Resources
As they work through the readings in advance, students should have in mind the following questions to help them prepare for class:
What have been the one or two key elements to Estonia's success?
Can the approach taken by Estonia work for your government? What conditions exist in your organization that would make it easy to replicate Estonia's model? What conditions exist that would make it more difficult or impossible?
What organizational culture, structures and capabilities need to be in place to enable a government as a platform approach? What differentiated Amazon and Google's ability to change?
Core Reading (Required)
Government as a platform: What can Estonia show the world? (2017), Article by Helen Margetts and Andre Naumann
Foundations for Government As A Platform (2016), Article by David Durant, UK Government Digital Service **
Making public policy in the digital age (2018), Article by Andrew Greenway and Richard Pope
Google Platform Rant (2011), Article by Steve Yegge
Resources Readings (Required)
Government Design Principles (2012), Guidelines from the UK Government Digital Service
Government as a Platform Playbook (2019), Playbook by Richard Pope for Digital HKS
Government as a Platform: The Value Proposition (2017), Discussion Paper by New Zealand's Lab + Experiment
Advanced Reading (Optional)
What could other countries learn from Estonia’s experience? (2019), FAQ by E-Estonia
What we're working on in Government as a Platform (2017), Article by Peter O’Sullivan, UK Government Digital Service
Government as a platform, orchestration, and public value creation: The Italian case (2019), Article by Antonio Cordella and Andrea Paletti
Culture Readings (Optional)
On being and doing government (2019), Article by Adrian Brown
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 75 minutes
See David's slides for this class.
The sections below describe the suggested dynamics of each part of the class. The videos were edited to only display the most relevant parts of each section:
The sections below describe the dynamics of each part of the class:
What is a platform? – 10'
The goal of this section is to develop a common understanding of what a platform is.
Purpose
The term 'platform' has become a widely adopted term, but what exactly does it mean? Before discussing the role that platforms can play in governments, it is essential to have a common understanding.
Discussion
This section opens with the question "What do you think a platform is?" Answers often vary, with the most popular referencing a common economic definition - the two-sided markets - in which a platform is a two sided market connecting buyers and sellers. This is the model behind Lyft or Uber, for example. Because it is widely understood, this definition is good to raise, principally so it can be discarded. It is not a definition that is helpful or useful to our conversation.
What we are interested in is a more technical definition of platforms as a shared resource that can be leveraged by other people or entities. In this regard a platform is like infrastructure, a defined resourced that different actors can use (with varying degrees of freedom) to build solutions at top of. To solidify this concept, David asks students to reflect on the last time they used a platform and how they think a common infrastructure was leveraged.
Video of David teaching this segment
Where are governments today? - 20'
This section explains how government systems are traditionally organized and the consequences of these legacy systems. Through the analogy of a highway, students begin to build understanding of what platform thinking in governments is.
Discussion
An initial discussion focuses on how the traditional structure of governments and how this influences the way government digital services are built. Using the analogy of a highway, David describes that governments commonly build digital solutions in a wasteful manner, building multiple highways that run in parallel to each other, all going to adjacent destinations.
The end result are digital services that, among other inefficiencies, duplicate effort, have few standards across government entities and lack security. These vertically integrated solutions also make it hard to innovate and change systems, which seem to inevitably be cumbersome and expensive.
Governments should build digital services like how they build highways, leveraging existing infrastructure and extending it. This platform thinking allows them to diminish inefficiencies and foster innovation, David argues. In this section, he explains how this is possible by describing the history of highways, how they became system integrators and the advantage of being "open platforms".
Video of David teaching this segment
Digital platforms today - 15'
This goal of this section is to provide an overview of platforms' benefits: better services, economies of scale, more efficiency, a dramatic reduction in costs and more innovation. This is achieved through the analysis of some canonical examples.
Purpose
It is easy to conceptualize the benefits (and drawbacks) of highways. But what about digital platforms? In order to make the benefits more concrete, David analyzes a series of examples from students daily lives as well as from governments.
Examples
Instructor should start with an example that students will easily identify. In this class, David uses the AppStore as an example of a platform and describes how it allows iPhones to offer services Apple would never have imagined developing. As a second example, David picks an example students interact with in their daily lives Harvard's single sign on service called "Harvard key." Finally, other examples of platforms in governments are also mentioned in this section: Blue Button and the US healthcare record system, GPS and Weather forecasting platforms. For each example, he discusses the advantages and positive externalities of these platforms.
Video of David teaching this segment
Government as a platform - 20'
This section showcases canonical examples of government as a platform and disentangle the core components of a platform.
Purpose
So far we have seen examples of platforms in governments, but this approach can be expanded to reimagine the way that entire governments work. What are the shared components that are commonly associated with this platform arrangement? Can governments be redesigned as platforms? In this section, David highlights some of the canonical examples of this new approach.
Examples
In the first part, the focus is on shared components, in other words the common infrastructure needed to "build interconnected highways" in governments. The examples outlined are:
National identification systems such as UK's Single Sign On Service, UK Verify, and digital ID's like India's Aadhar. Though there are controversies around these technologies that will be discussed later on the course, the benefits are clear: they help prevent frauds and improve access to social benefits.
Shared functionalities, such as UK's Notify, a common messaging platform which is currently used by more than 1,500 services in the public sector.
Shared templates or infrastructure, such as United States' 18F, a publishing platform that creates modern and compliant government websites.
In this section, David also provides canonical examples of countries that succeeded at implementing platform thinking at a large scale. In this class, he mentions Estonia's X-Road and their "Once Only Principle", Bangladesh's a2i, and India Stack.
Video of David teaching this segment
Challenges and concerns of this approach - 10'
The aim of this section is discuss what forthcoming governance challenges platform thinking approach entail.
Purpose
In the previous sections, the discussion focuses more on the benefits of platform thinking whereas in this section David looks at the downsides and challenges. He is particularly interested in issues of governance as he believes that they become more significant than questions of technology or implementation.
Discussion
David outlines four possible concerns that arise from the adoption of plaforms in government:
the potential need to renegotiate social contracts between government and citizens around issues like privacy
how control over platform services could centralize power
how ownership of the underlying code could allow vendors or other actors to shape future capabilities of government
questions about how governments will share and grant access services and data
Each of these questions will require policies and governance structures that balance governments ability to leverage the benefits of platform thinking with ensuring trust and confidence in government by citizens. This is an essential political and ethical conversation that every teacher should raise with their students and for which obvious answers to not yet exist.
Video of David teaching this segment
Common questions from students faculty could prepare for:
- What is an API?
- How to decided what should be built in-house or outsourced?
- What are the options for governments that are starting from zero?
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Acknowledgements
David Eaves would like to note that this material was made possible by numerous practitioners and other faculty who have generously shared stories, pedagogy and their practices. David is also grateful to the students of DPI 662 at the Harvard Kennedy School for enriching the course and providing consent to have the material and questions shared. Finally, an enormous thank you must be given to Beatriz Vasconcellos, who helped assemble and organize the content on this page.