Lesson 18. Government Departments as ExOs

Salim has joked for years that “exponential government” is an oxymoron. Peter’s face always grimaces when he talks about the 11 years it took to get FAA clearance for Zero-G flights. Indeed, a government is about as sluggish as any organization can get. But this is all changing, and very quickly. We will explore this much more in our third book of this series, but let’s give it a quick look here:

• MTP. The purpose of government, to serve the people, is a natural MTP. 

• Staff on Demand or Community and Crowd. Well, that’s easy because it’s the citizenry. 

• Algorithms and AI. With the data available in the public sector, this is a rich area to explore.

We could continue, but you get the idea. It turns out that the 2014 ExO book is being used by dozens of governments. We mentioned earlier how Nishan Degnarain, a key advisor to the Mauritius government, designed the Ministry of Oceans on the ExO model. Why? According to Nishan, “The water borders of Mauritius are over two million square kilometers. It was impossible to cover that area with a traditional linear model. The ExO model was mandatory.” 

In 2014, Salim was invited to address the US Republican National Leadership Conference. After some back-and-forth, the title of the talk was settled:“How to drop the cost of government 10 times in 10 years.” With today’s technologies and techniques, it’s eminently possible.

Perhaps the best example of an Exponential service in government comes from India, which has deployed UPI: the Unified Payments Interface. UPI is an alternative payment system that is secure, reliable, and interoperable among different payment companies. This technology is being adopted by many countries as it works well for a large population and has an open protocol. UPI aims to create a neutral, low-cost, and accessible marketplace and commerce platform. UPI already processes more than $100 USD billion a month and is used by hundreds of millions of people. 

We expect to see hundreds of examples of public-sector ExOs in the near future. The use of the ExO model by governments might have the biggest global impact of all.