Transcript
Transcript: Transforming Government Services for the Digital Era: Digital as a New Medium of Government
[00:00:00 A title card appears on the screen: Why Digital-Era Governments? And How Did We Get Here?]
David Eaves: Hello, everybody. My name's David Eaves.
[00:00:10 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'm an associate professor of digital government at University College London at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
The last decade, I've been thinking a lot and teaching about what's the minimum viable knowledge public servants need to be effective in the digital era.
And I'm excited to share some of those insights with you today.
[00:00:25 A title card appears on the screen: What is Digital Government in the Canadian context, what is driving it, and what does it mean for federal public service executives?]
David Eaves: Tom Loosemore, who is one of the founders of the Government Digital Service in the UK, has a great quote where he talks about digital government is really about meeting the raised expectations that citizens have in a digital era.
And I think this is so important because what's really driving this are our own citizens. They're out there right now and they're interfacing with companies, with non-profits, with each other, or with other types of organizations, and they're having simple, meaningful, even delightful experiences that are simple and easy that meet all their needs.
And I think they come to the Government of Canada, and they have a similar expectation of us. And so the big question is, how are we meeting their raised expectations? How are we meeting where they're at to deliver the types of services that they've come to expect from us in a digital era?
And what does “digital government”, “digital transformation” mean for federal executives? And here I think we have a much more complicated answer. Which is, part of it is just enabling our services to be more effective in an online format.
So I think we can think about the evolution of federal services, of first being almost entirely in-person, and then, with the advent of the telephone, 1-800 numbers, we had a new channel, which was to deliver services over the phone. And the Internet has created effectively a new channel where we can offer new types of services to citizens over the Internet.
And so one major question we have is how do we transport services into that medium? And I think one of the simple answers is, well, we just simply port them over.
But I think the much deeper question we need to ask ourselves is two things.
So the first is, how could these services adapt or change? How could we be fundamentally rethinking them? And so not simply porting them over, but actually doing something different? And then the second is, really looking at the business processes that are deeper inside government and thinking about how they could be re-imagined in a digital era.
One of the things I think is happening is that governments are actually on a much, much longer journey when we think about digital government, and that it's one that goes back decades. And I think it's actually sometimes useful to unpack why government even looks the way it is, and how much technology has shaped that. So, if you go back hundreds of years, it's worth just realizing how much of government is really centered around the fact that the piece of paper has been the fundamental organizing unit for information in our society.
So we have built ministries and organizations all around the idea about how can we most efficiently share information when the mode of sharing is a piece of paper. And that's how we built bureaucracy, it's around that. And one exciting thing about digital government is that it could allow us to think of new models for how government institutions could work because they can share information in different and more efficient ways. And so that could also cause us to be rethinking what it is that a service means to a citizen and how we might provision it.
More recently if I think about digital government, we've really been doing it since the 1950s. So if you think back, like, when did computers first start to enter the government? 1950s. 1960s. You think about like the Census work starting to use computers and then increasingly and slowly back office systems being computerized. And so the journey of digital government has, for the most part, and actually about how we automate back office systems.
It's only very recently in the last 20 years that we've actually started to now think about how we can use this technology to deliver services to citizens. And so one thing I always want executives take comfort in is, if this feels new and difficult it's because it is!
We spent the last 200 years in Canada building around paper, and then we spent the last 50 years really focused around the automation of back office systems. And it's only in the last 10 to 15, maybe 20 years that we've even started to think about how we can use technology to deliver services directly to citizens.
[00:04:34 The CSPS logo appears onscreen. A text appears on the screen: canada.ca/school. The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
