To the Clerk, and friends

To John Hannaford, your team, and colleagues across the federal public service:

Below are a set of radical (but implementable) ideas that would make the public service better equipped to handle the challenges of today and tomorrow. We need to invest in state capacity in Canada, and that starts with changing our public service structures, processes, and organizational culture for the better.

I presented these today at FWD50, an Ottawa conference dedicated to using technology to improve society for everyone. The most important of these ideas don’t involve technology at all; they involve changing how we work to better empower front-line staff and experts, to remove burdensome processes, and to change or eliminate structures that lead to negative outcomes.

I’d be happy to chat about these anytime, you can get in touch by email.

Empowering public servants

• Hire people from across Canada, and if they work at a desk, let them work from anywhere. Last year’s return-to-office implementation took the wind out of the sails of every conversation about building a better and more representative future public service. Until we admit that it was a mistake, I don’t think we can call ourselves an evidence-driven public service.

• Give public servants the tools they need to do their work. Outlook and Word and Excel aren’t enough. It’s 2023. We could roll out, for example, open source data science tools to every public servant tomorrow, as a first step.

• Get rid of at least one layer in the federal public service executive hierarchy. Keep the people but let them move out of management roles if they want. Citibank recently announced they were phasing out 5 of their 13 layers of hierarchy, allowing them to eliminate 60 management committees as an added benefit. We have too many talented leaders that are stuck acting as mailboxes, and too many constantly re-litigated decisions, owing to the number of management layers that we have.

• Increase the number of non-management individual contributor positions, and let people advance to the very top of non-executive classifications without becoming managers. Tech companies like Shopify have done this, so that people who are good at their craft don’t have to stop doing what they do best, in order to progress in their careers.

Better structures for digital capability

• Move Shared Services Canada under the Office of the GC Chief Information Officer, and make all of SSC’s service offerings optional to departments instead of mandatory. Migrate away from traditional corporate networks and just use the normal internet, like the UK did years ago and the US is starting to do now.

• Stop requiring that IT and CS staff work inside departmental CIO shops. They’re valuable contributors across departments. Split the IT classification in two (rather than grouping together all technology roles, from IT help desk staff to database administrators to network technicians) so that we can hire senior software developers and cybersecurity experts at competitive rates.

• Update the GC Digital Standards to actually act as a quality bar for online services. Pass legislation to enshrine user needs in service delivery and digital transformation work the way that Ontario did.

• Put digital practitioners at the helm of organizations. Not sales executives, not management consulting partners. Find people that have done the work and know what it actually takes to ship great services. Make them deputy ministers. Don’t smother them under a layer or two of our longest-serving and most traditional senior public service leaders. Hillary Hartley in Ontario and Natasha Clarke in Nova Scotia have done amazing work, the best in the country, partly because they’ve been able to change things from the top.

• Adopt an “approved once, approved everywhere” security assessment process for software and tools. The US has had this for more than a decade under FedRAMP, and is currently planning changes to streamline this further. Meanwhile, Canadian public service organizations redundantly assess the same widely-used software in individual departmental silos.

• Mandate that all custom software written for the government is made open source, and eliminate the software provisions of the Policy on Title to Intellectual Property Arising Under Crown Procurement Contracts that only benefit large IT companies (or deprecate the policy entirely). Don’t pay for the same software twice.

• Implement hard caps on time and money for IT projects, and unbundle all projects larger than $2 million/year into small ones. The UK’s spend control limits saved hundreds of millions of British pounds and curtailed spending on wasteful, expensive software. With more courage, we could do the same.

Simplify our administrative processes and improve government transparency

• Get rid of all the processes that stand in the way of delivering good services. That includes probably 80% of the TBS policy suite related to project management, procurement, and IT. Outside of policy requirements that have a legal backstop (like accessibility, Official Languages, and privacy), make them all optional.

• Relatedly: get rid of our 7-level information classification framework, and bring in a simplified model similar to the UK’s. Let public servants use normal cloud services without requiring additional approvals for anything that’s not Secret or Top Secret. Implement internal cost-recovery mechanisms for any documents that are marked sensitive to fund future declassification efforts and to disincentivize over-classification tendencies.

• Amend Crown Copyright to declare that all government works are in the public domain. Introduce a “release to one, release to all” model for Access to Information requests, and exempt documents released for transparency purposes from the web accessibility and bilingualism requirements that apply to government communications.

Learn more from everyday people, and use this to improve our services

• Create dedicated funding for departments to do design research. Normalize going out and talking to everyday people before you start building or procuring things. Eliminate policy provisions restricting public opinion research or, at minimum, set a floor of several thousand respondents below which these no longer apply.

• Build better feedback loops. Require senior management and deputy ministers to spend an hour a month working front-line help desk support, answering call centre phones and client support tickets. If processes and eligibility rules are too complex for this to be doable, urgently begin work to simplify these.

• Create your own critics. Fund a Canadian version of Citizens Advice that helps people access government services, and also holds us to account when things don’t work. Fund it through a long-term trust mechanism that prevents us from withdrawing its funding when it gives us advice we don’t like.

Protect the future of the public service

• Update the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector. (I’m glad to see that this is already being considered.) Bring in a commitment to Reconciliation and a commitment to evidence-based decision-making while there’s still enough political consensus to make it happen. Give the public service some preemptive defense against post-truth political movements that are growing around the world.

Public service effectiveness matters. Implementation matters. Too often, our services and our processes let down the people who need our help the most. We can change that, by changing ourselves and our organizations for the better. Most of all, we need to get accustomed to regularly changing how we work for the better, to make decisions that increase our future capability to change, and to have the creativity and open-mindedness to make this possible.

Here’s to the future of the public service, and here’s to the people that we serve. Thanks for reading.