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Scott McNaughton
Public Service Innovation at Canada School of Public Service
Highlights
ICYMI: Part 1 of what I am working on at the Ministry of Health (Digital Exploration): https://lnkd.in/gbsRW9vi
It is easiest to explain digital exploration in two parts:
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The digital exploration service is a new service that will assess digital enablement and support requests (like requests for new applications, help developing roadmaps etc.) This means working directly with clients to understand what work has been done, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the request, identifying subject matter experts that need to be engaged, developing recommendations and an action plan to ensure that the client and the request will succeed and assessing prioritization.
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A new position called the Digital Business Strategy Lead who is the primary trusted point of contact for clients who require help to identify their digital enablement needs, develop their digital plans and strategies and who need direct support with wayfinding, connecting with subject matter experts and navigating through the digital bureaucracy.
The digital exploration service takes 4 weeks and involves desk research, document review, interviews, analysis and workshops. It leads to actionable recommendations on how to strengthen a request and provides early line of sight and analysis to downstream intake and delivery teams on incoming requests and provides a systems view of requests and opportunities that can be tracked, managed and reported on.
The digital business strategy lead supports a client and a request during the entire end to end digital lifecycle. This ensures that the client has an advisor, an advocate, a wayfinder/navigator and someone who can be embedded during policy development but maintain strong connections to digital teams. The digital business strategy lead exists above the end to end digital journey so that they can remain embedded with the client and be the primary trusted point of contact, ensure warm handoffs during transitions and connect the many different parts of the digital system together at the right point.
We are launching a minimal viable service in the next month to provide support immediately to our clients.
•Receive requests in a shared inbox, triage and prioritize using a Prioritization Framework •Track and report on requests to provide line of sight on digital enablement and support demand •Digital Strategy Business Lead engages original submitter and client to better understand need •The Digital Strategy Business Lead may: •Continue engagement and facilitate development of digital enablement needs, digital plans or provide other direct support •Provide a “wayfinding” service by directing a request to an intake process, or to various supports •Park or pause a request.
I'll wrap up by sharing a visual showing how all of this comes together. A picture is worth a thousand words after all. Please feel free to reach out if you'd like to learn more.
Four months ago, I moved from the Digital Investment Office to the Ministry of Health. I'm overdue to share what I've been working on.
I've been leading the building of a new service called "Provincial Digital Health Exploration". We are not the first to create a digital exploration service but the scale and scope is the largest I've worked on in my career.
As many in the digital space know, the demand for "digital things" often outweighs the capacity of digital teams. Additionally, requests for digital support come in many shapes and sizes from the text message from the boss to the detailed request based on a vendor demo. These requests come from many different people and end up in the inbox of many different people. This leads to system wide inefficiencies and a lack of 40,000 foot views on what is going on and the capacity of the system to work on the requests.
Some of these requests go through extensive discovery processes while others jump right into business cases or development. This causes confusion, inefficiency use of delivery team resources and lower quality digital products.
The Digital Exploration Service is about catching these requests early and provides an early review that considers the strategic alignment, desired outcomes and overall maturity of the request. Digital Exploration results in higher quality requests, early visibility in future digital demand and improved use of resources.
Through this process we can do things like: flag issues early on for resolution, connect teams with subject matter experts early, provide actionable recommendations to strengthen requests, provide valuable insight and analysis for downstream intake and discovery teams, avoid duplication and promote use of common components and more.
The service is not mandatory and it is not a gate. Teams need flexibility and given the nature of the Health Sector sometimes we need to bypass process or move fast. Exploration is quick (4 weeks maximum) and not meant to replace intake or discovery.
We are rapidly developing this new service moving toward a Minimum Viable Service by the end of June followed by beta testing over the summer and a full launch in the late Fall.
I'm interested in hearing if anyone out there has developed something similar to what we are building here. Reach out if you have or leave a comment if you have feedback to share.
Edit: Next post I'll go into more detail about what the service looks/feels like, what is the output and some other details that will help better conceptualize what the service is.
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