Transcript

DARRELL WEST: For years people have been complaining about the inefficiency and wastefulness of the public sector. According to the common critique, the private sector is more innovative and more entrepreneurial than government agencies. Yet there actually have been very few tests of that proposition concerning the relative sense of technology innovation in the private versus the public sectors. We got a grant from the Kauffman Foundation that funded some research on technology innovation in the public and private sectors, so we compared the websites of leading American corporations with those of state and national government. We examined a variety of different examples of technology innovation such as the degree of online services, how much interactivity there was, was there disability access through the website, and how each site handled issues of privacy and security.

The details are in a report that's available outside of the auditorium. ...In general we found some aspects of the conventional wisdom to be correct. We found that the private sector did tend to be better at including multimedia features on their websites, having interactive features, and being able to personalize and customize the website to your particular interests compared to government agencies. Leading companies such as Wells Fargo, Home Depot, AT&T, and Microsoft all had a number of advanced features on their websites. You could make suggestions about products or services, provide feedback on your experience, watch videos, order products and services, and customize the site to your particular needs.

But there were two areas where the public sector actually did better on average than the private sector. Those were in the areas of disability access and protecting visitor privacy. On each of these dimensions -- particularly in terms of disability access -- it's very important for everyone to have access to this digital revolution that we are living through right now, and there is software that will essentially allow visually impaired people to see the contents of the website by converting text to audio signals. So basically the contours of that site will be read to this person so they can understand what is on the site. But the sites have to be configured in particular ways with tags on images and other ways for that software to work, and in general we found public sector sites were much better than private sector sites on providing that type of disability access. Ditto in terms of various indicators of the quality of privacy policies, in terms of safeguarding the privacy of the visitor experience to that particular website. You're much more likely to encounter cookies and other various features on corporate sites as opposed to government sites.

After we did the analysis comparing these websites, we undertook some interviews to see what were the keys to successful technology innovation, and the report outlines some of those suggestions. But one thing we found was that the private sector often does better because it actually spends more money. We got some information on the percentage of the overall government agency budget devoted to technology versus that in the private sector, and on average there is not a big differential, but on average in the private sector, about 2.5 percent of the budget was devoted to technology innovation compared to 1.88 percent for -- the information we got was actually for state government agencies. That doesn't seem like a big difference, but it's enough of a difference to allow the private sector to do many more things when they're thinking about their digital outreach.

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