Open Data emergent. Disruption ahead?
Technologists are very excited about being permitted to innovate within NYC government, their initial, high visibility focus of improvement includes procurement. However, I anticipate that real change, outside of headlines and fuzzy math, won’t happen there for a while. That type of substantive change is generational and attritional.
I expect the quicker, more quantifiable success using opendata will happen in the relationship NYC has within their own agencies, vendors and the contracts already in place.
It is likely that there will be a rapid, 1 to 2 year trajectory to a fragmentation of providers. Service providers that benefited by owning the entire interaction will now have to share customer touches seamlessly with other providers and agencies. Ultimately this will reduce bleeding and redundancy of resources throughout the system.
First this will manifest itself in a noticeable and quick shift to creating a mammoth data repository as a community asset
This will have considerable implications to vendors already in place as it suggests a devaluation of data as flyover air rights to be negotiated. Instead, that asset will be synthesized into an aggregate and more accessible pool.
The city will argue for a correction in contract structures that will reduce city risk, save money, foster a more cohesive offering of services and gain user intimacy from providers that are aligned. Large and small(ish) city contracts will break into niche core competencies and will be performance based rather than a cost plus.
Performance based arrangements have significant upfront outlays of cash which may not be recouped for a least a year, if ever. Yet such a proposition also offers tremendous more profitability to those providers who can exceed their goals and reduces risk to those same vendors who will draw down on data, best practices and technologies. In the many places where this data doesn’t exist, they have will have a manageable burden of innovating to push their findings/data into the pool.
I also expect that as NYC is asset rich, cash poor, and very illiquid, it will increasingly rely on city + funder projects to fulfill social service obligations and that this partnership will coerce collaboration and will further accelerate a shift.
These two cautionary notes:
Providers: Should respond to this change in advance of it blatantly evidencing itself, they must be ready in areas such as social media as an engagement mechanism. But, just as importantly, reorient their themseves into a culture that doesn’t have ‘one head’, but instead works in a syndicate. This will be a significant challenge to many resource strained organizations that may not have the human assets to be reallocated.
City: One large challenge will be data security…There must be administrators of this data, granting rights, wiping users, reviewing credentials and managing compliance and integrity.
I hope the city is wise enough to engage with the consultants, firms and technologists that will be neccesary to construct what will possibly be the first iteration of CompStat 2.0.0