Transcript
Transcript: Transforming Government Services for the Digital Era: The Importance of Executive Leadership
[00:00:00 A title card appears on the screen: The Importance of Executive Leadership]
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 strategies and tactics have you seen work and deliver results?]
[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: What has made governments successful in being effective in a digital era is executive leadership.
Whether that government has taken an infrastructure approach to solving those problems or a service design approach to solving those problems. Everywhere I look, where there's been success is because there has been executive champions who have sought to support and provide cover to the teams that are doing that work.
I think one of the things as an EX that you want to be thinking about is, how am I supporting the people below me and empowering them to go and explore and learn about these services and then come up with ideas about how they can be, how they can be changing them. How can I be ensuring that those people are empowered when they go talk to the technology teams about what they're demanding or expecting from their technology partners or from the vendors that are serving us.
But that executive sponsorship role is absolutely critical. And for me, the most important question I always want to be asking as an executive, that I asked when I was the CEO of my software company is, who are our users and when's the last time they used this prototype, and what was their experience, and what did we learn from it?
Because if we're not ground-truth testing the work that we're doing with actual citizens as we're developing it, all we're doing is developing a big hypothesis about how our service is going to work, that may fall apart when it encounters the reality of citizens.
For me as an executive, your job is kind of like metaphorically is imagining you're sitting at a table and because all you're mostly doing is your meetings trying to assess both support and assess the quality of the team of the work that the teams that are reporting to you are doing. So again, I think metaphorically you're at a table and you're kind of tapping the table and while you're listening for is like, is that solid? And what you're trying to hear is places where it's hollow and wherever you hear is hollow, you tap a little harder because you want to know, is it hollow because it's rotten there and you want to kind of break through it and discover it's run because that's where you're as an executive, now, you've got to go spend time understanding how it got to that place, how you are going to improve it.
Those same skill sets that I think have served you so well to get you this position, to be able to identify where teams are performing well and where they're not performing well are the exact same skills that you need in a digital era.
It's just that the sounds you're listening for, the questions you need to be asking, are now a little bit different. You want to be asking questions about, you know, who are our users, how are they interfacing with this service? What are the risks to security and privacy to this service is creating?
And it's not that you have to have complete knowledge of what the right answers are going to be, but you have to have enough knowledge to yield that kind of. Here, I'll go. Well, they don't they are not replying with confidence or I have seen this pattern before where someone's answered this question and it's resulted in kind of a lapsed approach to privacy or a poor user experience. And then how do you draw on that historical experience and then begin dive deeper and figure out how to improve that service or improve that team.
So where does Canada sit internationally when it comes to digital government, digital transformation? Here I think the story is neither unbelievably positive, but also not completely negative.
Canada has incredible assets at its disposal that could make it be a real leader in this space.
One is actually we have a set of provinces that create an amazing laboratory for experimentation, and a number of those provinces have actually built up very deep and interesting digital competencies in trying to improving their services and making them more effective in digital era that I think we could learn from.
And then nationally, we have other types of advantages. Canada's actually been a leader in thinking about digital identities and how we can enable people to identify themselves online. Which is core to doing any kind of a transaction over the web. But we've never really managed to kind of turn that advantage into the kind of digital IDs that you see emerging in places like Estonia and India. But it's clear that we have the expertise and the capacities. What we really need is kind of a leadership that's willing to kind of take an infrastructure approach. And here I think while we may not leap past some of the leaders like Estonia, we could be very fast followers and be leaders among the OECD countries.
One of the big disadvantages we have, which is shared by many of our kind of contemporaries is there's a lot of legacy systems and existing systems that are going to be hard to change and adapt. Again, I think leadership and figuring out how to have a piecemeal approach to that, begin to think about how infrastructure could begin to displace those systems would be really interesting for us to engage in, but it's going to require leadership and commitment. And it's hard to know where that's coming from at the moment.
So I think like the one good news story for us is that the models for thinking about how to do this work are no longer just emergent.
There are real patterns about what we can be doing. And so I think ten years ago or even five years ago, this work was a lot harder because it wasn't always clear why you should be doing. But I think both on the kind of the, you know, service by service level of going in and figuring out how to improve our services, they're the work of the Government Digital Service in the U.K. and other types of similar organizations have created all sorts of playbooks, the types of skills that are needed, you know, service designers, designers, product managers, researchers, those types of skills, those sorts of processes have been well documented for people who are interested in going and learning about them and bringing them into their organization.
And on the other side, the infrastructure approach is also starting to become fairly well established between Estonia, India, even places like Bangladesh, even much smaller and poorer countries like Togo are starting to have examples of this, and these patterns are starting to emerge about how you go about doing that.
I think the thing I'd really love to see from Canadian EXs is a willingness to actually go out and look not just across Canada and at the provincial level, but also internationally to think about what more are the skills that we need, what are the public services doing.
And to even break out of the trap of thinking, we have to be kind of restricted to looking at G7 or OECD countries. There's really innovative and important work happening in some emerging markets that I think we have much to learn from. And I think it would be a huge sign of respect, humility and positivity for people to go and try to engage in that learning.
And then the same is true for our partner members, traditional partners, is an enormous amount that we can learn from them. And so these patterns that exist mean that we can actually move much more quickly than have to reinvent everything from scratch.
[00:07:28 The CSPS logo appears onscreen. A text appears on the screen: canada.ca/school. The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
