The digital transformation of organizations begins with an internal cultural shift promoting agile strategies, a hunger for innovative practices and the ability to change direction quickly.
As serial entrepreneur James Bilefield pointed out in an interview with McKinsey, culture change can be the biggest challenge of any major organizational shift:
“In my experience, culture is the hardest part of the organization to change. Shifting technology, finding the right talent, finding the right product set and strategy—that’s all doable, not easy, but doable. Hardest is the cultural transformation in businesses that have very deep legacy and cultural roots.”
That all seems taxing enough. Now imagine the organization in question has more than 100 departments and 250,000 employees. That’s exactly the challenge that the Canadian Digital Service (CDS) is facing.
CDS is a team working within the Treasury Board Secretariat to help the government design and build better services. Structured on the delivery of useful tools, the team is also helping government departments to build greater capacity for digital problem solving. The CDS team retains control of their communication tools allowing for their work to be shown out in the open. And through the government’s Interchange Program, they’re able to recruit private sector talent on short-term assignments.
Pascale Elvas, Director of CDS, has an up-close view of the government’s hunger for change and how many roadblocks there are along the way.
“We’re trying to get departments thinking about digital differently,” says Elvas. “We want them to really understand their users, the citizens that they serve and to unpack the problem.“
Traditionally, the government puts out a request for proposal (RFP) — the average size of the RFP and bids related to it is 8,000 pages long — detailing its requirements, a solution and asking vendors to build that solution. However, this traditional method is far from agile project development.
“By the time it’s deployed, it’s already obsolete and there’s no room for course corrections along the way,” says Elvas. “We’re trying to get departments thinking about digital differently. We want them to really understand their users, the citizens that they serve and to unpack the problem.”
Since Elvas joined CDS a year ago, the organization has grown from three people to 45, they get more than 40 requests from departments per month, and they’re recruiting just to keep up with demand.
Elvas says a change in perspective within government departments is at the root of the work being done by CDS:
“It’s getting departments thinking about digital in a different way, and not necessarily starting with an end-state solution from the outset. So allowing the discovery work to happen, to talk to real users along the way, to iterate and to adapt and course correct based on the insights gained through that work.”
Elvas and her team at CDS are advocating for whole new methods of addressing and carrying out projects, reworking the culture around tasks within the government, in order to put the needs of the citizen at the forefront.
“Part of this work is about culture change: It’s about breaking building projects down into smaller chunks, it’s about building microservices, it’s about using different methods, it’s about moving away from waterfalls to agile, it’s about active prototyping and constant iteration, moving to user needs over government needs, and iterating along the way based on user feedback.”
CDS follows the efforts made by both the Government Digital Service in the U.K. and the United States Digital Service to transform government in the 21st century. While everyone can agree that governments around the world need to revolutionize their use of digital tools to improve user experiences, the way forward can often appear muddy at best.
In one ongoing project, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) is using CDS to open up data on household energy use in a transparent and reusable way. The initiative is particularly insightful as an early CDS project, as it involves working with legacy database systems, and includes user research sourced from various, unique data sets — specifically, provincial and municipal governments.
The expectations NRCan approached the project with, the kind of solution they already had in mind, changed radically after working with CDS to address the problem with a user-based mindset.
“When NRCan came to us,” says Elvas, “they came to us with a very specific solution in mind. NRCan wanted us to build them a database. They already had an internal database, so they wanted a database that was searchable by the public and that was more of a client-facing version of their internal database.”
“Now in doing the discovery work and talking to department officials and understanding their business, we discovered that what they were asking for wasn’t exactly what they needed. Building an API will enable all kinds of new services to be built and for private sector partners to use the data to do all kinds of other neat things — and open the door for much deeper service redesign work.”
CDS is hoping they can build on the success of projects like the API for NRCan to get government departments to reassess how they approach digital problem solving.
“We hope that by demonstrating an alternative way of doing things, we’ll move away from the traditional waterfall approach of launching an 8,000 page RFP with set requirements to really using service design and other methods to unpack the problem, understand the users and to build smaller solutions that can be iterated along the way.”