Transcript
Transcript: Transforming Government Services for the Digital Era: Global Success Stories
[00:00:00 A title card appears on the screen: Organizing Ourselves for Success: The Different Strategies]
David Eaves: Hi. My name's David Eaves.
I'm an associate professor of digital government at University College London.
[00:00:12 A title card appears on the screen: What does success look like when referring to digital transformation?]
[00:00:23 A text appears on the screen: David Eaves, Associate Professor in Digital Government at the University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose]
David Eaves: I want to come back to that model I talked about, about kind of governance as a platform where you begin to think about what is the data that we're collecting about people and systems.
What are the what are the business processes that we're standardizing and making available across the enterprise? And then, what are the front end services that we're building on top of all of this infrastructure?
And I think there's two types of success that are happening around the world.
So one is, there are teams that are that are kind of coming in from the top and really looking at the user experience of various services. And they're effectively redesigning the websites. They're trying to find ways to make those services more effective and easier to use. Sometimes that involves just creating a simpler design, a more accessible way of engaging with the content. Sometimes that goes involves going a little bit deeper and rethinking some of the business processes and removing some or changing some to make those services easier to use. And that, I think, is a critically important piece of work that's going on.
And I think it's that type of work that's led to kind of like the Revenue Canada website to be much more accessible than it was in the past and other types of similar services that you already see in the government of Canada. The downside of that approach is that it's really… it's almost like a ground war like you've got to go take it all... You've got to go to every service and you've got to go find a way to improve it. So I think that's critical work and that needs to continue to happen.
The other success that I'm seeing is really going the other route, which is to begin to rethink what is the infrastructure, the technology infrastructure that we need to power a state. And this is the type of conversation that's much harder to have because it really transcends ministries.
And we tend to be organized along kind of ministerial silos. So here, I think to step back and say, like, what is the common infrastructure that we want to have to power a service, and how can we begin to build that infrastructure?
And I think the places that are really doing an amazing job at this are places that actually people don't tend to look or think about as being advanced. So I think a lot of people talk about Estonia, and so I don't want to kind of reference Estonia. I think you should go read about it. There's a lot of written about them, but I have been absolutely stunned by the progress places like India and Bangladesh have made in the past 5 to 10 years where they have really taken an infrastructure approach for thinking about what is it the government needs to offer and created kind of core business processes that span all of government, not just on one level, but actually across all the levels of government.
So they have a digital ID system that you can use to authenticate in to any government service and effectively any layer of government. They have a payment system that allows the government to issue you money or for you to pay the government that is unbelievably simple to use and can be deployed across any service across the country. They have a data sharing format that allows them to take credentials that any government or public institution has about individuals and allow the individual to digest that a number of different ways.
So when I'm teaching, I can point to almost any Indian student in my class and they can pick up their phone and open what they call their DigiLocker and they can they can show their medical license, the deed to their home, their university diploma, their driver's license. All of these are being deployed digitally into their phone and they can call them up at any time they want.
So that for me, building that infrastructure up, that for me is a kind of big meta conversation where we need to be reinforcing and we need the EXs pushing for because that will actually make the work of changing and doing all that ground warfare around, changing all of those front end services much, much, much easier.
We know that it's incredibly difficult to succeed at. And in fact there's a number of studies that talk about how many digital projects succeed and that the one kind of a well-known one is the Chaos Reports, which look at projects both across the private and public sector and look at how many digital projects succeed.
And the hard reality is, well, the numbers have gotten marginally better.
I think even today, only under 40% of technology projects actually are finished on time and on budget and deliver the value as expected in the public sector. I think about 25% fail outright. And by fail outright, I mean like we like literally took the money, we lit on fire and we burnt. We have nothing to show for it. And then the balance are projects that come in over budget take longer than anticipated, and/or fail to deliver the value that we anticipated.
So I think for me, one of the struggles I have is if we had this kind of batting average and we had the success rate for building highways, nobody would get on a highway and drive and yet have this kind of success rate. When it comes to digital projects, this is kind of perceived to be kind of suddenly okay.
And I think we need to have a real mindset shift to recognize that every service in a digital era is going to be a digital service. The reality is our citizens need us to deliver services online. And that that's a hard, cold fact. And so it actually doesn't really matter if like, I don't know what the metric is like. I haven't seen a lot of studies that say, oh, like we should all go back to only doing over the phone.
What I think is what I think is contested is, is digital government cheaper?
So I think that the ways that we're measuring success are, for me, somewhat problematic. Like, should we be measuring the success of digital government because it's cheaper to deliver services that way? Then on some metrics it is. Like delivering a service in-person is significantly more expensive than delivering that over the phone and delivering over a website is significantly cheaper than delivering it over the phone.
But if you moved all services online, what I think would probably happen is, the degree of customization that you're afforded, that you could do online, people would come to expect that. And actually the cost of delivering up to online would probably go up over time.
But that doesn't mean that we can afford to not do it online. Our citizens expect us to deliver world class services online, and we have to do that. That's just the hard fact. And it doesn't really matter if it's going to be cheaper or more expensive that's what we've got to do.
I actually really dislike the term digital government. Because when I teach and use the term digital government, many people, including you probably listen to this right now think I'm talking about the future. This is about, you know, how is government going to look like in the future.
But the hard reality is that for all of our citizens right now that are trying to go to a government website to receive a service or learn about a benefit or to understand what their government is doing, digital government is not some future thing. It is the present. And for the tens of thousands of public servants who are delivering services that include an online delivery function over the web, digital government is the present.
So I actually don't think there's a digital government. There is just government. And now happens to be the government exists in a digital era.
And therefore, we need to be thinking about what are the digital era competencies and skills and capacities that government and the public service and the executives need to have in order to be effective in that era.
One of the ways that we could think about that is to create teams that might be more specialized and can try to go and solve some problems. I'm an enormous fan of digital service teams and the ability to kind of pull some talent in to try to go solve problems. I also just want to recognize the limited capacity for that approach to scale across the entire public service. So I've talked a little bit about, you know, we need to have like one approach, which is almost like a ground warfare game where we're going in and then we're actually looking at every single service and we're thinking about how can we make the interface on the web to that service more effective?
How can we transform that service and maybe begin to explore some of the business processes to simplify that service? Teams can be a great way to do that work and pulling in special talent, even hiring specialty firms can be enormously helpful.
But it doesn't mean that you as an executive don't need to be skilled yourself.
You have to have enough knowledge to know what questions to ask that team or that consultant, how to hold them accountable, how to know when they're doing, you know, kind of good work versus merely okay work. How do you hold them accountable? What are the questions you want to be asking?
But the other thing we need to be focusing on is an infrastructure approach.
How are we building out the kind of core tools that every government service needs so that we can create, if you will, a set of Lego blocks that any public servant can go and pull in to create or remake any service we have and make it delightful, easy to use.
I think we need two approaches to this.
We need an infrastructure approach to really dealing with this problem at scale and a teams-based or a skills-based approach that's going in and tackling and learning about our users and trying to reform services, you know, on a service by service level.
[00:09:47 The CSPS logo appears onscreen. A text appears on the screen: canada.ca/school. The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
