A routemap for a platform for government services in Canada

This was originally the READ ME card on the Government of Canada’s public ‘Platform for Government Services’ roadmap / routemap / delivery plan / feuille de route, originally published in May 2020— shared here for posterity / curiosity / discussion.

This is an experiment in open roadmapping showing our direction of travel with our Platform work at the Canadian Digital Service

There are many good works by good people about why digital platforms are a good thing. Lots of those are about using and making platforms for public services.

This is about why the Canadian Digital Service is working on a platform for public services in the Government of Canada.

CDS has a mandate to do three things:

• Work in partnership with departments on specific services to help them meet people’s needs in the internet age
• Deliver components and capabilities to meet needs common across government services
• Provide guidance to the government on how to take advantage of data, design and technology to meet people’s needs of services.

Our platform work draws these threads together. With our Platform group we are committing to help department delivery teams with well-designed products they can use to support reliable user-centric government services.

The grounds for a platform

The experience of using many public services is not currently as good as it should be, especially online. People who use public services want the experience to be good and to be consistent from one service to the next. The public’s experience can be considerably improved by using some simple techniques and technology.

More often than not, the technology needed to run services online is the same from one department to the next. As one government we can create and maintain a common core infrastructure of shared digital standards, processes and components for departments to set up and run their services on. That way, departments can focus their efforts on the details that are unique to their services and helping people access what they need to get on with their lives.

This is what we mean when talk about a ‘Platform for Government’ — often referred to internationally as ‘Government as a Platform’ (GaaP). The parts that make up ‘the platform’ can come from several sources. Thanks to shared standards, open source code, application programming interfaces (APIs) and human-centred design practices, platform products can be made and then reused by any of the following:

• our government itself
• other government jurisdictions
• the private sector for use by government public services.

Some platform products will be simple steps in a service journey; other platform products will enable whole services. For example, if one department created an application form that is easy to complete with all the right information on the first try, that form pattern could then be made available to other departments to use for different programs.

If there is a software application for making and managing payments that has been designed and tested to give a choice of ways to pay for a government service, it could be easily integrated — through the use of an API — into tens or hundreds of service journeys. One department creates a component for gathering feedback at the end of a transaction, and then all the rest can add it to their services, so that users can predict when they are going to get their chance to suggest an improvement or maybe even drop a compliment.

By making or procuring application infrastructure once and allowing all departments to use it, we can save them all time and money. But more importantly, it will give the public a simple, consistent and satisfying experience of interacting with the government from one service to the next.

Laying the foundations

The Government of Canada has the beginnings of the standards, processes and products needed to make a Platform for Government possible and sustainable. CDS is looking to iterate on these and to demonstrate how to bring them together to deliver better outcomes from public services across the board.

We are starting modestly with Notify. Every government service should give its users the choice to receive a notification when they transact with that service, like confirmations of receipt or status updates. Government departments do not need to spend the effort and money on custom solutions for each service; we can make Notify once and operate it for all, for just a few thousand dollars each month, creating a positive impact on people’s satisfaction and trust in government services.

We selected Notify as our first platform contribution because we kept encountering the user need and a delivery challenge for departments through our partnerships and community engagements. It was also a success story in other governments, and those governments had helpfully made their software and learnings open-source and available for our reuse. Being easy to customize and measure also helps Notify make the case for the idea of a Platform for Government and for the delivery of future components and products.

We have considered other platform contributions such as digital identity, user accounts, payments in and out, information publishing, and case management systems — all areas with known needs and a number of implementation avenues for exploration. We have begun to look most concertedly into creating service appointments, making and managing forms, and testing online services to ensure they are accessible and secure.

It takes a village

CDS cannot be the sole platform provider for the Government of Canada services. We want to specialise in products that help the public with common, direct interactions with government services. In doing so, we want to encourage service teams in other departments to make their enabling products and processes open and available for others to reuse.

The Government of Canada has access to the technology and the talent, with the will and the demand in place to make a Platform for Government services happen. It doesn’t take a lot of administration, money or time. But it does need effort, and it needs to be sustained over time. The experience of other countries large and small who are further along on this journey shows that a Platform for Government starts small and builds and improves incrementally.

Our platform will start with a few components doing basic but substantive things. Before too long, the standards, policies and market-forces will make it much easier to create a net new service or migrate a service away from legacy technology. In the near future, fitting everything together necessary to support a service online — from the web domain to the hosting — should take a fraction of the effort and cost that the orthodox wisdom suggests it currently requires. That will be better for the public, and it will be better for the government.

As CDS experiments further and starts to release and operate platform components, we will share our code, our ways of working, and our results. We will prioritise working with federal government services, but we will also readily engage with other jurisdictions and industries. Starting with this high level outline of the thinking, activity and intent of the CDS Platform team.

There’s more to say and even more to learn, and we look forward to doing so in the weeks and months ahead. We hope this routemap will serve as a way for people to follow along, and it will be updated at least once a month.

That never really came off. But there is still time and the needs remain.