We’ve all been there: Filling out a jargon-laden form; waiting on hold on the phone; standing in line in a stuffy office; trying in vain to navigate a byzantine website to find the information we need.
For far too long, these kinds of experiences have typified people’s interactions with government.
Mercifully, that’s starting to change, as public-sector decision-makers realize the financial (not to mention political) benefits of bringing government into the digital age, specifically by focusing on us, the end users.
That’s the focus Aaron Snow has brought to his role as CEO of the new Canadian Digital Service, launched last year by the federal government.
Snow, who previously was co-founder and Executive Director of 18F, the U.S. government digital agency launched during the Obama administration, spoke at Communitech on Tuesday as part of the ongoing Pizza with the Prez series of talks by technology leaders.
“We are a tech consultancy inside government,” Snow told the audience. “Our mandate is to help the Government of Canada get better at delivering digital services by helping it embrace new practices and new tools.”
As one might imagine, that’s no small ambition when dealing with a bureaucracy unaccustomed to putting the end user at the centre of the design process.
“This actually stands on its head the general approach” of government, which is to start with policy and then worry about implementation, he said. “In [the tech] world, we know that doesn’t work unless the people creating policy understand digital so well [and] they’ve done the user research, they’ve done the prototyping, they’ve done the experimenting …”
In driving that new approach since his arrival in the role last April, Snow and his team have already seen improvements in people’s interactions with various government departments and programs.
Citing an example, he said research showed fewer than 20 per cent of Canadian military veterans were taking advantage of the benefits they were entitled to. A cross-functional team was assembled, including tech and policy experts, who discovered the main problem was not particularly technical at all, but a question of the language used on the Veterans Affairs website.
“It was not in the vernacular and idiom that the veterans were used to,” Snow said, making it difficult for veterans to cut through policy language and find what they needed.
In another case, this one involving Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the CDS team helped resolve difficulties people faced in rescheduling their citizenship exams, not only by building a more user-friendly process, but by changing the “officious” tone of government correspondence that left people feeling intimidated by the process.
In yet another project, CDS is helping the Canada Revenue Agency resolve the issue of people with low or no incomes failing to file tax returns, which can shut them out of owed refunds and other benefits. In one case, a homeless woman hadn’t filed in a decade, missing out on $9,000 in refunds which she has since received. The woman now has a job and is off the streets.
Tying together all the work of the CDS is a focus “on user needs, not government needs,” Snow said. The team has also been working to build the capacity of government departments to adopt the CDS’s user-centred approach to designing and delivering services, to help accelerate improvements across the public sector.
The CDS is also working to help Ottawa meet a challenge issued last September by Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, who heads a digital industries panel advising the federal government: to offer all its services online by 2025.
“I think 2025 is an ambitious but not an outlandish goal,” Snow said.
While the appetite for improvement from within public-sector ranks is strong, he cautioned that governments still have a way to go in becoming better at procuring tech solutions.
“My spidey sense goes off when I see a 10-year, billion-dollar plan to replace a legacy system,” Snow said. Such massive procurements often have the effect of simply replacing one costly legacy system with another.
Instead, Snow would like to see shorter, smaller procurements of tech solutions, which involve less process, leave the government more nimble to adopt new tech, and encourage more buying from smaller Canadian tech companies.
He wrapped up his talk with word that the CDS plans to launch an accelerator for government tech projects in the coming months.
“More about that soon,” he said, “but there are lots of little experiments going on to try to make things better.”
