Rethinking the Client
[This is the first in a series of thoughts on public administration and governance from a millennial perspective. I am looking forward to your comments]
When governments and public administrations interact with their “clients”, this can be a one-way process (the client approaching an institution for a problem, or the institution exercising policy or disseminating information to the clients) or an interactive process. We are entering an era of governance where public institutions (as well as corporate actors) need to rethink how they approach the “client” – or the constituent, the voter, the public, the stakeholder, whatever term you want to apply. The generation entering adulthood now and in the near future is growing up on social networking, on-demand entertainment, public debate and freedom of information. It is no longer sufficient to employ the one-way process, not only because it does not meet the clients’ demands in a satisfactory way anymore, but also because it is clearly a thing of the past. An interactive interaction process does not only include free and technically sound publication of relevant information, it also means feedback and feedback processing. Governance is starting to employ management methods that are already common for example in the software development world, where a fruitful cycle of dissemination, feedback, feedback processing, and re-publishing creates not only a close bond with the client, but also leads to higher accountability, more effective governance and more trust. When we are rethinking the client, the client needs to be part of the process, not solely a recipient, end-user or “consumer” of policy and administrative outcomes. Is that governance turned on its head? Not quite, to me it is merely the logical continuation and execution of how governance in today’s society needs to look like, but it is also only the beginning.
