Transcript
Transcript: Transforming Government Services for the Digital Era: Risk Management
[00:00:00 A title card appears on the screen: How Should Executives Adapt to the Digital Era? Part 2]
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 are some of the other competencies that federal executives need to be thinking about?]
[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: Because the technology is powerful and enables all sorts of new capacities and competencies. That creates a need for knowledge and wisdom about those capacities and how they can be used in helpful ways, but how they can also expose us to new threats.
We really need to understand who our users are and how they're interfacing with our services. And that means gathering data about how they're moving through a service, even doing user research.
We have to make these explicit choices to understand how they're using the technology. And there's all sorts of new tools that make it easier for us to do that. At the same time, I think we've always been concerned about the security and privacy of citizens. These new tools are wonderful in that they allow us to create vast new amounts of data and to connect data about things together so that we can make better insights and make better decisions.
But at the same time, that capability also creates new opportunities for threats, violations of privacy. And so as a federal leader, you need to be constantly aware of what those threats might be and asking questions like what are the possible exploits? How could this be misused?
Even thinking about creating red teams where you're like, go off in your corner and I want you to brainstorm all the ways this new capacity we're building could be misused and create problems for us. Not so that we don't do it, but so that we build adequate protections and safety measures to prevent or minimize the risk of those happening.
Another risk I think is really important for us are the ethical risks. Any public servant for the last 100 years, I would like to think as part of their oath, has been concerned about inclusivity and access. How do we ensure that all Canadians can access our services? How can we make sure that all Canadians are being treated equally and with respect?
And digital technologies offer us all sorts of new and exciting ways to improve access and outreach and connect with people. But there's also real risk that as we're building these services, we inadvertently might exclude people because they can't access the service in ways that we couldn't anticipate.
And so I think as a federal leader, you want to constantly be thinking about who has access, how are they getting access, and one of the best ways to protect yourself against that is actually to have diversity built into your team.
How do you have a team that's built up that that's representative of the makeup of the country, geographically and in every other possible way, so people are coming forward and saying, “Oh, actually people in my community would really struggle to be able to use a service” or “They may not have access to the service. We may not know how to use it.”
Those types of questions you want to be asking early, early on, in any time you're creating a new service or digitizing one. And again, the diversity of your team is the most helpful tool in your toolkit to deal with that.
I think another important role for a senior executive in the Canadian Public Service is to really begin to recognize when a new capability is ready to be deployed and used by the public service. And there's often a history and a desire to use the latest and greatest hot topic that's out there, whether that's the blockchain or AI.
I'm of an opinion that for most services that we are trying to deploy to Canadians, I really want my government to be using more boring, de-risked technologies that are proven.
For me, the challenge of all of government is that often we're constrained because we're using technologies that are 30 or 40 years old or are using processes that come out of the technology space in the eighties or nineties.
And I don't need us to be at the bleeding edge.
I'd like us to be grabbing processes, tools and technologies that have been proven and de-risked so that the problems of security and privacy, of ethics and inclusion, and access have been broadly addressed, particularly by the private markets.
And so then we can figure out the innovation that is, how do we bring those technologies inside the public service, and deploy them quickly as opposed to waiting a long time for them to come there.
So at the moment there's a lot of interest in things like artificial intelligence. And I take a much more conservative view, maybe a surprisingly conservative view over the use of these technologies. There are already examples of governments that have attempted to use artificial intelligence type systems. With, I think, kind of problematic outcomes.
Part of this has to do with the fact that anytime you're using artificial intelligence, you're training it on historical data. So it's basically looking at a historical pattern and building its judgment off that. But I think one of the big problems we had is that a lot of the historical data that we possess as governments or in private companies actually have hugely problematic viewpoints and decisions built into them. There are communities that were underrepresented or mistreated historically, and if we use that data to then train them the artificial intelligence, the machine learning tools, we then encode those biases into that tool and then deploy it at scale across our population.
So I'm much more interested in a cautious and slow move towards the use of artificial intelligence. And the public benefit of using it would have to be absolutely enormous for me to think about why we would want to begin to deploy that into an existing tool that we had in the Canadian public service, particularly one that might be citizen facing.
Another core competency in a digital era for a federal executive to be thinking about is how to think about data. And I think the big mistake here is to assume that every EX needs to be a data scientist or, you know, to know how to program in, you know, Python or in R. I think this is a big mistake. I mean, part of the conversation around data is going back to the issues of privacy and security, and are you asking appropriate questions to ensure that the data you might be collecting is secured?
But there's a whole bunch of other things, which is, are you also empowering people in your team to make use of that data to generate insights? And to find new ways they could be creating public goods and public values for Canadians.
But the other piece about data is I think so much about government is really focused on how to collect data. And very infrequently, when we're building services, are we thinking about how to share or export our data? And I think this needs to be at the core of what every EX is thinking about, because one of the reasons we're in a world where we're stuck with large legacy systems that are incredibly difficult for us to move off of is because those systems weren't often built with easy ways for us to remove the data from them, so what we did then import that into a new system.
So one of the single best things you could do as an EX is ensure that anything you touch or anything you build doesn't just ingest data well, but actually can share data more effectively or export data to others in the future, because that's the one way that we can begin to futureproof ourselves and get ourselves out of this trap of being stuck with legacy systems that are incredibly difficult to change and update.
Another competency that I think is really worth working on is how do you empower both yourselves and the people around you to work more what we might call in the open? And I think that this is a term that often gets public servants quite nervous because they think of working in the open as being working in front of, you know, all 39 million Canadians who are out there. I don't mean it that way.
I mean, so much of what technology allows us to do today is to collaborate across time and space, to pull in others to help edit our work or make our work more effective. And that can be anything from shared Excel spreadsheets and shared word documents to getting on phone calls together quickly or even just actually publishing updates about what you're doing for others on your team to read.
The most effective teams that I've ever worked on, how leaders who regularly either are calling people together to give them updates, or even documenting what's going on and writing in kind of, if you will, blog posts, not so maybe the entire public can see, but at least their team and even those across the ministry can see, so that there's visibility into the work.
And this can have hugely amplifying impacts. One is that you can allow your team to have a much better understanding of their mission, where their leadership is, where people are moving towards, what their leadership is thinking on or what other people are working on, but it can also infect other teams who may be working on issues that are parallel or close to yours – it allows them to catch up on what you're doing – and then interface and integrate with your team more effectively.
This for me is maybe the single biggest lost opportunity right now, is that we have all of these tools that are enabling us to collaborate more effectively and share more effectively.
And in many large organizations, but particularly in public institutions, we don't make effective use of those, not to share necessarily always with the public, although I think that's an opportunity as well, but even just to share internally behind the firewall with other public servants.
[00:09:38 The CSPS logo appears onscreen. A text appears on the screen: canada.ca/school. The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
