Transcript
Transcript: Transforming Government Services for the Digital Era: Government Structures
[00:00:00 A title card appears on the screen: Breaking the Monolith: The Structures of Government Are Changing]
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 is government as a platform, and why is it important?]
[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: Government as a platform is a term that gets batted around a fair bit. Let's break down what it actually means and why people are excited about it. So I think the first thing to think about is where is government today, and what how do people think about it?
You should think of government kind of as a monolith. So right now we have these crew vertical ministries where each service lives inside a ministry. And from a technology perspective, most services have, broadly, a single technology solution that provides that service.
So if we want to offer a benefit, we build a technology solution that offers that benefit and it's kind of what we would consider a vertically integrated in that the data about that service, about the people being served, the business process and the logic, is all inside that system.
Government as a platform is a different way of thinking about this.
So rather than building a service to be vertically integrated, what it's seeking to do is instead break those various pieces out and actually have them managed by different people.
So now you can start to think about what's all the data that we collect about an individual or about different assets. And each of those would be a single source of truth that would be shared by all the different services the Government of Canada offers. So you have a single source of truth about, say, my birth date, that everybody would come and query when they want to get that piece of information.
And then you would also think about trying to encode the different types of business logic that is common across the types of services that Canadians use when they're interfacing with the government of Canada.
So, you know, obviously when you come into a service, often you have to authenticate yourself or sign into the service. Rather than rebuilding that in every single silo and every single service, could you have a single version of that that exists across every service across the Government of Canada?
When you to enter in an address, maybe it'd be nice to have it look up and validate that that address is a real true address in the country. You'd have a single database with all of the addresses that you'd be validating against. I mean, if you wanted to check your social insurance number, we'd have a single database that you could go check against to validate that.
So now you sort of think about the various business processes that make up the services, whether it's a passport or getting a unemployment benefit… All of those are composed of these business processes – can we automate those in a “once”, and then kind of like Lego blocks, combine them to deliver that service.
And then on top of all that would then be the actual kind of “display” layer. So the website or the application that's pulling the data and the business logic into it. So government as a platform is really thinking about not building everything in silos over and over and over again, but building each process once and having it shared across the Government of Canada.
One way to think about understanding platforms is to reference something I think everybody's pretty comfortable with, which is your smartphone. So you can begin to think of your smartphone as a kind of platform. So the operating system of your of your smartphone is a platform. And one of the reasons people find using their smartphones so easy is that, as they upgrade their phones, when they get their new phone, all they have to do is enter in their credentials and all of the apps that they've ever downloaded in the past automatically get downloaded on their phone and they all work! They all work immediately, even though the phone, all the hardware, everything on the phone is brand new.
So what are your phone is doing is it's actually creating kind of a platform architecture where on the one part, the lower part, is all of the hardware that's in the phone and it's upgrading on a two or three year cycle every time you're buying a new phone.
And on the top layer are the applications which are updating every week. You may not pay attention to this, but in the app store, your apps are getting updated usually weekly, if not every other week. And so we have this constant cycle of getting upgraded.
And one of the magical things about your smartphone is that even though all that software is changing at a very quick cycle and all of the hardware is changing on a very slow cycle, they continue to work with each other over years and even decades, and that's only possible because of that stable interface, that middle layer, which is your operating system. And it's a consistent layer that allows these two pieces to work together.
So when we think about government as a platform, what we're really trying to think about is, what are the slow moving variable pieces (which is the data that's kind of slowly updating), what are the high variable components that we want to update a lot (which is the various applications and services that we want to offer citizens). And then what's the stable interfaces we can create that allow those two things to work together, and that's the business processes that we're codifying. So that is another way of thinking about government as a platform.
I think you see one really exciting example of government as a platform that already exists is Notify. So those who are not familiar, Notify as a service that you can connect to any government services out there that will send a reminder via a text or email to remind citizens to do something that could be to, you know, get vaccinated, to pay their taxes... And so this is a single business process that's been nicely codified and that can be attached to any government service that we have out there. And then it can, you know, send messages or reminders to all citizens.
So reminding people that they have a responsibility or a requirement to do something is critical to delivering services effectively. And so having this business process exist just once that thousands of services across government can use is a much more efficient way than trying to rebuild that service over and over again in every silo.
I just actually saw recently that the cost of standing up Notify for the Government of Canada because we borrowed the code from the UK was something like in the order of $4,000 or $10,000. So for next to nothing, we stood up this incredible capability that allows us to deliver a delightful experience to our citizens, to remind them to do the critical things they need to do, which both lowers our cost and makes their lives easier. That's a great example of a platform service.
One example of something that's not a kind of government platform is a vertically-integrated service where the data, the business process and business logic, as well as the interface that either the public administrators or even the citizens are using to engage in that service are all vertically integrated and part of a single solution. That is an application that happens to have everything. But maybe another example – this is more complex – would be something like renewing your passport, that application process, that service, if you will, that might be sitting at the top of a government as a platform. So it might be leveraging components that are a part that make up a platform service. So maybe it's using an authentication tool to sign someone in. Maybe it's using an address lookup tool to help you complete what your address is. But that service itself is not a platform service. Other people can't build on top of, or use the thing that you've built. It's leveraging government as a platform, but it is not a platform service itself.
[00:07:25 The CSPS logo appears onscreen. A text appears on the screen: canada.ca/school. The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
