The Alberta Digital Innovation Office: Two years in review (Part I)
The past two years have certainly been a roller-coaster ride for the Government of Alberta’s (GoA’s) Digital Innovation Office (DIO). What started as a group of five in July 2018, has now quintupled in number and is not stopping anytime soon!
As part of the DIO’s second year anniversary, we sat down (virtually) with Dominique Bohn, Chief Officer, Blair Neufeld, Director of Service Design, James McKee, Director of Research, Ting Zuge, Director of Architecture, and Carita Chan, acting Strategic Advisor, to reflect on the DIO’s journey and what comes next.
The following is the first part of this interview. Please note that it has been edited for flow and length.
We started off our conversation with a look back to 2018 and where we are now.
JM: We have quintupled in number over the past two years, but we aren’t done yet! Over the past two years, the DIO has faced a very rapid set of changes and developed in many ways, and yet we still face some of the same problems as in the beginning.
One development is that there are now many others in the GoA that use the language that we take for granted. There has been a definite spike in interest in the work that we do, and we are seeing reorganizations in other government sectors that reflect that. These are all positive changes.
At the same time, we have a long way to go to change the government’s mental model, about what it means to have a digital government. We’re not in 1980 anymore, but it’s not 2020 either. So onwards and upwards!
HA: Could you speak more to the challenges that the DIO has faced, and how it has tackled them?
JM: Looking back, the main challenge that the DIO faced — and I believe will face in the years to come — is breaking away from the mental models that limit digital transformation. Some of these challenges are probably eternal because large organizations that are hierarchical by nature don’t lend themselves well to the kind of federated team-based model that is the basis of DIO work. I suspect it also has something to do with the belief that if you don’t spend millions of dollars on any one product, how is it any good? But this is colliding with fiscal reality and maybe that is moving people towards being more open about digital transformation.
BN: I concur on a lot of the things that James was saying, and I just want to emphasize the fact that we are already seeing an appetite for digital transformation across the government, not only in projects that we plan on taking on but also projects being sent our way.
TZ: It’s pretty interesting! If you think about all that has happened in the broader context since we’ve started at the DIO — like a change in government, restructuring in Service Alberta, and now with COVID — we are doing a lot of this work against a background where everything is rapidly changing while other things seem to stay the same. This has created challenges and opportunities.
Looking back at getting our exemplar projects started, one of my personal realizations was how deeply engrained many structural issues actually are. So even as we were getting really good face to face support around our approach, we were still finding trained behaviour that worked against us. In retrospect, we really did need to dislodge some of the existing structures before we could really start building towards a vision of a better digital government in the future.
HA: Could you share more about changing those existing structures and models?
BN: In our projects, we take a service design approach; we put the power of decision-making into the hands of the people who are responsible for [delivery] outcomes, even though the parties involved might initially not share the same objectives. For example, in large workshops we tell participants: it’s your call; we will facilitate decision-making — using whatever we agree are the criteria, such as priority, impact, or reducing the backlog — but it’s absolutely your call. We are going to decide the direction that we will be taking in this workshop.
We put the power of decision-making into the hands of those responsible for delivery outcomes. We do this through approaches like well-considered consensus and facilitated workshops based on values. This is a shift from decisions being made externally.
DB: I totally agree, and that is really authentic prioritization. It saves you years of trying to figure out your business case, strategy, and planning, which we always end up finding become barriers as opposed to enablers. Whereas the way you are talking about it Blair, I think it really gives people, both the ability to create services that actually meet their business needs as they emerge and also the responsibility for it. So everyone has heard each other and come to a decision together. It’s very powerful and very efficient.
HA: Given that we live in a post- (or current) pandemic world, do you see digital transformation as an absolute need, or is it still considered a nice to have?
DB: The necessities imposed by the pandemic have brought down many of the psychological barriers that both public servants and citizens might have had around doing more digital. With this opportunity comes great responsibility, as now we actually have to do the heavy lifting and make some more decisions. There’s not going to be affordance to view digital as a nice add-on. We are actually going to have to decide that we are going to be a digital first service. We need to do more attentive user research and really understand how people are adjusting to this new world. We also have to focus on how we can bring the skills that we as a group are fortunate to have, to clients.
But I think this has to be an all of government approach — we need to have a continuous check in with users to understand how they evolve into a more digital world. Today we have the technology and the ability to adopt it, and also the demand for a more digital government among citizens has been there for a very long time. The pandemic has really forced us to put user needs first, and to adopt the best and newest technologies as quickly as we can. So it is the best possible time for digital.
