Digital Standards Alignment Tracker

This page represents the Digital Standards working in the open to share the analysis of alignment with the Digital Standards

The information displayed here does not represent any form of performance or metrics tracking on behalf of Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) or the Government of Canada (GC).

The anonymized information being shared is in the spirit of Open Data and Working in the Open, to share information regarding the alignment to the Digital Standards.

This page is currently a prototype, and more information will be added as work progresses.

This data is generated through analyzing submitted concept cases. Work is underway to improving our data collection and reporting to remove subjectivity as much as possible. For the time being, this is the data at hand, and we are actively working to improve the quality and quantity of said data.

A concept case was judged whether or not it aligned with a Digital Standard. This means if the concept case identified that it had met a given Digital Standard, but was judged not to have adequately met the standard, then it will result as having not aligned in the data below.

Work is presently underway to provide further guidance regarding what would be considered to align with a Digital Standard. In the spirit of working in the open, the work presently underway can be viewed here.

Services should not be built based upon internal constraints or complexities of government, they should instead be built to address the needs of all users. To deliver value to users, one must understand and prioritize their needs. The value of a given service or initiative is a hypothesis until tested with the users of our services. As such, services should not be designed against detailed information proxies such as requirements documentation or Requests for Proposal, as these are only hypotheses. Assumptions need to be validated through direct and frequent interactions with a representative sample of users, who may be members of the public, or government employees or a combination thereof. At the end of the day, requirements for services are built first and foremost with the needs of all users in mind.

In contrast to high risk and long-lead time big-bang deployments, working services or initiatives must be tested with users as early as possible in order to get rapid feedback. That feedback is then used during the development of the service or initiative to iterate upon in order to improve the service. In order to reduce risk, rather than creating long term detailed plans resulting in risky big-bang deployments and changes, make iterative changes to services regularly. This is enabled through breaking services into smaller components that can be managed independently of one another.

By working in the open one increases transparency of services, increases trust in government, creates an ecosystem that promotes innovation, prevents needing to reinvent the wheel by increasing collaboration within, and external to, government. Working in the open promotes understanding of government processes and services, and creates an environment whereby innovation can take place throughout the Government of Canada and through non-governmental organizations leveraging the government data and information to improve service delivery. When content cannot be made publicly available, it should be made available throughout the Government of Canada. This way of working aligns Canada with the Digital Nations Charter, of which it is a signatory and promotes “transparency and citizen participation, and uses open licences to produce and consume open data”, and the Open Data Charter. By working in the open the Government of Canada can increase its reuse of existing public solutions, and allow others to reuse work conducted by the Government of Canada.

In order to maintain the trust of Canadians, the government must continually learn and improve itself by embracing leading practices in order to simplify access to government services to match the rising expectations of Canadians. In alignment with the Digital Nations Charter, which calls for both the use of Open Standards and Open Source, this Digital Standard aligns with the ultimate Digital Vision. This vision says that: “The Government of Canada is an open and service-oriented organization that operates and delivers programs and services to people and businesses in simple, modern and effective ways that are optimized for digital and available anytime, anywhere and from any device.” By leveraging open source software, and leveraging open standards and solutions, the Government of Canada increases interoperability, mitigates vendor lock-in, and expands its vendor pool from which to acquire digital services. The division of services in terms of their percentages over the course of 3 years (2017-2019) showcases how needs evolved and the number of services grew while tracking the use of open standards and solutions while implementing easy and safe access.

Digital services store the information of Canadians and must be protected in order to maintain the trust in government services. The creation of frictionless processes reduces the burden on users, and also increases our agility, and our ability to quickly respond to issues as they arise. Security and privacy should be taken as a consideration from the onset of work for a given service and the implementation of security and privacy controls should be considered part of daily work. Similarly, processes should promote and monitor the continuous implementation of security and privacy controls throughout the lifecycle of a service, and the resulting data and information should only be maintained for as long as it is needed. This will demonstrably increase the security and privacy posture of digital services by leveraging automated testing and real time reporting and monitoring over anecdotal document-heavy manual processes. These processes, and the security and privacy controls themselves, should be frictionless, ensuring a user first approach which ensures that services are designed first and foremost for users, not to satisfy existing legacy government procedures, tooling, or processes. Furthermore, by creating frictionless processes and permitting services to be iterated and improved upon quickly, the government is better situated to respond quickly to security or privacy risks. By responding to these operational needs within hours or minutes rather than months, the government can improve its security and privacy posture.

Quality should be built in from the start, preventing the need to revisit previously implemented components due to issues, such as accessibility. The faster issues are found to when they were created the less costly they are to fix. By creating solutions that are accessible from the start one creates communities, workplaces and services that enable everyone to participate fully in society without barriers. In order to ensure accessibility is considered throughout the service development lifecycle, it should be continually monitored in an automated fashion wherever possible and built into our processes to continually promote alignment with accessibility standards. While iterating and improving frequently and designing with users, accessibility should be a key consideration, and become a source of work items throughout the service design lifecycle. When designing with users, efforts should be made to identify a wide variety of users with a wide variety of needs, to ensure accessibility standards are met or exceeded.

The following link shows the percentage of various wesbites under the gc.ca domains and subdomains which meet the accessibility standards set under the Digital Standards handbook

In order to promote innovation and create agility within our organizations, the teams that make up our organizations must be empowered. Aim to hire good people not to tell them what to do, but to have them tell you what to do. Ensuring professional advancement is available to retain high performers throughout their career.

The government manages large, highly complex, crucially important services for their users. A top-down command and control approach to service delivery and designs enforces a structure that aligns to the structure itself, rather than to the needs of the users or based on the expertise of those building the services. Rather than bringing information to authority, bring authority to the information. Those best suited to solve a given problem are those closest to the problem. By removing decision-making authority from the teams into complex governance structures, the innovative potential of teams is mitigated by legacy governance procedures and processes.

In order to create organizations that are able to create high quality services and iterate and improve frequently, teams must be empowered to make decisions for themselves. Therefore the following outlines the alignment of the Digital Standards under the condition of 'Empowering Staff to Deliver Better Services.'

The following link displays the division of averages espect to eight separate questions that track empowering standards all throughtout the number of years (2014, 2017-20) and represent all the subsets that report them. Furthermore the availability of further subdivision on comparisons with respect to positive and negative specific subsets of specific years can also be viewed for better understanding.

Good data stewardship is required to ensure data is fit for purpose, reusable, and managed responsibly in order to support data driven decision making and help minimize data duplication. This involves managing data and information responsibly and securely over time, supporting the sharing of data throughout the Government of Canada and with the public, and promoting its use through innovative new solutions within the private sector. In alignment with working in the open by default, data and information should be published so as to be readable, by humans or by machines, by publishing interpretable and parseable data in machine readable formats. In alignment with iterating and improving frequently, efforts should be made to continually improve the quality of the data, and the quality of the processes used to manage and publish said data. Further, by working in the open by default and properly managing data and information assets, issues such as duplication can be mitigated, while promoting the creation of innovative solutions which are able to leverage the data and information collected and published by the government.

The following link shows Open Data Portal as one of the examples of how reusable data is provided and accessed in the open.

Designing ethical services means that the services created by the government are inclusive and ensure that everyone receives equitable treatment. The underlying complex systems that run Canada’s services come to conclusions that can be opaque to both the external users and those managing the systems. Further, with increasing complexity comes increasing resource demands on governmental systems, including energy and physical footprint. Therefore, efforts must ensure that services and their respective infrastructure and processes are procured, built, and operate sustainably. Efforts are required to increase the transparency and address potential biases of computational decisions, and to ensure that decisions made or supported using these systems are legal, consistent, accurate and align with the expectations and intents of those managing them. The responsible use of automated-decision systems includes being open about their use and being able to explain how decisions are made. Through the use of extensive monitoring solutions, one must ensure their services are not enforcing biases, whether conscious or unconscious.

Collaborating widely allows us to learn from lessons learned in order to minimize the mistakes already experienced by others, and reduces rework through identifying and sharing existent solutions. The problems that government solves are often unique, though they are not unique amongst governments. Many of the same solutions by the same, or similar vendors, are used throughout the world, or at varying levels of government within different jurisdictions. When designing a service, or implementing a service using tools or systems, identify which other departments, jurisdictions, or organizations, have leveraged similar technologies to solve similar use cases in order to collaborate widely, reduce rework, share solutions, and benefit from lessons already learned by others. Furthermore, through the use of multidisciplinary teams, especially when coupled with the empowerment of teams, the government improves its posture to deliver modern and innovative services. Through wide collaboration, organizations begin to break down the silos developed over time through the overreliance on functionally based teams. Going forward, working across skill sets, and leveraging work from others, while learning from their lessons learned, promotes the development of modern services better able to meet the changing needs of citizens in the digital age.