Digital-Era Government Reform: Keeping Pace with Global Leaders (DDN2-V47)

Transcript: Digital-Era Government Reform: Keeping Pace with Global Leaders

[00:00:00 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]

[00:00:04 The screen fades to Phil Gratton in a video chat panel.]

Phil Gratton (Associate Faculty, Innovation and Skills Development, CSPS): Good afternoon, everyone. Bonjour à tous. Welcome to this event, "Digital-Era Government Reform: Keeping Pace with Global Leaders." And thanks for joining us. My name is Phil Gratton. I'll be your session moderator today. Let me acknowledge in friendship that I'm joining you from the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. Please accompany me in a private reflection on the Indigenous territory you're also located on in your own region in context. Today's event will feature a presentation from our guest speaker, then move to a fireside chat style discussion, and then we'll open it up to a question-and-answer period. So, throughout the event, even before the Q&A period formally starts, you'll be able to submit questions by using the bubble chat icon located in the top right-hand corner of your screen. Please be aware that even if you don't see your question appear, it will still get to me for consideration. And please feel free to use the official language of your choice in submitting your question.

In this era of rapid digital transformation, governments worldwide are redefining and reforming their governance structures, policies and services to align with the demands of our digitally enabled society. Today's speaker will address the current state of the digital reform within the Government of Canada, recognizing both its accomplishments and the imperative for future modernization to keep pace globally. My distinguished guest today is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, Amanda Clarke. Amanda is at the forefront of research on public service delivery, with a focus on digital government to support institutional change, and she brings a wealth of knowledge to this important and ongoing discussion. Amanda's presentation will shed light on policy and management reforms that have propelled leading edge digital governments around the world to success. And she'll offer insight and steps for Canada's own federal government. Amanda, welcome. Thanks for being with us.

[00:02:01 amanda Clark appears in a separate video chat panel.]

Amanda Clarke (Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University): Thanks, Phil. It's a real pleasure to be here and to have the chance to share this research with everyone in attendance. So, I'll begin by acknowledging that as much as the premise of this presentation is that Canada has something to learn from other jurisdictions that are a bit more advanced, are moving forward with more success in their digital government reform, it's certainly not that we're doing nothing. So, I'll begin with a bit of a reflection on sort of what we are doing. I think one of the things to really be aware of is, I mean, Canada, the Government of Canada has lots of written commitments on digital reform. This isn't a file we've been ignoring by any means. And in most cases, we're saying the right things. We're aligning with what the rest of the world is sort of viewing as best practice on a number of fronts. And so, we have, just to run through some examples of some of the written commitments that we have right now, we have a policy on service and digital, we have the digital standards, which are, mirror what we see in leading jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom and the United States. We also see those at certain provincial orders of government in Canada as well. We have things like the Digital Standards Playbook, which helps put this into place, the guideline on making information technology usable by all. There's a directive on digital talent. We have had action plans on open government for several years now. The most recent one released, I mean, covers some, again, some of the dominant themes in open government that you'll see in other jurisdictions around things like open data and citizen engagement. And we have a data strategy for the federal public service reaching forward to 2026.

So, in addition to these sort of written commitments, we also have some institutions that we've built to try to build digital capacity in the federal government. So, the Canada School of Public Service has created a digital academy with the view of training public servants in modern digital competencies. We also have the Canadian Digital Service, which used to be House and Treasury Board and is now at Shared Services Canada, and the Canadian Digital Service also falls in line with kind of global best practice in developing an in-house digital government unit or digital service team to sort of jumpstart digital reform across the government. So, it's not that we're doing nothing, and I really want to underscore that. I'd say what we've seen in Canada relative to other jurisdictions that are kind of bounding ahead with meaningful digital reform is that we've been doing a lot of writing, and talking, and committing, but then not a lot of, sort of, hard action on digital reform. And this has become, I would say, kind of the theme of Canadian digital government reform.

And so, what I mean by talk, not action, is that we have seen relatively limited budget for some of the large reforms and for the institutions that we're talking about building here. We have few, and in many cases, largely ineffective policy levers. So, some of the policies that I pointed to, they're Treasury Board directives, or they're sort of guidelines, but they're not hard law. It's not something that you would be in trouble for not following or that there's any kind of hard stops on actions that would betray those guidelines or suggestions. We're lagging in building some really key sort of core infrastructures for modern digital government, so things like digital identity or developing cross-government data platforms. And I would say that my research, and others' research in this space, has found that digital government reform is not something that many, and arguably most, public servants even know about, which is especially concerning at the executive level, where we often find a sort of a lack of awareness and engagement with digital government reform as an imperative of all modern, competent public administrations.

And to be fair, you can't blame executives or those that they're leading for not thinking about digital government reform, because as I noted, there's not a lot of hard rules asking them to do so, right? And so, the incentives and kind of requirements are not necessarily there. I want to also acknowledge that, despite this, there are many public servants across the Government of Canada who are working very hard to drive meaningful digital government reform. And I think the problematic thing is that these folks are not supported and the burnout rate is actually pretty high. It can be, feel a bit like an uphill battle sometimes to try to move forward digital reforms that are, in other jurisdictions, well underway and already bearing fruit in terms of improved services, cost savings and employee morale, right? So, that's an important point that I really want to underscore, is that while I will point to other jurisdictions and things we can learn, this isn't to deny the very hard work that's underway in many, many parts of the government right now.

As a skeptic in the audience might be thinking, "Well, maybe people don't think about this and maybe there's not a lot of meaningful investment in this because it doesn't really matter." And I think for a while, digital government, and amongst many, it's still being viewed as like a nice to have, an add on, like it would be cool if we could have effective government digital services and it would be nice if we could have cross-government data infrastructures that work well. But a key sort of premise of the digital government reform movement is that it's not just about adding tech to an existing system of government, that actually digital government reform is essential to effective public administration. It's not a nice to have. It is core to keeping pace with the expectations of the citizenry and also to meeting basic principles of good democratic governance around equitable, accessible services, responsible stewardship of public funds, and accountable and open government.

A few examples of why it's problematic if we continue to ignore this file the way we have, or not give it the due attention and investment that it needs. We saw this past summer, many examples of kind of just failing services, like, for example, long wait times for passports, or issues at the border or processing immigration applications. We've also seen the Auditor General of Canada recent, like regularly and recently, raise alarms about the dire health of our, sort of core services. In the most recent reports from the Auditor General, which I encourage you all to read because they're excellent, two thirds of the Government of Canada's 7500 applications are viewed to be in poor health. The Auditor General's also, for over a decade now, been warning about the kind of risk of just critical systems falling apart because we're not investing in and modernizing our IT systems. And these are not just, again, nice things to have. These are the backbone of things like delivering core benefits. The Canada pension plan, for example, or employment insurance.

The Phoenix pay system is obviously the most recent example of a kind of large-scale digital failure. And this is some interesting research that I'll point you to that came out from Christopher Cooper and Luc Turgeon at the University of Ottawa, recently published in Canadian Public Administration, the journal. They used data from the 2017 Public Service Employee Survey to find that the greater the problems an employee has endured from Phoenix, the more likely they are to intend to quit the public service, and that this was a particularly pronounced relationship amongst younger and more educated public servants. I raise this research to point to the fact that the, kind of the failures in modernizing digital systems and bringing in sort of modern service design approaches to government, affects not just the citizens who are interfacing with government but also employees. And we know that having a motivated, engaged workforce and being able to attract and retain talented people is key to any organization thriving. And so, we can't, this file is also relevant to that piece of kind of good governance.

We spend a lot of money on information technology, 4.6 billion alone in external IT contracts in 2021-2022. We also know that a big part of that is the reliance on kind of management consulting firms, which we recently, the federal government paid $670,000 to one of those very management consultants to attempt to find ways to cut those consultant costs. This has caught the attention of the Government Operations and Estimates committee in the House, and it's something that I think is justifiably sort of on the radar, and that, I will say, in recent conversations with digital government leaders around the world, that Canada is being viewed as one of like, kind of ground zero for failures in managing the IT-vendor relationship, that we have an overly dependent kind of reliance and that we're locked in too significantly to these external sources of advice. In the Government of Canada's own Digital Ambition report released in 2023, which kind of lays out the roadmap for what needs to change here, I mean, it's refreshing, actually, to see that the government itself is comfortable acknowledging this, right? Saying that we have the lowest usage frequency for digital government services amongst a 2020 survey of 36 countries. In the 2022 U.N. E-Government Survey, Canada is ranked 32nd in the E-Government Development Index. So, we're well behind our peers as well in these kind of international rankings. So, I think it's important that we kind of focus on what we can do to fix this, but also acknowledge from the beginning that, like there is an issue here, Canada is really lagging behind on reforms that are, like, well underway in other jurisdictions.

So, that brings me to the core of what I want to talk about today, which is, well, what lessons can we draw from digital government leaders? And there's kind of three overarching messages that I really want to hit home, and then I'll break down some, like, specific things or specific initiatives that we could turn to. But to begin with, the three key things that have, the research is pretty clear that these are in place when you see successful digital government underway. Digital reform, when it succeeds, these three things are in place. The first is that, this is, governments that are succeeding are building the digital talent base, they're empowering those people and they're eliminating the rules, structures and processes that prevent these people from doing their work effectively. That's all intuitive, but it's not happening right now in Canada. And so, I'll talk a bit more in the presentation about how we could do that.

The second key thing that drives successful digital reform is introducing hard rules, like legislation, for example, that make it impossible or very difficult for bad digital habits to continue. And I'll talk a little bit more about what those bad digital habits are and what those hard rules could look like. But the key thing I want to illustrate here is that a lot of what we're trying to do with digital government reform is break entrenched ways of working, organizing the public service, managing data, thinking about services, interacting with the public, that for a long time, way before the advent of the Internet, have been acknowledged as problems in modern public administration that need to be remedied. And so, some, a lot of what the digital government reform movement is doing is trying to finally, like, challenge those ways of working and provide pathways for them to kind of be, like, eliminated. And the research shows that this doesn't happen through soft power and nice sounding top-down directives, or kind of guidelines. It happens through, like, hard rules. You can't get money for this if you don't follow this way of working, for example, or there's legislation which says you have to design services this way. So, I'll talk more about that in a moment.

And the third, really key piece of driving digital government reform that sticks and that works is to build sustained political commitment to, and scrutiny of, digital reforms. And this just speaks to the reality that the money, policies and laws, and kind of political leadership that's required to transform the way that a large organization in the public sector works, like that doesn't, that's not going to happen if you don't have the external kind of scrutiny, and oversight and like political commitment to actually make these changes. It's not something that the public service can do on their own.

So, I'll jump into one theme here that speaks to these three kind of overarching key dynamics of effective digital reform. And this is around digital talent and literacy. So, basically, like, the people piece of digital government reform. And here's a few things that, I mean, and I'm not the only one who's been saying this, you can find many others who have made these points, but this is kind of established as I think what we need to see in the federal government right now to bring in that talent. It's something that the Chief Information Officer has talked about, for example, before Parliament. So, one is reducing time lags and administrative burdens in the Government of Canada hiring process. No surprise there. That's probably going to solve a lot of other problems, too. But it needs to be easier and faster to bring folks in who have these really in-demand profiles who can be snapped up by private sector firms for their in-demand talent. Another space where there needs to be reforms is modernizing the IT and digital job descriptions and classifications so that when you're advertising for positions, those who have those skills actually can recognize the work and like say, "Oh yeah, that's a job that I have trained for." The way that we currently classify IT jobs in the federal government is dated and doesn't align well with kind of those expectations.

I think adopting a fully distributed teams model for the Government of Canada, with reasonable exceptions, so moving away from the current model of the sort of hybrid, you're in the office two to three days a week. That, again, that's probably going to solve a lot of other HR problems. But I think it also is essential to bringing in that digital talent, and to creating a workspace that is dynamic and aligns with the expectations of those folks. Adjusting reporting structures to allow IT folks and policy to work together. So, breaking the idea that if you work in IT or digital, that you have to only report through a kind of CIO chain. This completely is at odds with the need to bring that talent in and then have them work one by, side by side with people who are designing policy and delivering through things like multidisciplinary teams, which is something that is acknowledged as sort of a best practice in building a digital government.

I think mandating meaningful training and experiential learning on digital government for executives, and for policy staff especially, getting their hands dirty with these methods. Creating funds and pathways to bring in outside digital talent to senior roles in government, and then empowering those folks by making them deputy ministers. This is often the case when you see a successful digital government reform, that move of bringing in someone from the outside who has led teams and delivered effective modern services, digital services, and then bringing them into government and giving them the levers they need to do their work. And then finally, making interchange easier and rewarding it. So, that means not just bringing in folks from the outside who have that digital expertise, but also getting executives, for example, across the government to spend time, the private sector or the nonprofit sector, in civic technology firms so they can see how other organizations have successfully implemented digital transformation, or organizations that were born digital, and learn those methods kind of by actually experiencing it.

So, some concrete examples of how this sort of digital talent piece of reform has been done well. The United Kingdom has developed a Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework. So, this is creating those job descriptions in those titles so that you can advertise effectively. We haven't done this in Canada, and this could be the kind of thing that you create and that all departments can then use, and it helps sort of modernize the way you're advertising your jobs and also specifies like what different areas of talent and skills you need to be a modern, a modern organization, a modern service organization. Things like data architects, cybersecurity experts, data ethicists, data scientists, user researchers, product owners. Focusing on the kind of, how to train existing leaders, you can look to the model of Digital Israel, which is, they've got this model where they basically pick 40 senior leaders and then they run them through focused digital training every year for two days a month, and it's sort of nine months of the year that they do this training. And so, the idea here is to basically say, well, we've got all these existing leaders who were trained in an environment where they were never asked to really understand technology, but now their ability to effectively manage their teams, to oversee programs and services, means they need like a strong baseline understanding of modern digital procurement, what user research is, what it means to develop a prototype, and how to how to scrutinize a service as it's rolling out to make sure it adheres to things like digital standards. This training is like not something that these leaders were ever given. So, you need to have a really focused effort on upskilling this existing cadre of leaders, who are going anywhere, like this is, they're going to be around, they're planning on riding out their careers in government. So, this is one example of how to do that training.

Korea has a really interesting model where they focus a lot on bringing in sort of external talent to CIOs and to CIO roles in government. So, more than half of central government agencies have outside IT experts appointed as their CIO, for example. They've achieved this in part through an external consultancy that's publicly funded. It was started in 1987 as something called the National Computerization Agency. Now, it's called the National Information Society Agency. And so, yeah, they're bringing in people from Samsung, Google, LG to provide advice and leadership to the, to government on sort of digital reform. And it's viewed as like a think tank or consulting agency that's publicly funded. It has about a thousand people in it. So, a really interesting model for like bringing in that outside expertise to senior leadership roles.

Of course, you build the inside talent, but a big part of effective digital government is going to still involve working with vendors, IT vendors, management consultants, for search capacity, for building things when it doesn't make sense for government to build. So, a successful digital government reform almost always rests on really targeted efforts to improve digital procurement. I mentioned earlier that figure of we spend about $4.6 billion a year on IT contracts. So, this is a huge, huge piece of public spending, and fixing that relationship with vendors matters for tons of reasons, not just because of the amount of money, but also because a lot of the big failures result from poor management of those contracts. So, instituting strict spending limits on software contracts, adopting modular contracting, which is something that I'll talk about more in a moment, that the U.S. has done, reducing barriers to small and medium-sized enterprises entering the GC market by making it, by reducing the administrative burden largely of, sort of, bidding for government work, prioritizing open source software and adopting something called the Open Contracting Data Standard. So, it's easier to follow the money and see what we get basically from the amount we're spending, and to hold government better to account and vendors better to account, frankly, when we set up contracts with them.

So, to point to a few concrete examples of how this vendor relationship has been reoriented in successful jurisdictions. France has really invested and prioritized open source. Basically, this is something the Government of Canada could do as well by mandating that any code developed by the government, or contracted or procured by the Government of Canada, needs to be open source. And you could have exceptions where there's issues around, concerns with national security, for example. But other jurisdictions have found that the sort of concerns around this being not secure are largely unfounded. We actually do the, almost the opposite of this approach right now in Canada. We could probably say that most Government of Canada IT contracts, because they're subject to the Policy on Title to Intellectual Property Arising Under Crown Procurement Contracts, which is a bit of a mouthful, that policy that we have explicitly prevents procuring open source custom software that would be owned by the Government of Canada and requires instead that IP created through Crown procurement contracts is owned by contractors, not government. So, we're actually doing the exact opposite of what leading jurisdictions like France are doing in mandating open source.

The Government Digital Service in the U.K. instituted some of those hard rules that I was talking about in putting in place strict spending controls. So, basically saying that the size and duration of government IT contracts has to be capped. Tons of reasons for that, one being that we know the evidence shows large contracts almost always fail and it's hard to switch from a vendor when you've got a long-term contract so you can get kind of locked in, even if what you're getting from that vendor isn't high quality, right? These spend controls in 2015 alone saved £391 million with it in the United Kingdom. The United States has a really excellent document that I point you to called, "De-risking custom technology projects." It talks about a lot of things that you can do to make government tech projects more responsible, but also brings in ideas around modular contracting, which I mentioned earlier, basically breaking down a large project into its constituent parts, mandating things like open source, limited contract size and duration, and ensuring you have kind of in-house talent alongside vendors, learning and working together, all so that you can lower the failure rate of government projects, government software projects, and also ensure that you're kind of building capacity to improve and learn as you go, versus getting locked in to these kind of long-term IT projects, which we know almost always fail. And there's very little debate around that.

For a little bit more on sort of how you could take those ideas and bring them into the Government of Canada, I'll point to a research project that I completed with Sean Boots, a former federal government employee, actually, who at the time was working as a researcher with us at Carleton. And the website's there, if you want to read a little bit more about how some of these rules could be instituted in Canada. The next thing that I'd point to that has worked well in other jurisdictions that we need to do here is modernizing and giving teeth to policies on digital. So, I pointed initially to all these sort of Treasury Board directives, and guidelines or digital standards, which many, if not most public servants don't even know about, and certainly don't think about and don't feel obliged to follow. This is true with a lot, these are sort of suggestions, not requirements. I think the driving principle of any policies on digital government, and service design and public administration in general, should be making it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. Part of that is going to be things like writing a new and more streamlined Treasury Board Secretariat policy suite. I know there's been lots of efforts to do that.

I think part of what we might need to do is just start from the beginning, and I think user testing it to make sure that a manager, early career policy analyst, when they pick up these documents that they can easily find the answer they need and that they're not, they don't assume the answer is no, which is often what you find when you read these overly complex documents, which are incredibly risk averse, and cumbersome and far from enabling, right? I think you'd find, if you looked to other jurisdictions, there's not really, I have never seen anything similar to the amount of rules we impose on public servants in Canada, as I have in other jurisdictions. And then the other thing I would say is in addition to cleaning up the rules we have or starting again, would be introducing legislation that mandates adherence to the digital standards. That would be a very good place to start to bring some of that kind of hard law, and the teeth that I'm speaking about on digital, so that things like doing user research, working in the open, adopting open source, are requirements legislatively of the service design and delivery process, not sort of nice to have ideas about what a modern government would look like, which is what they kind of are right now.

To begin with, the kind of reforming the Treasury Board suite, I think I would point actually to some of the work that's already been happening in Canada. The Blueprint 2020 Internal Red Tape Reduction Report, which is available online at the link that I put there, is developed through kind of public servants talking to other public servants in the federal government to find out what are the main impediments in terms of rules and processes to you doing your job well in areas like procurement and in human resources. This is like such an excellent source of suggestions for how to fix some of that internal culture to make it easier to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing in Canada. So, that's one place to start. Could also look to the Government of Ontario, which introduced legislation, the Simpler, Faster, Better Services Act in 2019, which provides that kind of top-down hard law to mandate modern ways of working in digital. And this is the kind of thing you need, again, to break those habits, basically to force a cadre of folks who've never been asked to work in these ways that, like, it's now a requirement that you adopt these ways of working.

The last set of reforms that I think are needed speaks to that point I made around needing kind of political commitment to digital government reform. I mean, I will admit, like in the past year or two, having studied this now in Canada for about ten years, like, it can feel a little bit depressing maybe, because you think, well, what's going to finally instigate changes? Like, there's lots of talented people, there's lots of great ideas, but nothing is really changing meaningfully, right? And what you see in other cases, what causes that change is a massive failure, right? So, I, sometimes I've been asked the question, like, what do you think would lead to meaningful reform in Canada? And I think in the lowest points you say, well, maybe like the Old Age Security system crashing and cheques not going out. We don't want to go there, right? Like, massive failures of public services are terrible for government trust, for trust in government, and also lead to genuine harm, like people not getting cheques that they need to pay for their medication. So, we don't want to go that route.

But I think what the failure, and like, failure leads to reform narrative, which has been kind of a not implicit but kind of accidental theory of change in other jurisdictions, is like that you need the public and political leaders to care about this file, and failures sometimes lead to that, right? But there's other ways we could get there that don't involve those costs. So, one would be to think about striking, say, a citizens' assembly on digital government reforms. If you could develop sort of like a large-scale evidence base to show that this is something that Canadians want, that they're concerned about, that they're frustrated with not having the kinds of services that they expect, or that they're concerned about how the government is using their data and they have very, like, understanding their comfort level, things like annual polling on citizen preferences and citizen service experiences. This is something that I've been putting a fair bit of effort in lately on research with some funding through the Government of Ontario, to understand, like, what do Canadians even want in this space, what do they want their government to look like in a digital age in terms of data use, and handling and sharing, in terms of involvement of private sector firms in service delivery.

If you build that kind of evidence base alongside things like regular public reporting on service and program outcomes, and cost and vendor performance, what you do is you create this sort of undeniable source of evidence, that like, this is something that Canadians care about, it's something that they're worried about, and that's something that then political leaders start to worry about and care about because that's their job. So, I think we've kind of, we've lacked that in Canada, and that's maybe what's going to help us finally, like institute these reforms. So, we have experience running citizens' assemblies. This is something that has been shown in places like Ireland to be a safe space to discuss really controversial policy issues. In Canada, we recently used this model to talk about reducing online harms and human rights in Canada. So basically, like, how do we want to regulate big tech platforms that, those sorts of questions. So, what you do is you bring together sort of a kind of broadly representative sample of Canadians for in-depth engagement on complex issues, but you bring people from different sides of the table together. Could also have parallel tracks with sort of subject matter experts. And this kind of is part of building that evidence base that becomes undeniable, regardless of the party in power, that advocates for this kind of reform can point to, to say like, this is something that the government is obligated to respond to.

On the point around sort of creating more public reporting, this is an example of what the Open Contracting Data Standard can look like in practice. If you want to learn more about it, I recommend you go to the Open Contracting Partnership website. They've got great stuff. But this would be like basically to visualize how an IT contract and the money that's been spent on it develops over time, any changes. And then ideally, you tag on as well information about what was produced so that we could say confidently how much it costs to develop a given service, how much was paid to the vendor, and what the satisfaction rate was, which you could do something like a performance dashboard. This is something that the Government of New South Wales in Australia uses. You can see here they talk about things like how many COVID-19 digital certificates were issued, what the customer sentiment was. This sort of public reporting provides like content for legislators, for the media, for academics, for citizens groups, and internally for public servants to advocate for investment in, and focus on, improving the quality of digital government services. Without that, like, kind of hard evidence, it can be difficult to like string a narrative that speaks to political leaders and puts it on Cabinet's mind, right, which is like I think what we really need in this space. And what you've seen in other jurisdictions is that as soon as you get the Prime Minister and Cabinet members concerned about this stuff, you start to see reform. And that's like, I think, where I appreciate the limits on public servants. But your job is always frank advice and loyal implementation, and providing that sort of internal source of advocacy in a neutral, nonpolitical way up to ministers around the need for these sorts of reforms. This kind of data could be really powerful and I think is something that we've really missed in Canada.

So, I mean, that just lays out basically a set of examples of what's worked well in other places and also some like high level themes of changes that need to take place if you want to institute meaningful digital-era government reform. With that, I'll turn it back to you, Phil, and open up for questions. I'm super excited to hear your questions and also to hear what the audience has to say and ask as well. So, thank you.

Phil Gratton: Well, thank you, Amanda. Well, that was really enlightening. So, really a lot of the stuff you said just really resonated with me and I'm sure it resonated with a lot of the viewers we have now. I do have a few questions for you. I wanted to maybe, I think we're inspired by the points you made, but I feel they may need repeating. And just as a reminder to our viewers, you're able to post questions for Amanda for a little later on in the Q&A using the little bubble chat icon located at the top right-hand corner of your screen. That's where you can access the chat for today's session and it's where you can post a question for our guest, and you can just type in your question and click send. All right, so Amanda, I was talking to a colleague recently who was actually echoing your messages, that he was increasingly spending too much time maybe working on messages about change and not spending enough time effecting change in his department. And he said the messaging about change felt like a kind of illusion of work or illusion of progress, but that it really wasn't being executed. Now, I mean, it can't be like that everywhere, right? Like, you talked a little bit about some of the successes. Are you able to highlight where the things are actually in change mode rather than just talking about change? And what does progress look like over there in terms of government reform?

Amanda Clarke: Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question, because I do think it's important to give a nod to those who are, like, doing the hard work. And actually, a lot of the presentation is premised on the idea that we need to remove the blockers and create pathways for those folks to keep doing the work they're trying to do because it's thankless and difficult right now in many cases. So, where is it working well? I mean, so I would really point to the Canadian Digital Service as, I think, a huge success. This was set up as a small team without permanent funding in Treasury Board, basically to demonstrate what it would look like to bring in digital talent, and modern ways of working and build, through Agile processes, build protocols, do your user research. And there's been some excellent success stories there and work around things like booking citizenship tests, support for the COVID-19, COVID Alert app. And I'm curious to see where that organization goes now that it's in Shared Services Canada and that we've got Minister Beech on the Citizen Services file. I mean, I think there is potential for that organization to grow, and I would say continuing to give more policy levers, and more funding to that team, and also to then try to set up similar kind of digital government teams across departments. That would be a way to scale that effective model.

What does it look like in these cases where you actually see success? Like, what does digital government, what's the marker of effective digital government reform? And I think part of it is like, products not documentation, like building things as a first step is an important part of like getting out the mindset that I think traditional public administration has focused a lot on kind of planning, long-term planning, long-term documentation, writing out strategies, whereas the modern service design ethos is like, build something, and test it and learn from there. And that's like maybe you would say, okay, but then what about the larger organizational changes? I think the more you start to work in those ways, the more the bigger changes around HR processes and organizing teams around thinking about data infrastructures, or building digital identities, all that stuff becomes sort of necessary because you're, instead of writing about things you want to build, you're actually building them and learning. Well, wait, hang on, we need those other pieces in place. So, that's I think a marker of successful digital government reform, is that you're actually producing things, you're not just producing documentation.

Phil Gratton: Yeah. And also, I think it feels like the, sometimes the business gets in the way, right? So, if you're asking reform on producing and delivering passports, I mean, the department still has to produce passports, right? So, they still have to serve their citizens. And yet, at the same time, they are, in parallel, they have to reform as well. So, that's like another layer of effort that may kind of come into conflict with the, like the current level of service delivery that they're faced with.

Amanda Clarke: Yeah. Yeah. And I think like all organizational changes, is hard, and it's not like this is the first time we've tried to institute these reforms. I mean, the themes of digital government reform are actually like pretty remarkably parallel to what we have seen in earlier reform efforts leading back in to like, the 60's with the Glassco Commission. The point you raised about public servants getting fatigued at these efforts is a really excellent one because the idea of like renewal or reform fatigue is like very real and documented in the research because I think, justifiably, public servants are like, great, another one of these things? And so, part of the challenge of digital government reform is like to not fall into that trap, and just kind of acknowledge that and then to offer something different to people. And I think the different thing it can offer is like moving to that action and actually like building new things, new teams, new ways of working, bringing in those, that new talent, which is different than like maybe writing about strategies for reform, which is that we've kind of had a lot of that. There's been, probably the only time we've really meaningfully seen like drastic changes to the public service and how it operates is whenever there's been sort of like cutbacks, right?

And so, we're not talking about that here. We're talking about like meaningful machinery of government reform, meaningful changes to the HR process, to reporting structures, to incentives, and introducing like new talent to powerful positions that can help lead those changes. That could be remarkable and actually would speak to a like a thing that's well, again, Canada is known not just as a digital government laggard, but public administration reform in general, we're often cited as a jurisdiction that is heavily status quo oriented, which has its benefits because you don't jump into something new that's untested. But this is not a set of new, untested reforms. This is like other jurisdictions have done the hard work of trying this stuff out and now we can just pick up their lessons. So, we have to just do that now.

Phil Gratton: Yeah. So, you talked briefly about how a digital reform is not a widely spread message, and like this topic is particularly important to me as someone who works with executives a lot. I feel it's not really well messaged that the, like let's say the middle executive level, right, and that there's often a kind of absence of support for it. So, the executive is under a lot of pressure, as you mentioned, to deliver on programs, but they may not have the time and resources to work on reform. Can you expand on that a little bit and why isn't the support there? And what would it look like in practice if it was there?

Amanda Clarke: I think right now the, like, executives are not being asked to work in these ways, they're not, and also haven't necessarily been provided the education and the training to do so, right? Like, technology, I think when like governments first started thinking seriously about the sort of digital interface with the citizens, about kind of ramping up their internal kind of digital infrastructure in like the late 70's and 80's, this was like the heyday of government outsourcing, right? And so, there was kind of decisions that were being made around like technology and understanding technology, something that we're going to outsource. And I think managers today are still kind of operating under that mindset that like it's not part of their job to understand tech. And I'm not saying that they have to know how to code or build, like that's not, or become a user researcher, or any of those things or a data scientist. But I think just in the same way, we would never say that an executive can do their job effectively if they don't inform themselves of like the HR process and the dynamics of that, or of financial management, understanding like strong technology procurement, understanding like how to manage and lead like multidisciplinary teams, knowing what it would look like to take to like the modern design process for a service around the kind of the Agile process of like developing a prototype, and doing user research and like iterating on that, and the idea that software is never done.

Like these sorts of basic principles of, are like core to modern service design and government is a service organization. And so, executives like, they just, they need the training and literacy around this. And then again, I think to break bad habits, you also need to, or a lot of the reason why executives haven't really taken advantage of the opportunities to learn more, or haven't changed the way that they practice, the way that they lead their teams or organize their work, is because they're not incentivized to do so. And I think technology projects in particular are still in many cases, and I've had several people say this to me in research interviews, like executives don't want to get involved in it because they see tech projects as rife with failure, and they'd rather like outsource that responsibility to consultants because then it's not, they don't want it on their plate. And that's, I mean, we just have to kind of call that it for what it is, which is just like deeply irresponsible stewardship of public funds and programs, right? Like, executives need to be getting their hands dirty with these questions and understanding them. And so, yeah, some of the training programs that I pointed to and some of the kind of pieces of legislation that could mandate this way of working, and also, just frankly, having ministers ask for this from their leaders, from their deputies, and from the deputies putting that down the chain of command, I think that's like where we've seen changes in other jurisdictions and we haven't seen that here. So, yeah.

Phil Gratton: Yeah, I mean, it's a message I hear all the time, right? The executives will say, well, relegate technical stuff to IT. And like you said, we're not asking them to do anything sort of, we're not asking them to code or design an architecture for a department. We're only asking them to understand how it works because it's something that they'll, they're using all the time now and that they'll be using to deliver services. Can you imagine, like, if there was an EX who would brag about not knowing anything about budgeting or HR processes? Like it would, you would, it just wouldn't make sense. So it's, to me, it's strange when I hear executives talk about technology as if it's something that the IT people can, should only be dealing with, you know?

Amanda Clarke: Yeah.

Phil Gratton: So, I appreciate that. So, you talked a lot about citizen engagement from the various departments. I appreciate that. Like, I think that's a great area to kind of like, to explore a little bit. I'm sure you'd agree with me that it's a good thing. But, and I know some departments are kind of doing it, I've seen some social media related to trying to engage with citizens. Are they doing enough of it, though? Like, if you were giving advice to Canadians on playing a kind of advocacy role in government reform, what would you tell them?

Amanda Clarke: Yeah, that's a great question. So, like some departments have done a bit of polling around questions like how Canadians want their data to be shared and used. I think ISED did some polling on Canadians' views of artificial intelligence. So, there's some public opinion research being done. I would say, like, the public opinion research piece is like important, and we don't, but it can also be abused, right? So, there's some, I think we have to be like really honest in how we generate opinions from the Canadian public on, like, what they want to see governments do with their data. There have been, there are surveys where you can set people up to basically, because they'll say, well, I don't really care what you do with my data, and then somehow that gives government sort of license to run wild with it. And then you can get into some dangerous zones. And you see this in jurisdictions that have tried to move too quickly with things like digital identity, or with a (inaudible) service model, basically sharing the government department. You give your data to one government department and then they can share with other departments. Like, and if you're not careful with how you pull the opinions from the public, you can actually generate what is like almost fake support for it because people weren't thinking carefully when they responded, or also acknowledging that, like, there's tons of things people say they'd agree to that we still don't do as a government because it's not good for the public. It creates harms that people might not be thinking about.

So, I do want to say that I think there should be, like, really carefully designed studies, something that I'm like trying to do myself, that I'm, and I'm happy to talk to anybody who wants to engage on that, because I do think it's a really fascinating area that we need to do more work on. We saw that, for example, in during the pandemic when it was like lots of questions about, across the world, about, to what extent governments should be engaging in sort of deep digital surveillance of the population in order to try to contain the contagion, and try to manage spread of disease and all these sorts of things, or monitor outbreaks. And, like, we just didn't have the evidence base actually to know what people would be comfortable with. And like, that's why we have to start doing that work now. So, there's that sort of like regular opinion polling. I think also the, like the public reporting piece that I pointed to, could be powerful. And if I had to give advice to like advocacy groups on the outside who might want to ask government, like who want to be able to push government in the direction of like meaningful reform, it would be sort of asking for more like concrete, clear reporting on service outcomes, on service costs, on the vendor relationship.

That's an area where there's tons and tons of advocacy to be done to like open up what is a huge envelope of spending. And it's, globally, we know that management consulting firms are like under attack right now, and we do have parliamentary inquiry, but it needs to be more sustained and like I think the citizenry would be like very concerned if they knew how much we're spending on management consultants to deliver what are often failed projects, or where we're not investing in kind of the knowledge transfer to build the public sector's capacity. So, these are some areas where I think there's like a lot of important work to be done. And it's sort of, I appreciate not so much in the hands of public servants necessarily to lead on those things, but that sort of work can be enabled by initiatives coming out of government, like more transparent reporting, for example, around costs and relationships with vendors, and outcomes, and transactions and these sorts of things. Yeah.

Phil Gratton: Yeah. Thanks. And not to start a revolution here, but what about the public servants themselves? Maybe the ones who feel they don't have the levers to effect change. Like, how can they contribute to reform? Like, I feel that there's quite a few of them listening in on today's event.

Amanda Clarke: Yeah. It's like, sometimes it's tricky, right, because if the entire organization is designed in a way that makes it difficult for you to like adopt these modern practices, then I, like, don't want to just like… I'm sympathetic to that. Like that, there's only so much you can do, right, without having the kind of political leadership, and the requirements, and the mandates, and the funding and all that sort of stuff to make this happen. But some of the things that I think have worked well for people who are innovating in government is like finding like-minded people. There are lots of communities of public servants who are interested in these ways of working, and I think like connecting with those folks, whether it's through the communities at the Canadian Digital Service, or working in the Digital Academy, the Policy Innovation Labs. Like these, finding like, finding your people, I guess, is part of it from, as a survival tactic. I mean, some of it is like I think, and managers have a role to play in this, but like talking more about the things that are actually working well. Like, it is hard to sometimes know about the successes because we don't really encourage or facilitate like working in the open as much in the Government of Canada, whereas you're seeing other governments maybe let teams like openly blog more about successful projects, or about the development of a new program and how they're bringing in kind of modern service methods and what it means to do the user research. Like, this has both the advantage of, I think, creating like internally for public servants, like signs that there's like important things happening, and also examples of how could do it safely, like from your peers. So, you can point to your manager and say, "Hey, like look, this other team is working in that way." So, that's a nice tactic.

But I also think, externally, it has tons of benefits for demonstrating to the public that there's a thoughtful, deliberate effort to modernize the way services are designed in the Government of Canada that can, is important for kind of like the public to see that. And if you're not talking about it, then all they see is maybe a transaction that didn't work well or news headlines about how much is being spent on management consultants. And so, like, there needs to be a kind of counter offensive on like telling the good news as well, right? Not in a, like branding way, but in a meaningful like discussion of what's actually happening, and I think what hard work is actually underway, right?

Phil Gratton: Yeah. Yeah, and I actually think that like networking is super important. Like, if your public servants are talking to each other across the different departments, even from headquarters to regions kind of thing, it really helps to kind of develop the discussion around what everybody else is doing, and how they're doing it better and how they're doing it well. And so, there's lots of lessons to be learned when you sort of break down the silos and allow these public servants to kind of like mingle and talk to each other.

Amanda Clarke: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Phil Gratton: So, we're at the, maybe the Q&A portion of the event today. I have already, I have some questions that are streaming in from the audience. Are you ready to take on some questions from the viewers?

Amanda Clarke: Sounds good. Let's do it.

Phil Gratton: All right. Let's see what I have here. So, you mentioned that one of the key components of digital reform in other governments being to rebuild, or to build the digital talent and empower them. How can we achieve that in Canada with the existing public service force of some 330,000 people before trying to compete with the private sector for digital talent?

Amanda Clarke: Yeah, like the competing with the private sector point, like, I don't want to under, I don't to downplay that. So, and this is something that like all governments are facing. The reality is if you are graduating or you're working away with your skills in product ownership, or data science or enterprise architecture, like you're in high demand. We have like a serious kind of gap in digital talent in Canada in general. And this is sort of well documented. So, government's competing for like, already like a small pool of talent. Some of the things that Sean Boots and I recommend in our report, and that we tabled to Parliament when we spoke for the Government Operations and Estimates Committee, were things like, so I mentioned creating like modern job classifications that reflect sort of the, sort of like range of digital roles and skills that you need in a modern service organization. So, that's one thing. Really like making it easier to bring that talent in because right now, because of the time lags in like onboarding, or sorry, recruiting and like actually bring someone into full-time work, like, these people have already had like five other job offers. They're not going to stick around. I don't think that requiring people to work in the national capital region or to be in the office for two to three days a week or, like that, like I think that that was a, that is a very flawed policy and it needs to be like really rethought and like, I would be so pleased if the federal government just kind of said like, "That was a, what we did for a short while. We were figuring out what we're doing, but now we're going to move away to a fully distributed teams model because it's going to be difficult to bring in so many talented people." There's tons of reasons to do that in terms of like getting talent from across the country, but also specifically on the digital file, like these folks are not going to, that's just too much of a barrier to bringing them in to government.

The other thing that you can do to try to bring in talent who might otherwise consider moving to like, moving into a private sector role where the pay will always be higher, is like, one is make sure that the pay is not wildly out of touch. So, it can't be as competitive, but it can't be like a too much of a difference. So, figuring out that piece. And then also like really discussing and promoting the value of a public sector career, right? Like, the kind of pro, there's been some research done on like why do people join digital service teams, like the Canadian Digital Service, or 18F, or the U.S. Digital Service? And there's this like pro-social motivation, the public service motivation, the sort of, that that drives folks to want to put their talent into government as opposed to like helping a tech firm make more money or keeping people on a website longer, you know? So, you can speak up. Like, in the U.S., it was like President Obama talking about coming in to government to do a tour of duty and like this kind of thing. So, I think like advertising government careers as meaningful, like the opportunity to improve people's lives, to tackle climate change, all the things that make working in government important and that can drive you. And that, like, actually does work.

The other thing is like creating space for interchange so that people can move into government careers and out of government careers more easily, so that they're not, you might not anticipate that you're going to spend your entire career working in the public sector if you have that set of skills, but that you could do it for a while. And then I think the last thing to do to like promote all of that, and in particular in around the kind of branding piece of government careers, is letting public servants like openly talk about what they're working on so that the career can seem exciting. I mean, if you're going to go to a Government of Canada website to like better understand what a career there could look like, you probably want to hear from people who work in government, that show that it's like a modern, dynamic, exciting place. So, you have to let the people who are doing that kind of work talk about it. And that can all be part of like, and it's not impossible, right? Because other governments are bringing in that talent. It's not an easy thing to do, but there's a concerted effort to put the, kind of the money, and the marketing and the like HR infrastructure in place, acknowledging that like it's not, you can't build a modern, competent service organization by, strictly through contracting and digital expertise. Like, that's never going to work. It needs to be baked in to the like, to all activities. And buy as well, we have know what to buy, right? So, there's all these reasons to invest in it.

Phil Gratton: Yep, for sure. Okay. So, maybe in the same category as talent, we have a question here about, so creating talent, about training, training specifically for the EC category and those in the policy world, on the training on digital. Could you elaborate on that? What does this mean for something like training on Agile methodology and how modern IT teams work? What does that mean for the EC classification?

Amanda Clarke: Yeah, I love that question. So, like again, this idea that digital has been kind of like hived off and viewed as something separate that some of the IT folks do. We talked a bit about how like executives need to get out of that mind, that head space, but also the policy class needs to, in part because like the EC profession is like a major feeder group into the senior leadership, and also I think because, historically, like we had a certain idea of what a policy analyst had to understand. And I mean, I experienced this as someone who teaches in a policy school. We largely produce graduates who intend to become EC classifications in the federal government. And like, we've historically, and to this day in most policy schools, we prioritize things like economics, quantitative methods, theories of the policy process, law and ethics. All of these things are important. But you also have to then think about, well, if all outputs of policy decisions now are some kind of digital product largely, right, a digital service, and if all the inputs are like based on kind of having a sound digital infrastructure within government, like components for delivering services, like digital identity, for example, or data infrastructures, but also like solid database management and like use of modern tools for collaboration, all these kinds of things, there's a whole range of like digital competencies that need to become mainstream policy competencies.

I've worked on this a fair bit with an organization that I'm helping lead called Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age that I would point people to, to see what some of those competencies are. And I mean, our goal there is to help train teachers like me and my peers how to educate, but policy folks, on this kind of stuff. But I think how I think about it is like, if the kinds of analyses and inputs to traditional policy advisory work might have been things like an economic analysis, a stakeholder mapping, jurisdictional scan, maybe looking at like, maybe you're pulling in some data sets from StatCan and like, maybe you're doing some econometrics, like these kinds of things. But now it's like we acknowledge that strong policies are based on a deep understanding of the lived experience of users with those policies, not just how they go to the website and apply, but also like how they interpret the meaning of the benefits, the language that you might put in, how you would want to write the legislation from the beginning to make sure that the requirements for applying for that benefit don't exclude a whole range of your target population, you know? So, it's like bringing in some of those implementation considerations around the delivery of the policy to the early policy design work. Like, that's what we need to start doing. And that means like bringing into the EC class an experience with user research as another important data point to draw in to policy analysis, or thinking about, instead of like long-term planning, and documentation, and meetings and Gantt charts to set out like what a policy initiative is going to look like over the next few years, like introducing more of a like let's build and test mindset. That's reorienting the policy process to be much more experimental, much more focused on kind of learning and short-term iteration and inputs. And that's just like a real mind shift from how we teach the policy process, which is much more linear. We do evaluation once we have launched and invested so much time and money into something that it's too late to fix it. The policy class like needs to get on board with that. It can't just be something that the IT community is thinking about and that's why like Agile, as a software development practice, is now becoming something that governments globally are talking about as actually a way to like think of the policy process. So, yeah, that's kind of where I think, where the EC class can like really, really needs to be brought into this whole world.

Phil Gratton: Yeah, for sure. Like, I totally agree with you and like I'll take this moment to plug some of the things that the CSPS and the Digital Academy are doing. We are very much involved in developing courses on modern service delivery with a very user-centred approach. So, we spend a lot of time talking about, designing with the users, and figuring out what, like, what the service needs to look like. And as a facilitator and an instructor for the, some of these courses, I feel like a lot of times when the word, "digital," appears in the course name, I get a lot of IT people showing up and I get a lot of like people responsible for digital transformation showing up. And that's great. But I would love to see more analysts show up, more EC people, more business side people kind of like showing up and learning about how user design can actually help you develop better policies and better services.

Amanda Clarke: And I mean, the user piece, we should say, is like just part of it as well. Another huge chunk of it is kind of modern data governance, right? Like, how do you think about data as an asset responsibly, and like steward that so that it can be used across different policy files, understanding the limitations of artificial intelligence and also the possibilities of artificial intelligence for some of the routine analysis and more advanced analysis that could be possible. Like, these are all, like the competencies required of a modern policy worker are changing quickly and like it's incumbent on like the EC class to like get that training. And so, we have to think about lots of intervention points. There's like the early training and then there's like the ongoing kind of on-the-job training through things like the Canada School of Public Service, and then partnerships, potentially, with other governments, because I'd say across all these files, a really interesting thing is like every government is like trying to achieve the same objectives and actually is like really committed to the same methods. The digital standards that I refer to, like things like working in the open, engaging with users, iteration, like those are like common. I have yet, like every government is trying to do the same thing. So, there could be lots of scope for like sharing this training challenge, for example, alongside training, sharing a whole bunch of other challenges at play here, so that you can like piggyback on each other's work. You don't to kind of recreate the wheel.

Phil Gratton: Yeah. Great. So, let's switch gears here. There's a question about, we talked about the global leaders. I heard a lot about the U.K. Digital Service, starting with the top number of services for a first round of digital services. Since we are behind, and obviously can't do it all at once, how should Canada prioritize services for digitalization?

Amanda Clarke: Yeah, so the U.K., one of the things they did is they looked at like their top, their top sort of most used services, basically, to like tackle first, right? So, that can be one way of dealing with this. I would say alongside that they also did a lot of kind of deep organizational reform. So, not just focusing on like delivering certain products, but introducing things like spend controls, creating a whole bunch of new job classifications, and really staffing up. Like, they spent, invested hugely in bringing in digital talent. And then also, they put in a lot of external digital talent at the tops of organizations, like, leading on these reforms. And this was all supported by the Prime Minister and a very active Cabinet Office minister, like, leading the charge on this. So, like, they benefited from that kind of, that dynamic, and also like extensive parliamentary scrutiny of failure. So, there were a lot of things in place in the U.K. that enabled them to like be a leader. And that's like, kind of their experience has repeated itself in other places in terms of what drove the change. But to the specific question around, like, should we pick certain services and start there? I mean, that's not a bad way to think about it because you can then have like sort of case studies to point to of like what's possible if you work in these ways. But I don't think that we can do that until we, like you need to do it in tandem with those other things, like, because the worst thing you could do is like create a team that's under-supported both in terms of policies and laws, and in terms of funding and ability to hire, and then ask them to work in these modern ways in an organization that's calibrated to work, it's not going to, you're not going to be able to deliver and those people are going to, are going to kind of burn out. So, I think those strategies have to go hand-in-hand, like the larger overarching changes to leadership talent, and like the legislative environment and the policy environment. And then maybe you kind of say, "Okay, tackle these top ten services right now, and like, that's how we can like start to make the most impact." You know? I mean, I kind of like the approach of focusing on like service, like certain services and most used services as well, because it gives you like a tangible product to think about, like a tangible outcome as opposed to creating more roadmaps and strategies, which like don't, at the end of the day, change how a service is delivered or designed, really, in practice, right?

Phil Gratton: Yeah. Okay. So, here's a maybe tough but tantalizing question. If you had to give advice to the Minister of Citizen Services, what should they focus on first?

Amanda Clarke: Well, I think part of the challenge for the Ministry of Citizen Services is going to be the kind of like distributed leadership on this file across the Government of Canada, right? Because you've got many ministries who have, and many ministers who have, like a piece of the puzzle. So, like obviously Treasury Board, Public Service Procurement Canada, Shared Services Canada, although I kept seeing that CDS was at Shared Services Canada. Sorry, it's at Service Canada, not Shared Services Canada, let me correct myself there. And please, anybody who dropped off early, someone message them if they start tweeting about me getting that wrong. Yeah, they're at Service Canada. But yeah, so and then you've also got like the owners of some of the big service files, right? So like, CRA, ESDC, Immigration. So, like part of that is like, yeah, I mean I feel for Minister Beech and that there's also like limitations on what's possible in that role because there's lots of other people to coordinate. So, I guess trying to build those relationships and like coordinate around like the shared goal is an important one, clarifying who's going to be responsible for what and how the various like pieces of power will fit together. That sounds vague, but I think it's like kind of needs to happen because there's like, sometimes it's not clear.

Like, when we had a Minister of Digital Services, for example, for a while, I received a lot of media questions about like will eliminating that role like mean that we've given up on digital service reform? And it's like, well, not necessarily, because actually, there's tons of other people who are still responsible that and it wasn't always clear what that role was going to be. So, there's questions about like who's doing what, that needs to be clarified as a first thing. I think a space where I would like really focus is bringing in executive leadership and empowering them, creating deputy minister level digital leaders who are bringing like demonstrated capacity to like build and ship modern digital services. Bringing those people in is going to be absolutely key, attracting that talent and then empowering them. You can't like bury them under a few layers of approval. They actually have to be like at the big table. And that's, I think, because until you have that leadership in place, no matter what you introduce, all the digital, like all the kind of like digital talent you bring in, and all the like emphasis you place on like Agile methods and working in the open, none of that's going to matter because there's still going to be a senior class of leaders who, like, don't want to work in these ways or don't understand how to work in these ways.

So, you have to shake up the leadership in a big way. I think also then thinking with the existing cadre of executives and instituting like some experiential learning, having those folks spend time with digital service teams and seeing what it looks like to work in these ways, understanding why it's beneficial, like why it matters to their business line, how it will help them do their job better, how it will help them please the minister, like these are important things. And then I think peer learning can be really powerful as well to like spend time with other governments or other organizations that are like instituting these modern practices. I think that's much more powerful than like, like sitting in on workshops and attending talks like this or like going to trainings sessions. That's all important, but I do think that folks, when they reach a certain level of authority, like they, and there's like research on this in the education space, like peer learning is a powerful tool for executive training, right? And I think we have to think about doing more of that. So yeah, there's like, for Minister Beech, I would say like the leadership piece, like has to get solved.

And then the other thing is I would, I would really say that the minister needs to spend time, take it like trying to institute legislative, like hard rules. And this would be done in collaboration with like several other colleagues around the Cabinet table, but to like make sure that those bad habits have to end. Hard caps on spending like the U.S. government is recommending contracts of no more than, for software projects, no more than $2 million a year, no more than three years extension. So, we're talking like a three, sorry, no extensions after three years, so like a three-year contract max, $6 million. We, that is like far from what we, dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on contracts with IBM to deliver benefits reform that like all the evidence suggests is going to lead to massive failures, right? So, like those sorts of things, like hard spending limits would be a big one that I would introduce. And then also bringing in legislation akin to what they did in Ontario to make the digital standards a requirement of the policy process so that, like, funding won't flow for a program or an initiative from Treasury Board unless there's like user research implemented, unless you're adhering to these standards and caps on contracts, for example. That would be like a really amazing legacy for any minister to leave behind, because once you introduce legislation, especially one that is going to, like all the evidence suggests, lead to cost savings and better services, like that's not going to be undone by future governments, right? So, it's like probably one of the most important things that could be done to fix this file. And it's what no leader in the Government of Canada has done yet, right? It's like the thing that we need to see happen, is bringing in that talent, empowering them at the senior levels, and then introducing those really hard rules.

Phil Gratton: Yeah, I mean, one can only hope that someone from the minister's office is sitting in on this talk right now, Or maybe from the clerk's office. Would be really interesting. Maybe they'll watch the YouTube video later on.

Amanda Clarke: (laughs) Yeah.

Phil Gratton: So, let's switch to (inaudible). We've got maybe about ten more minutes. I think we can, we'll switch over to some questions on Agile here. Do you have any advice for the public servants who are already using Agile methods, and modern technology methods, and need to navigate the traditional ways of thinking on how to deliver projects? Oh, I like this question. I like how, like, questions about how people who are already digitally minded can be successful in maybe organizations or environments where traditional ways kind of still prevail.

Amanda Clarke: Yeah, that's such a great question because that's like kind of the reality, right, for anyone trying to work in these ways, is like your out of step with how the rest of the organization is structured and how it's like traditionally been done. So, part of this is just digging into like some of the classic like techniques of successful policy entrepreneurs or government innovators. So, things like discussing your wins publicly, like not necessarily in an appropriate way, like not, but like doing the, show the thing like show and tell with your peers to like build support and show, like demonstrate. That's an important part of the learning process, too, is like showing other teams like how you're working and why it's working well. Thinking about like developing like hard metrics and like demonstrations of success, of good evaluative like data to show, that would speak meaningfully to people up the chain of command so that like they might not care about, like, or think about Agile methods, but you can show them that like we saved this much money, or like we served this many more people, or like the transactions are like, failure rates are down significantly which means that like we can now at the end of the year talk about how X number of like members of the population were served by this service that weren't served before, like things that actually, that can matter. So, that sort of stuff is like speaking to that audience. I think building like alliances and doing the hard work to build those relationships with the communities who can often be the know folks, so like legal, security, like these are typically groups that can be a little bit more risk averse in this space and you need to kind of like reach out to and build their comfort level with the new ways of working, understand their concerns. Like classic, like building strong relationships. But then that way when you do try to push maybe further up the chain of command to introduce an Agile method, or you want to build a multidisciplinary team or something, to designing a new program or service, or redeveloping an existing one, when you get those questions from a scrutinizing manager of like, well, what about the security concerns? What about the data privacy issues? Like, that you can say we actually already talked to legal, we're on board, like we have, we've worked that out. This is like a smart strategy for kind of helping navigate those barriers.

Another like, I think, interesting way to think about it is like aligning your, and this is like, again, not anything new, but aligning like what you're trying to do with the political priorities of the day. So, like, reaching into those mandate letters and finding those lines that talked about how the government was going to build more accessible open services, like these kinds of things. You want to work in the open? You want to have a team blog? Like, there's tons in those mandate letters right now that you could draw and that justifies what you're trying to do. The other thing is like when a manager, or some executive or somebody tells you no, asking them to show you the rule. Like, not being afraid to say, can you please show me where this isn't allowed? Like, show me the Treasury Board rule that doesn't allow this, show me in the Privacy Act where this is problematic. And it doesn't have to be in a rude or irreverent way, but it can force the person who gives the default no, because of a risk aversion instinct, like to actually do the time and like think through, like, oh, well, maybe this is actually permitted, and totally fine and actually supports what we're trying to achieve through this given directive or policy. So, I mean, those are just some of the tactics that I think, like, that come up when I interview like successful digital innovators. They'll usually point to those things. And then the last thing is, if you are in a middle manager position, you are like an incredibly crucial piece of this entire reform movement because that's where, time and time again, the research shows, it's like either digital innovation and like effective public administration reform thrives because you've got like a manager who's willing to like provide you air cover, effectively like communicate what you're doing up the chain, help you understand what the like higher levels are going to be concerned about, like, do all that stewardship of your team. Like, servant leadership is a really important piece of this, like creating the space for your team to do their work and then empowering them. And then it's also, though, a place where all these ideas can die, right? Like, because if you just get the no. So, like thinking a lot about that sort of middle leadership role is an incredibly like, powerful place to be in driving forward or halting these reforms.

Phil Gratton: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. It's also like a risky space to occupy, right? Because these people are putting a lot on the line in terms of how they'll be. If they're in any way ambitious, like I feel like in the government, if you're ambitious, reform is maybe not your best ally in terms of like promotional opportunities, right?

Amanda Clarke: Yeah.

Phil Gratton: Given the, sort of like the feeling of stagnation that we sense at certain layers, if you're if you're a manager who likes to be a little bit subversive and change things up, it's quite, it be quite the risk that they're taking.

Amanda Clarke: Yeah. For sure. And like, that's where I suppose there's like thinking about how do you create like incentives and accountability measures so that the sort of status quo bias and risk aversion that is well-documented as a dynamic of federal public administration Canada, it's like a thing that comes up, it's been coming up for years, any like Donald Savoie book is like largely centred around this, recent research coming out of the Brian Mulroney Policy Institute in collaboration with the Institute on Governance found that, like, senior leaders in the federal government don't feel that they're rewarded or being asked to speak truth to power, that there's like a lack of kind of willingness to push against the status quo. I mean, this is, so how do you change that? Like, because that's a, these are, this doesn't come out of nowhere, right? Like, the organization is obviously rewarding this. So, thinking about what those reward structures are through things like management accountability frameworks, and remuneration and like all these. And I think, that's also where I do think like just injecting in new folks who are willing to like question some of these ways of working is something that could be like a really healthy moment the federal government right? And it's like I think a lot of existing executives who would like, it's not a threat to them. I actually think it would make for, it would be dynamic, it would be fun. Like it could make for a really exciting, like management revolution, not to use that term because it sounds so cheesy, but in an organization that is kind of known for being very risk averse, and very rules and process oriented, right? That's like a very kind of Canadian public administration tradition.

And I suppose I'll say one more thing on that, is like, I'm not here advocating to throw out rules or process, because like that's irresponsible. But I think we've over calibrated to that concern, right? And there's tons of reasons for that. Political coverage of things, like the sponsorship scandal, and the grants and contribution issues, like this sort of coverage like has fueled that risk aversion and then managers respond accordingly, right? So, I'm not blaming people for responding to the incentives and dynamics put before them, but I am also saying, okay, now it's time to like, we've been complaining about these excessively burdensome rules, and overly dense hierarchical chains of command and default risk aversion for decades. It's in clerk's reports going back like ages. So, we have to stop just kind of documenting it and then like we now actually have to address that, right? It's a bit, if like, if we see one more like kind of reflection on the federal government that, like, from a senior leader who's retired, that like it's too risk averse, like at some point we have to say like, well, what are we going to do to change that, you know?

Phil Gratton: Yeah. Yeah, are they incentivized to effect radical change at the tail end of their career, you know? At least I hope some people are thinking about that in terms of like how senior, like senior leaders are put into their jobs and mandated to effect change, or maybe not, you know?

Amanda Clarke: Yeah, that's right.

Phil Gratton: Yeah. So, I feel like there's so many great questions, but I don't think we'll have time to do any more. So, I'm going to call it. I hope we could do this again sometime, maybe in the future, Amanda. So, I think the knowledge we gained on key trends today in the comparative analysis with global leaders and the big considerations for the Government of Canada in the digital-era, it really paved the way for an informed policy and management reform. So, I really hope that these insights will inspire innovation in the public service. Amanda, is there a place where people can go to learn more about your work or maybe some resources you'd recommend?

Amanda Clarke: Yeah, thanks. That's great. I mean, anytime I publish it will show up on Google Scholar, but you could also find some references to my research on my website, amandaclarke.ca. I'm on Twitter, X, as well, @ae_clarke, with an E on the end. And like some of the organizations that I would say to like follow, to keep up, I mean, 18F, which is in the U.S., the Government Digital Service, Open Contracting Partnership. These are all like just to name a few like organizations that have amazing resources online that we can turn to. So, I would really like to give a shout out to the work being done by those folks as well. Thanks a lot. This was really wonderful. And I hope that if anybody has any questions, they feel free to reach out to me. I'm always happy to hear from folks and learn more because I know that everybody, especially people working on the frontlines of this, have a lot of important insights to share and I'm always eager to hear them.

Phil Gratton: Yeah, I'm sure they were paying attention. So like, so to our viewers we'll be sharing some Canada School of Public Service resources on government reform, to those who registered for today's event, I think in a post-event email. I'd also like to invite people to check out the What's New page for the CSPS to see what's coming in terms of federal public learning and events. And again, on behalf of the School, Amanda, thank you so much. And thanks to all of you across the country for being part of today's discussion. I hope you enjoyed the session and that you gained some insight on this and that you will kind of like advocate for reform in the public service. Because I think, I think you deserve it, I think Canadians deserve it, I think it's an important issue today. Your feedback will be very important to us in terms of this event, and I hope you take a few moments to complete the satisfaction evaluation that will be sent your way shortly. And with that, I'm going to wish everyone a wonderful day.

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