Fast Tech, Slow Change

I am the founder of Citymart, a global public procurement organization based in Brooklyn, N.Y. As early as January, 2009, we assumed we struck gold when it came to fixing large public problems. After experimenting for three years we finally reaped real results in our efforts to spread public service innovations across cities with our idea: Using public procurement—the same function governments use to buy goods and services—as a problem-solving tool. We would deliver this service as traditional consulting work.

A History of Inequity and Slow Public Change

We were excited by the speed of our innovation because it usually takes an average of forty years to gain wide adoption for new public solutions, making social change a slow process. For example, shared public bicycles—first invented by citizens of Amsterdam 1965—took more than 40 years to catch on. By 2004, only 13 cities had a bike share program. By 2010, 400 cities were wheeling around. Today, bike share is a highly visible innovation that mayors like to replicate. That’s just one example. When you look at other social innovations the adoption rate is even slower.

Public procurement came up on our radar because one of its hallmarks is that it is designed to source the best solutions in the market. We found that by teaching cities to open up their procurement programs to other workflows, they could more reliably discover novel ideas such as bike sharing across all public services. We discovered that the best way to fill this knowledge gap and put trillions of dollars to better use was to get more participation from the market.

Teaching and Showing—the Secret to Success

Our approach became widely known as problem-based procurement—procurement challenges or calls for innovations. We helped cities replace detailed specifications with problem statements. In the case of Philadelphia, for example, the process of problem framing helped the city realize that in order to reduce its high traffic fatality rate, it needed to forgo buying smart cities technologies. The city’s leaders could make streets safer by accessing data and doing analysis to understand how crashes happen. Once they did that they could make more nuanced interventions. The end result: Instead of spending millions on new technology such as additional traffic signals, they spent $30,000 to glean detailed insights from existing data. We helped them figure this out, consulting for them and putting a laser-likefocus on capacity building, guiding city teams through the various steps.

Our results speak for themselves: 135 governments in 35 countries including cities such as New York, San Francisco, Paris, London, Norfolk, Va., Long Beach, Calif., Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Fukuoka, Japan, Da Nang, Vietnam, and Melbourne adopted our approach. As a result, their procurements received an average of 24 proposals instead of just the two on average they received without us. This brought many new ideas into government, and vendors changed, too. Cities received bids from a variety of service providers. In fact, 98 percent of all bids coming in using this process were from small, minority, and women-owned businesses. We trained more than 2,000 public servants to carry out the work on their own. And, always a good sign, we had an increasing number of copycats replicating our approach.

But despite all these successes we were concerned. How would we ever get this lesson—our lesson—out to a market of 551,000 municipal governments? As a group, our team, clients and funders believed that we should build a technology solution that would make our approach accessible to the masses and do so at lower cost. Indeed, it seemed that the only way forward would be to productize our consulting approach.

We all agreed that it was a logical step to build a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that would help city halls across the world at much lower costs and effort compared to consulting. Our investors were concerned about us offering both consulting and a SaaS offering. They demanded that we choose one, so we became a tech startup and pulled out of all our consulting arrangements, going all in on productizing.

How Far We’ve Come

Fixing public procurement is what we call a Slow Lane problem. There is massive public interest in it but it is highly complex, involving bureaucracy, culture, mindsets and human behaviors. As such, it wasn’t long until we realized our SaaS approach (along with many of our fundamental assumptions) was flawed. For one, we thought that by lowering costs we’d be able to offer our process to even more governments. That, it turned out, wasn’t true. The reason: Many Slow Lane problems don’t suffer from logistical or financial bottlenecks but from a lack of readiness.

We also learned that the richness of our relationships with city employees and the leadership function we held during consulting work could not be duplicated in a SaaS offering. Yes, the tech product we were offering had all the same functions and workflows, but it lacked important intangibles such as empathy and the encouragement of human contact. We also had to recognize that fixing procurement cannot be solved in the lifecycle of a startup, especially if we are pursuing meaningful change over just servicing the status quo.

After this decade of learning, I have found four promising principles to take forward into my professional life, and something you, as a PIT practitioner, may want to keep in mind as you move through your own career.

The first is to prepare for a journey of change that may take decades. This includes finding funders who don’t squeal at building open, societal platforms that may take years to gain traction. Secondly, to do this, we need to embrace collaboration. You’ll see this when you get into government or another public-serving environment. Our competitive mindsets can render us ineffective by carving out unique selling points and differences over our common mission for change. The journey to success will not be a winner-takes-all scenario, but one in which we all shoulder the burden. Third, we need to find ways of placing technology into a context that also requires human nurturing and engagement. For this we need a unifying vision and mission, but also an appreciation that every contribution is equal. And finally, our public interest technology missions need a standard of open governance, data and information. You will be challenged often by stakeholders, whether they are constituents, government partners, and even the press, to roll things out quickly and make big changes using technology. Keep in mind that there are times that this certainly may apply—think about the way technology has transformed covid-19 reporting—but there are times that you’ll need to slow down and follow our four-step plan in order to succeed.