What is Digital Government Transformation?
Recently, I have had lots of people (from friends and family to work colleagues) ask me what does this whole digital government transformation thing actually mean? I have been unhappy with my answers to them so over the holidays I sat down to put my thoughts to paper to try to create a clear response.
Note: This is far from a complete draft, I put it out for discussion.
So what is Digital Government Transformation?
Let’s break it down into its components.
Digital is the most complicated so let’s leave it for last.
Government:
These are the organizations and processes we have created to help us do things together as a community. It is how we set community norms and values (laws and policies), where we pool our resources (taxes) and put them towards collective projects.
In a democracy, the government is meant to be the moral arbiter and consciousness for a people. It is where we solve the great problems of our communities and our times. Where we decide how we want to live and the world we want to live in. Everything else has to play within the rules that governments create.
Government can be where the powerful control the people for their own ends, or where the people reign in and manage the powerful. In our modern democracies, it tends to be some blend of both.
Though lets be honest, in Canada, and much of the west, it is feeling increasingly like the first, this is leading to a significant drop in trust in public institutions (what in school I studied as the democratic deficit). Lets be clear, people are not stupid, they know when the game is rigged and they are not happy about it.
Transformation:
This is about change. Change at a fundamental level, not just changing the deck chairs and paint but actually the DNA. As we like to say in the social innovation world, it’s about changing the power and resource flows. This makes it hard to snap back to old ways of doing things.
Digital:
This is the hard one.
There are many different ways the word is used. Within the context of digital government transformation, we are referring to digital as the world that digital technology enables “the digital age.” This is a lifestyle, a set of norms for how we do things, shaped by values.
“Digital: Applying the culture, practices, processes & technologies of the Internet-era to respond to people’s raised expectations.” ~Tom Loosemore
But what does this actually mean? There are common characteristics and norms that often pop up when people talk about digital. I have bucketed them into the following:
Iteration/Agile
Agile has become a real buzzword and I think it is heavily overused but poorly applied. At its most basic level it just means doing things in quick iterations, and adjusting as you get feedback. It is about doing lots of experiments, testing things out, learning by doing.
User centric
Another big buzzword. This just means putting the user front and centre in your program/policy design process from the start. Actually bringing them into your design floor to provide feedback.
Open
One of the beautiful things about the internet is it serves as a platform for us to share openly with others. With this has come a culture of sharing as much as possible (sometimes too much). We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, the internet allows for free sharing and copying. Digital embodies this philosophy.
Modularity and Interoperability
The internet is a world of lego blocks. Each lego block serves a single simple purpose and can be easily exchanged for another one. This allows people to build things to create a personalized and specialized experience. For this to work, all these pieces need to be able to fit together, hence the heavy focus on interoperability. This is done by setting standards. Like how all electrical outlets look the same, even if the appliances are different. (It is also one of the key elements of Government-as-a-Platform, a concept that is reshaping how governments design themselves in the digital age)
Data
Digital technologies make it possible for us to collect, store, share and organize information at a level never seen before. This information allows us to do more, better, faster.
Tools
At the heart of this is a new generation of tools that make it easier to do all the things listed above.
Now let’s pull it all together:
Digital Government Transformation — The act of fundamentally changing government organizations and processes to embody the characteristics and norms of the digital age.
This is how I define it but if you want to get an idea of how governments are looking at this, many of them are creating their own digital government transformation vision documents. For example, here is the Government of Canada’s Digital Charter.
