Promoting the Culture of Sharing
Digital Service Design Experts Share Their Experience and Knowledge with Alberta’s Public Servants
Part of our job here at the Digital Innovation Office is to spend time learning from other jurisdictions that also work in service design. We’re just getting started on our first wave of digital service projects so we are happy to host our friends and colleagues to hear what they are working on, how they work, and what has (and hasn’t) worked for them already.
To that end, the DIO hosted two informal presentations right before the holiday break. The first was a talk with Katy Lalonde of the Ontario Digital Service. She’s Chief of Staff to Deputy Minister Hillary Hartley, formerly of 18F and now Ontario’s Chief Digital Officer. The ODS has been actively growing its capacities since 2015, and Katy has been at the heart of this growth.
Her wide-ranging presentation focused on the historical evolution of what the ODS does, and how it works and the follow up discussion tried to capture what our shop could learn from their journey. As Katy put it, the ODS started as the office that put out fires, slowly formalizing its role as a governmental fire department before realizing that they ought to be redesigning the building code from the get go.
Some highlights of Katy’s presentation included a discussion of the broad mandate for the ODS, how leadership and the team model has been rethought as the ODS has expanded and evolved over time. We also examined more tangible results, including the production of a Digital Service Standard , and looked quickly at some of the successes the ODS team has already had, including a wholly redesigned Environmental Registry.
The DIO also hosted Dylan Gordon from Idea Couture -he is the IC Head of Insights for Financial Services, which means that he works with large corporate clients in service design, but does so with an anthropologists’ training. He gave a compelling talk on how we should strive to bring an “ethnographic attitude” to our user research. We start with the core premise that service design research requires us to meaningfully identify human needs, it follows that we need to sort out what “real” insight means.
Dylan suggested that with an ethnographic stance in our user research, we ought to work as if in an open-ended focus group, always directing our research towards a translation of meaning; we start by inhabiting the users’ world and seeing how our services or programs are given meaning by them.
But this is also a translation in two directions; having captured what the end user sees as vital in a given context is to then translate these human insights back into the government context. As we develop our roster of DIO projects this means it is just as important to orient ourselves to user-centered insights as it is to broadly orient ourselves to government-centred service design.
Both presentations were a welcome insight for us at the DIO into how other public and private sector colleagues work. And ultimately a not-terribly-subtle invitation to those who find themselves nearby. If you are doing interesting work in the digital design space, and want to share, we’d love to have you by for a quick conversation!
