Speaking Notes for The Honourable Scott Brison, President of the Treasury Board of Canada, at FWD50

November 2, 2017,
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Good morning and welcome to the inaugural FWD50 Conference.

Congratulations on bringing together a wide variety of talent: representatives from all levels of government, the private sector, NGOs and academia.

Partners, with different perspectives, are key to the cross-pollination of ideas that drive creativity.

Fwd50 offers us all an opportunity to do more than just talk about the shiny possibilities for the future.

Let’s openly share what we are all doing to get there; how we can swap ideas, time, and expertise to amplify each other’s work and truly make a difference. Have an impact. Get things done.

The goal, for me, is better services to Canadians. In 2017, this means better digital.

We were elected 2 years ago and we’ve learned a lot over the last 2 years. Assessments of Government IT projects, such as reassessing and re-scoping the Canada.ca project, the Gartner report on Shared Services Canada, or the Goss Gilroy dissection of the Phoenix pay system, have provided tough, but important, lessons.

One of the lessons we’ve learned from the actions of the last government is to not treat IT transformations as a cost-saving exercise.

We have also learned valuable lessons from other countries’ experiences. The responses of our international friends and allies to their own high-profile IT project failures help inform our way forward.

Back on October 1, 2013, the US government launched Obamacare. On that day 4.7 million Americans tried to register online at healthcare.gov. Only 6 people succeeded. It was the worst, and most public, government IT failure in history. And it was probably the best thing that ever happened to US Digital Government.

18F and USGDS were born. Similar, if less dramatic stories produced the Government Digital Service in the United Kingdom, and closer to home, the Ontario Digital Service.

Achieving better digital service means baking digital into everything we do.

Good service, in the connected 21st century world, means digital delivery. Whether you are loading up your transit card. Doing your banking. Planning your next holiday. Or accessing government programs and services.

The people in this room know better than most that digital is vital, whether you’re in business or government.

Naturally, because of our IT challenges, the people I work with can be a little gun-shy about digital. Sometimes, when I talk about digital, they ask, can we really do this digital stuff?” I respond that’s like saying, can we really do this breathing stuff?”

In the 21st century, you’re either digital or you’re dead.

If a company fails to get digital right, it’s out of business. If a government fails to get digital right, it’s out of touch with its citizens. Our relevance to citizens is in jeopardy if we can’t deliver world-class government digital services.

Right now we are a Blockbuster Government serving a Netflix citizenry. Canadians don’t understand why they can’t receive the same level of service from their government when they renew a passport that they receive from Amazon when they buy something.

We’ve got to raise our game in terms of digital services.

But it’s not just a necessity.

It’s also an opportunity.

Because digital transformation isn’t just about IT.

Digital transformation is about service. It’s about designing government services based on user needs, not government processes

For existing services, it’s about rethinking how the service is delivered, the actual step-by-step business process, and designing a new process that better serves the user.

It’s about seeing how digital technology can add value to the user. It’s about citizen-centric government, where citizens are no longer passive recipients of government service. But where they actually help shape the service they receive around their needs

Let me give you an example. Amazon didn’t just take the process of buying a book and move the transaction online. It harnessed the data created by going digital to add value to users. As a customer, you get personalized recommendations based on your purchases or those of similar shoppers. Digital can significantly add value to client services. We just have to put the user first.

To do things better, we need to do things differently.

In government, we need to replace a culture of risk aversion (AKA, cover-your-ass) with a culture of experimentation.

When faced with a problem, we need to try new approaches: Get a prototype up and running as soon as possible, and if it works, constantly improve it based on user feedback.

And if it doesn’t work, then we need to learn collectively from those failures.

Yup. That’s the f” word. I said it. Failure is an option. In fact, it’s a necessary step on the path to better results.

In my first few months as TB President, I wanted to push innovation and risk-taking, and my team at Treasury Board would put a line in my speeches that we want to encourage intelligent risk taking.” I repeated that sentence a few times but it just didn’t sound right. It didn’t work for me.

When we say intelligent risk taking,” what we’re really saying is people can take risks as long as they work out.

To succeed today, we need to empower and incent people to disrupt the status quo, to innovate, to try new things, and to look at each problem with fresh eyes.

We have a new CIO in Alex Benay. You’ll be hearing from him at this conference. He’s great. I’ve told Alex to be a disruptor.

We’re opening up government, reaching out to the tech industry, large and small, like never before.

We’ve also created our own version of a Digital Advisory Board, one that includes CIOs from industries like banks and insurance companies who have already tackled major digital transformations, along with government CIOs.

We need to stabilize existing infrastructures, and then move to Cloud, safe, secure, and essential to modern digital service.

The fact is the riskiest possible approach we can take as a government when it comes to digital is to do things the way we have always done them.

You know, the tried and tested government approach we’ve been using for 30 years for IT.

You know the one. The same approach that helped create situations like Phoenix or similar zombie IT projects.

In every area, we need to challenge assumptions, think experimentally, and constantly measure ourselves against our end goal: better service to Canadians.

We can do better and we will do better.

So, how do we do it?

One key change that we need to make is in the area of procurement.

Up until just recently, our default was old-style waterfall procurement.

Where a department would write a 250-page RFP where we would tell vendors what we thought we needed.

Vendors would respond with a 250-page proposal telling us what they thought they could do.

Then we would enter into a blind marriage. And, 2 years into it, we get the final product and it’s already out of date, and it’s not quite what we expected, wanted, or needed.

It’s kind of like a bad marriage. Nobody’s happy. One party inadequately described its needs. The other misrepresented its capabilities. But we stay together for the sake of the IT infrastructure or for the sake of a bad contract.

Agile digital means fewer blind marriages and more constant dating.

Less tell and more show.

Fewer 250-page RFPs and more working prototypes. More hackathons. More bake-offs, contests. Constant iteration. User testing. Prizes and challenges. Open source … And shorter contracts.

Recently, the Treasury Board Secretariat used a simplified procurement process to award a contract to improve the user experience of our Open by Default portal. Instead of telling bidders exactly what solution we thought they should provide, we made it an open-ended challenge that allowed us to benefit from their creativity.

We looked at the bidder as a user,” a user of our government’s procurement process. So we tried to make it as easy as possible for suppliers to compete for a contract.

The team made itself accessible and provided responses to potential bidders through a webinar. They completed their evaluation through a Dragon’s Den style event. The process occurred within 2 months, from the call for proposals to the award of the contract.

This simplified procurement process could be adapted and extended to larger procurement processes in the future.

Here’s another experiment that’s underway: Right now we are running a pilot project on innovative funding approaches.

We can now provide incentives to experimenters and people who will push the envelope and try new things. This pilot project in innovative funding will shift the government from funding based on tasks and activities, to funding based on achieving concrete goals.

For instance, imagine Health Canada offering a prize to scientists who can develop a better vaccine to tackle emerging infectious diseases?

Ultimately, I believe it will lead to better outcomes. That’s the thing about experimentation: We take risks, we learn, and we follow the best way forward.

Risk, rewards, results. That’s the road to innovation.

Oh, and failure.

Another important catalyst in our digital transformation is the new Canadian Digital Service, or CDS. CDS will help to design and deliver high-quality digital services to Canadians.

CDS will help accelerate and scale up innovation. CDS will partner with departments to tackle specific projects. Together, they’ll rethink how the department delivers the service and design a new method for the user.

Then, we create prototypes to put it in the hands of users, and make changes based on their experience.

No doubt mistakes will be made, but they will be at the alpha and beta stage, not after launching at scale.

For example, CDS is working with Veterans Affairs to develop Benefits-at-a-Glance, an online service that will make it simple and easy for veterans to ensure they are accessing all their benefits. It’s also working with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to develop online scheduling help for citizenship tests and oath ceremonies.

The Canadian Digital Service is fast becoming a magnet and hub for digital talent with the Government of Canada. In fact, we’re currently recruiting an experienced and inspiring chief executive to lead the team.

I’m excited about the potential of the CDS to improve service for Canadians. We aren’t the first government digital service in the world, but I believe we can be the best.

Digital moves too fast to spend all our time looking back. But it’s important that we pause from time to time to see what the heck it is we just rolled over and how we can avoid it next time.

So let me list a few ways:

• Government shouldn’t look at IT transformation as a cost-cutting opportunity.
• Legacy systems must be maintained while investing in getting transformation right.
• We need to do planning and priority setting of transformation projects across the enterprise and not in silos.
• And we need to bake user-centric digital thinking into everything we do, from policy development to implementation.

I’m excited about the potential of what we can and must do to provide excellent digital services to Canadians.

And with that goal in mind, this conference is a tremendous opportunity for the cross-pollination of ideas.

I encourage you all to go into the next two days with the goal of meeting people outside of your own area of expertise.

You might just learn something that sparks the solution to the problem you are trying to solve.

Cross-pollination. New ideas. Experimentation. Risk and reward. Those are all part of the path forward in providing Canadians the kind of world-class digital services they expect and deserve.

I truly believe that with our collective effort, we will do just that.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to hearing what comes out of this conference.