Don't forget the governance: digital government performance in Canada

This post is written by Jonathan Craft, Founding Director, Policy Ready.

• The problem: New digital ways of working present challenges for governance - how can we set them up for success? Do we really know how digital government is performing?
• Why it matters: Governance arrangements need to facilitate digital organisations and projects and help drive their performance.
• The solution: There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but sharing governance examples can help - in this article we share insight from Canada.

When you Google digital government you get an increasingly littered terrain, usually featuring images of Matrix-style 1’s and O’s or figures pushing mysterious digital buttons that are connected to… well, something. What is less apparent is how to effectively build governance around digital government to ensure it is working well and to better measure and manage its performance.

New digital government ways of working - like Agile or human-centred design - often sit awkwardly within traditional, hierarchical, command and control public administration units and cultures. What has received less attention is how these new ways of working also present big challenges for governance and managing performance.

The role of governance

Governance is about the structures, systems, and practices that are in place to assign and manage decision-making authority, oversee implementation of work, and report and manage performance.

So how well is digital government performing? Are governance arrangements adequate and enabling? The answer is we do not know.

There is no one-size-fits-all or silver bullet.

Looking around the world you can find a variety of governance arrangements and performance regimes. Some countries have digital government ministers while others do not, some have a single unit while others have opted for a federated approach with digital living in various pockets within government. Some digital units have spend controls while others do not, many have variously configured and resourced oversight committees, and some have key performance indicators (KPI) like cost per transaction or digital service completion rates.

Which of these are effective and when remains unclear.

A case study from Canada

In part I of the case study of the Government of Canada’s Application Rationalization Project we noted a bunch of challenges around how the project was conceived and executed. We outlined risks around ‘faux-gile’ or the partial adoption of digital ways of working while preserving waterfall structures and culture. The lessons learned were clear.

Interviews also revealed that a big part of the project’s failures, but ultimately also its eventual success, was rooted in the governance arrangements and performance management.

In the newly released Part II we examine how the AR team sought to build additional performance measures, what tools were used to generate performance information and apply it, and how the adoption of digital ways of working required a careful change to the governance arrangements in place to allow digital to flourish.

The case shines a spotlight on major challenges and lessons learned around how to measure performance, track and monitor it, and utilise performance information and indicators - particularly in the context of the adoption of digital ways of working in government.

It details how a lack of early governance was painfully addressed by a succession of reforms to ensure the right people and processes were in place to balance the digital transformation work with the requirements of effective governance and public administration.

As digital government continues to reform the fundamental ways government works this case study sheds light on some of the challenges in getting the governance right, and in managing the performance of digital government projects.

There is no one-size-fits-all or silver bullet. How does your organisation manage its digital government performance and what governance arrangements work and why?

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(Image Credit: Unsplash)