What it takes for the new Digital Transformation Canada to get to delivery

In early-September, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the creation of Digital Transformation Canada (DTC).  

DTC is a central federal agency that aims to consolidate the Canadian government's digital capacity. 

DTC will bring together Shared Services Canada and selected functions from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Public Services and Procurement Canada, and Employment and Social Development Canada, specifically the Canadian Digital Service (CDS). 

On paper, the logic is sound: bring together infrastructure, digital delivery, technology policy and procurement; give them a shared mandate, and scale what works. 

But moving organisations is not transformation. 

Machinery changes are expensive. They distract leaders, unsettle teams and create months of uncertainty.  

Sometimes they establish the conditions for something better. Sometimes they weaken the very capabilities they were meant to strengthen. 

Lessons from Canadian Digital Service (CDS) 

I spent six years at the Canadian Digital Service (CDS) and lived through its move from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat to Service Canada.  

That experience taught me that organisational homes matter, but mandates, authority and culture matter more. 

At its core, CDS was a delivery team. It brought together product, design, technology, policy and operations to build services around the needs of the people using them. 

The development of Covid Alert, Canada's national smartphone-based exposure notification app designed to help limit the spread of Covid-19, showed what was possible when a multidisciplinary team had a clear mission, authority and trust.  

Public servants built it in the open, cheaply and in just 45 days.  

That was far faster than a conventional procurement would have allowed. It was accessible, secure, privacy-preserving and downloaded nearly seven million times. 

We also learned that individual successes were not enough. 

CDS’s original model relied heavily on partnerships with individual departments.  

The government’s own evaluation found that these partnerships increased digital capacity, but sustaining it after CDS left remained difficult. 

That helped drive a shift towards common platforms. Solve a common problem once, then make the solution available across government. 

GC Notify showed the potential of such platforms. It has now sent more than 387 million messages for nearly 1,000 government programs and services. 

Platforms are also fiscally conservative. Government should not pay multiple departments to solve the same problem over and over again.  

Shared capabilities reduce duplication, lower costs and allow individual teams to focus on the parts of their services that are genuinely unique. 

That is very much in keeping with DTC’s stated mandate to scale shared solutions, reduce operating costs and make better use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). 

Institutional authority needed to drive adoption 

CDS proved that this model could work. What it lacked was the institutional authority to drive adoption across government.  

DTC could provide that authority. 

That is the opportunity. The risk lies in what happens while the new organisation is being assembled. 

Important questions remain about which functions will be subsumed into DTC and how it will connect with other public service infrastructure like Canada.ca. 

There is also a fundamental difference between the organisations being combined.  

Shared Services Canada was created to consolidate and operate government-wide technology infrastructure. It was not designed to build digital products and services in-house. 

CDS was. 

The risk is that CDS is absorbed into the operating model of a much larger organisation. Its ways of working could be diluted, its best talent could leave, and the delivery capability government spent years building could atrophy.

As Michael Karlin has written, the new organisation needs to channel that energy rather than stifle it. 

What could help the new Digital Transformation Canada (DTC) 

Protecting the CDS’s talent, operating model and delivery culture, while giving its teams and platforms the authority they previously lacked, should be one of DTC CEO Patrick Pichette’s most important early priorities. 

The proposed fellowship model could help. CDS piloted this approach before.  

In 2017, Jason White, then-technical lead at Shopify, took a three-month sabbatical to help the CDS apply more flexible software development methods. 

But such fellowships should strengthen lasting public sector capability, not substitute for it. 

Having now worked with governments across Canada and internationally, I can say with even more confidence that Canada has the talent to do this. 

The prize is not a tidier organisational chart. It is an institution that combines the reach and reliability of enterprise infrastructure with the speed, focus and humanity of a great delivery team. 

If DTC can do that, Canada may finally have the institution it needs to transform public services at scale. 

DTC could again become an attractive home for talented private sector technologists who want to contribute to public service.  

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The author is a digital government leader and lawyer by training with 15 years of experience in public sector transformation. She is a Director at Public Digital and a former senior leader at the Canadian Digital Service. Her work focuses on digital government, institutional capability, service delivery and the implications of AI for the public sector. 

The original article was first published on MacEachern's LinkedIn page here, and then edited.