Transcript
Transcript: Transforming Government Services for the Digital Era: Barriers to Digital Transformation
[00:00:00 A title card appears on the screen: Barriers to Digital Transformation and What Executives Can Do About Them]
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 the barriers, obstacles, or challenges to digital transformation, and what actions could executives take to overcome them?]
[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 think the most important is, does the leadership understand why this matters?
Do people feel connected to whoever is using their services or using the materials they're producing?
And I think one common way that we struggle is that we get focused on managing the process as opposed to understanding what the value it creates for others. And so when we get stuck into a world of managing a process, we're kind of optimizing often for ourselves. We're optimizing against kind of a criteria that's just, “How do we keep the machine going?”
Once we focus on who are we trying to create value for, and are we creating value for them, and what are the obstacles that they're experiencing, that can really change and shift the conversation.
And I think often people who are frontlines often see those things and want to raise them. The critical thing is, is there a receptiveness from the EX level to hear and then empower people to both further dive in and explore and understand those things, and then even begin to think about what are some possible solutions?
My experience has been that the single most important skill set in a digital era is empathy.
Because we're further away from our citizens when they're transacting and working with us online, or even our fellow employees and the people we manage (they're more distant from us), the capacity to get into other people's shoes and to understand why they're struggling or why they can't complete something, that becomes the most important skill set.
And that's what EXs need to have in spades. They need to model that constantly.
What we can't do is hide in our offices and kind of try to avoid hearing both the mistakes, but actually embrace them and engage in like an enormous exercise of empathy, of understanding them, so we can get better and we can rally those around us to improve those services.
I think one of the most important skills in a digital era is actually not your capacity to manipulate data or to write code or to even be a designer and figure out how to design services or business processes. It's really the skill of empathy in a digital era because we're removed from the citizens we serve. We interface with them through a website, say. And even, we're removed from the people we manage or our colleagues that we work with because we're interfacing with them over Zoom or on teams or remotely, empathy now becomes this enormously critical skill. Because that's how we're when people are struggling, or they're not seeing the value that we think that we're creating, our ability to get into their shoes and see the world from their perspective and understand why they're struggling becomes absolutely critical.
And so I think being able to do that – and the people who most often see that are actually often frontline workers or those who are closer to the people that we're serving – and they want a service set up, and it's imperative that the EXs create an environment where surfacing those types of concerns is not only easy, but actually welcome and are actually constantly modeling the behaviour of empathy and curiosity and humility to try to go and say, okay, let's learn more about that so we can make it better.
One of the things I feel I've observed in the last couple of years in the Canadian federal government is a realization of the risks that inertia is creating. We have a number of systems that have become very long in the tooth on which we are dependent to provide critical services to Canadians. And so there's a real desire to think about what to do about that. But the inertia of existing processes, and particularly existing technology solutions is very, very significant because the risks of moving off of them are hard.
The ability to extract data from them, the ability to kind of keep a record that you know, is auditable, that goes back 60 years so you can become comply with various laws is very, very real. These are why I think people ask, well, why can't we change more? I think EXs are wrestling within a range of incredibly difficult and complicated issues that reinforce inertia and therefore they become the voice of inertia in the system.
My fear is the long term risk here is that if we don't act at some point, these systems will fall over and then we'll be in a situation of crisis. So I think as an EX, the question is, is how can you try to create at least even small spaces for experimentation where people can try to begin to overcome some of the risks that these legacy systems create?
And I think one of the big risks in my mind is actually to try to replace systems wholesale as opposed to maybe carving off small sub parts of a system and seeing can we modernize just this element or can we honor this, just that element, both the smaller project de-risks that and I think kind of lower some of the resistance.
You can also create some windows that makes it easier to then go on to the next system of the next system. There is no silver bullet here, and I think you guys are facing an enormously difficult situation. But we need to kind of increase the range and diversity of approaches were taken because I think the very, very large, you know, $100 million or tens of millions of dollars, we're going to kind of completely redo the system from scratch. Those we have tried, and when they go wrong, they go deeply wrong.
And so one are we have a kind of portfolio approach where we're tackling this a number of different ways. And how do we create room for EXs to be able to take the initiative in leadership to do that?
I think, you know, as individual EXs, there's two conversations I would love to encourage people to have.
One is, you know, what are we doing within the remit that you control? So how can you create space for the people who report to you to improve the services that they oversee or improve the products, the public value they're creating? And to think about how technology can do that. How do we create space for them to do that?
And a big part of digital transformation is not just shifting things online. It's actually how do we go back and fundamentally rethink what are the business processes that are involved in delivering the service or creating this good? And how might those be very different in a world where people are working with us online?
What can we remove or what will we do very differently? So I think that's our first conversation that as an EX, you should feel deeply empowered to have that with your team because you're the executives and you have the power to go and encourage that experimentation.
I think the other kind of bigger piece is to be part of a larger structural conversation about, you know, what does it mean to look like, to move to a world where rather than replicating these massively expensive silos, in which all the data, business processes are locked in systems.
And we're recreating them over and over again, what can we do to begin to move towards a world where we're creating more shared infrastructure and adopting a more kind of “governance as a platform” approach?
And I want to fully recognize solving that is beyond the remit of any one given EX.
But being part of that conversation and finding ways to drive that conversation forward and to be looking to others to lead and then offering ways that you can contribute. I think those are kind of like really interesting opportunities.
And so I think you are the team that created Notify and that's now being used by, you know, hundreds and hundreds of services across the federal government. That started because someone chose to make an initiative and chose to take a leap.
There are a lot more opportunities that are out there, and I'd love to see people trying to find ways to architect solutions like that and finding spaces to create those opportunities.
[00:08:12 The CSPS logo appears onscreen. A text appears on the screen: canada.ca/school. The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
