Part 6: The Simple, Faster, Better Services Act: Solidifying Ontario’s Digital Government Standards (2019)

By Honey Dacanay, with Laura Nelson-Hamilton, Darren Chartier, Paul Vet, Christine Hagyard, Ebony Sager, Daphnée Nostrome, Amy Bihari, Dalia Hashim, Allyna Sagun, and Rachel Barton, Ontario Digital Service, Canada with Lauren Lombardo, Harvard Kennedy School

The Ontario Digital Service team. Standing, left to right: Jeroen Amin, Lester deLuna, Michael Kehinde, Darren Chartier, Allyna Sagun, Honey Dacanay, Rachel Barton, Ebony Sager, Pooja Narang, Dawn Edmonds, Christine Hagyard, Paul Vet. Seated, left to right: Dalia Hashim, Amy Bihari, Kelsey Merkley, Laura Nelson-Hamilton, Jen Snyder, Melvin Christopher. Not pictured: Daphnée Nostrome, Namita Sharma, Kim Monastyryj, Nikki Alabi

Background

In 2017 the Ontario Digital Service released its Digital Service Standard — 14 guiding principles that help governments work more effectively, including establishing the right team, testing the end-to-end service, being agile and user-centered, making it accessible, and embedding privacy and security by design. Each principle is based on a global best practice and is accompanied by an outline that specifies how to use the principle to improve access to government services.

We employed a three-pronged change-management approach to help Ontario’s government adopt this standard:

• provide support
• remove barriers
• show, don’t tell

To this end, our team of bureaucracy hackers provided self-help guides and toolkits, designed and delivered trainings, and addressed institutional obstacles to help teams embrace these principles.

Path to Legislation

In 2018, while this work was being done, the accounting firm Ernst & Young released a report that recommended Ontario adopt a whole-of-government digital approach, citing that, “while investment in digital and data is required, it cannot be viewed as a cost centre — it is at the heart of what the Government must become.”

Ernst & Young’s challenge gave us the firepower we needed to ask how much we could change to make government work better. To answer this question we proposed legislation that would put the principles of the Digital Service Standard into statute and introduce coherent leadership for data and digital services, signaling signaled the government’s intent to work differently in the digital era.

To bring our legislation to life we relied on agile policy-development processes, effectively working the way we want the government to work. We empowered our teams to own pieces of the development process and adapted our proposal based on consistent feedback. We also pushed our team to have an empathy-first mindset, meaning that we listened to the users of this policy and worked hard to move the needle while respecting the speed of the organizational and human capacity for change.

Furthermore, we all believed in a common narrative, that service transformation will allow Ontario to make government work better for its citizens. Our narrative was our North Star. As we navigated the path to legislation we sometimes needed to pivot and explore other avenues to deliver our mission. When things got messy, our narrative united our team back to this common goal and allowed us to push forward.

Most important, we wrote this legislation as a technology-agnostic framework. We want this act to be a longstanding tool that fundamentally changes how the Ontario government delivers services, irrespective of what technology is most popular at the time.

Here’s what the Simpler, Faster Better Services Act did:

Barriers to Success

Getting the Simple, Faster, Better Services Act passed was a huge accomplishment. The act gives our team the legal power, authorization, and leadership we need to be more effective and efficient. But admittedly, we still have a long road ahead of us.

Our team’s biggest fear is that the act won’t live up to its full potential — that we will lose an opportunity to make a difference and won’t bring about the real change this legislation could accomplish. We’re afraid that the act will become symbolic, rather than transformative, and that even with this legislation, we won’t be able to enact the meaningful change we envisioned.

To combat this, we must keep in mind that this act was only designed as scaffolding: We’ve made a law, and it’s great, but it simply sets up a high-level framework for digital and user-centered government. We now need to fill in that framework with tools that will empower and enable ministries to actually work in the way we’ve legislated.

We must continue to create and implement standards, guidance, practices, and rules that teams across government can apply in their daily work. Further, we have to help public servants understand the full scope of what a service is or could be. Enabling practitioners to think creatively to apply the act to the full gamut of their work will give us more opportunities to engage users and showcase success.

What’s Next?

Over the next few years, we’ll need to put in a lot of work to bring this framework to life. One of our first priorities is to showcase the value of the act. Our team is proactively looking for ways to use this legislation, and the intent behind it, to transform services in a way that makes a measurable difference in people’s lives. Showing value in this way will help other government teams and the public see how the legislation will benefit them. We’re working to show that this law isn’t about compliance and regulation, but rather is an exciting change that will create better services.

Another focus of ours is people. To be effective, we need a strong team to enforce and implement this law — a team that is willing to strive to change organizational and individual behavior, whose members see it as their responsibility to bring this legislation to life. For this act to be successful, public servants need to buy into the mission of this work at the central and ministry level. We also need to build a talent pool of digital leaders and practitioners and deploy this workforce in flexible and innovative ways across the government. This cross-functional team will break silos, foster knowledge-sharing, and support talent retention.

We need to carry out these people-oriented goals in a way that brings everyone, with their institutional knowledge and policy expertise, along on the journey. We can do this by removing technical barriers, providing targeted growth paths, and hosting detailed trainings, creating a new baseline for digital knowledge across government agencies.

In accordance with the above points, if legislation is the right path then let’s make it the easy path as well, for both process and people. We need to update the internal policies that dictate how teams and departments operate, receive funding, and produce a technology. These standards are inherently waterfall, and they disincentivize iterative and incremental approaches to technology-product development. This issue exists for procurement practices as well. We need to open up procurement to a greater diversity of suppliers. This includes offering terms that are tailored to the concerns of smaller suppliers and understandable to vendors without full-time legal staff.

Along the lines of prioritizing people, we need to focus on our hiring policies. Ontario should proactively engage its labor representatives to enable faster and more dynamic practices for job classification, talent recruitment, and employee retention. With these reforms in place, the government will be hiring more represented employees and relying less on large contractors to deliver technology-enabled products and programs.

Government transformation is measured through incremental gains against insurmountable obstacles. To maximize the impact of this legislation, we’re focused over the next few years on achieving incremental gains across these focus areas.