Federal, state and local government systems have been built on a legacy of convenience paths much like the paths one sees on Harvard Yard. Convenience paths, also called desire paths, are the crisscrossing trails trod overtime, that were not necessarily planned for, but rather built out of a desire for the individual to take a shortcut over unpaved territory. As students would leave buildings, instead of walking out of their way on a paved path, they would cut across green space in a direct line to their next location. Over time, these trails would become worn enough that they would become permanent fixtures on the landscape, and then often institutionalized when the authority that governs this property paves them over, solidifying their use. This type of convenience architecture is illustrated in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. He details how the medieval city of Bruges is laid out with its streets intersecting and bisecting at awkward angles, based not on institutional planning but a legacy individual process need.

 

 

 

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While convenience paths can serve a purpose and are a type of intuitive design, they can come at a cost. This type of architecture takes into consideration only the needs of the end user and not the larger organization that provides the system infrastructure and services to the end-user. This can create inefficiencies at the foundational level that, at some point, may need to be ripped up and re-built at great cost to providers who in turn pass this cost on to the user.

 

We often hear pundits say that government should be run like the private sector, but when dealing with large infrastructure projects, this mentality can lead to large scale problems and inefficiencies. There is a vast difference between a small nimble startup and large scale governmental infrastructure. For example, imagine if our nation's highway system were built with only the end-users input, based on personal convenience — highways would branch out from individual homes crisscrossing communities at dangerous angles. From a cost perspective, this system would not be feasible, specifically as startup and upkeep costs would bankrupt the system. To create large-scale efficiencies, organizations often mandate small inconveniences to the end user so that it can appropriately provide effective and lower cost services, ultimately benefiting the end user in the long run.

 

Entities within the private sector have the ability to be nimble, as they are often operating and innovating on the bleeding edge. Due to the lumbering nature of government, the systems built by them are often built over long periods of time. This process creates legacy systems and the problems inherent in these types of structures. A good illustration of this problem is in the creation of Estonia’s X road project in which the nation of Estonia created a unified digital services platform for its citizens. While this may seem antithetical to the above point, it actually illustrates why established governments face legacy problems. Estonia had the ability to create the X Road in large part due to the fact that it had no legacy of digital infrastructure to begin with, a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving Estonia to create its own infrastructure from scratch.

 

Due to the nature of jurisdictional and intergovernmental hierarchies, many of the current digital services and systems provided by Federal, State and Local government were built with little forethought to the larger structure of how citizens interact with multiple agencies and governmental systems across jurisdictions, or for potential future needs of interconnectivity and scalability. Like students at Harvard creating their own trails of convenience, individual governmental and/or jurisdictional authorities and agencies acted as individuals creating their own systems out of convenience for their immediate needs. This is not necessarily the fault of the individual agency, but often a reflection of the size of government and an inability to balance the needs of a unified infrastructure and the needs of the end-user, just as the original architects at Harvard did not necessarily think there would be a need for 50 different paths crisscrossing Harvard Yard. Once convenience paths are laid, the ability to rip them up and rebuild planned infrastructure can be extremely costly, both in time and resources as well as consternation to the user.

 

Digital Infrastructure: A new path forward

 

One potential solution for this problem could be a slow iterative and lean process. This process would entail federal state and local jurisdictions, working in conjunction with each other, building out scalable platforms. This would create the potential of transitioning agencies and systems onto the solution one at a time, as individual legacy systems reach end of life. This solution may not work for all systems, but it could create opportunities for smaller agencies that have not yet invested in effective digital solutions for its users — to opt in at an early stage of a new platform. It would then allow for larger organizations to move on to an established and robust network at their own timeline.

 

While this is only a brief description of a solution and only represents one thought process, what is clear is this: government institutions must build robust and resilient digital infrastructure as a platform. This will make it possible for smaller jurisdictional authorities and agencies to efficiently and effectively create digital services for its citizens, not based on individual convenience, but on long term planning.