Let's Think Digital

We're back...sorta! A few months ago we officially brought the Let's Think Digital podcast to a close. I feel very fortunate to have been able to host three seasons of Let’s Think Digital where we covered a wide range of topics related to how governments here in Canada and around the world are adapting and evolving to the digital world, with varying degrees of success. As I was moving on to new pr...

This is the final episode of the Let's Think Digital podcast in its current form. I've been thinking a lot about transitions recently. Last month, I had the honour of being asked to serve as Vice President of Learning and Leadership at the Institute of Governance. The IOG is a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization that I’ve worked with for a number of years that does important work to advance...

To change systems, sometimes you need to bend the rules, or even rewrite them. That's the argument that Alistair Croll and Emily Ross make in their new book, Just Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook. In this episode we speak to Alistair about his new book, which offers numerous case studies and frameworks on how to drive change with subversive tactics while keeping in mind how far is to...

Data is the lifeblood of any organization, including government. And in today’s digital age, there are very real questions about whether governments are capable of managing the enormous amount of data that is now collected. We’re no longer in an era where data was created at human scale with pen and paper on a government form. Instead, governments are increasingly being flooded with an avalanche o...

International assistance and aid can help bring people out of poverty, build peace and security, and drive economic prosperity. For Canada, it's also a major source of its soft power globally. In fact, Global Affairs Canada delivers around $15 billion dollars a year in international assistance, of which approximately $6 billion is delivered through what is known in the federal government as “Grant...

As much as we talk on this podcast about transforming and modernizing governments and bureaucracies, we can’t ignore the role of the private sector which is often working in very embedded ways with government when it comes to all things digital. Whether it’s the role of private tech firms and consultants and their complex and sometimes contested relationship with governments, or the impact of the...

Trust is everything. It’s clear we’re in a moment in time where people do not trust their governments. There is skepticism about the impact of big technology companies, concerns about new technologies like artificial intelligence, and fear about the future, including the future of our democratic institutions themselves.  So we should be concerned about how complex, opaque, and often infuriati...

Follow the digital government space long enough and you will hear about Estonia. Despite being a small country of 1.4 million people with an overall economy that by total size is only 101st in the world, it is a powerhouse in digital government services. In the most recent United Nations e-government ranking, Estonia ranks 2nd in the world, and has been in the top 10 for many years.  So what...

Canada has fallen from 3rd in the 2010 UN e-gov rankings to 47 in 2024. We’re stuck when it comes to modernizing government for the digital era. But our guests this week, recorded on location at this year’s FWD50 conference in Ottawa, have a new playbook that they say can help get governments in Canada out of the rut and back on track. Anna Hirschfeld and Alex MacEachern and are two of the authors...

Live on location from the FWD50 conference! In the most recent United Nations e-government rankings Canada has dropped from a high of #3 in 2010 down to #47. We are stalled out while other countries pass us by. There is a real question from many in public service about whether senior leaders have the necessary digital era competencies to get us back to the top of the rankings again. That's why the...

Season 3 premiere! For those of us in the digital transformation and government modernization space, we are feeling tired and burnt out. We heard a lot about this last season where we talked about how it seems like the efforts to modernize how government serves its citizens are stalled. Here in Canada it feels like we're stuck in the mud. We heard about projects stalling and innovation teams being...

Let's Think Digital is back for Season Three!  We've heard from experts and leaders in digital modernization about how new technologies have the potential to redefine the way government works in the modern era. From new technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality to policy issues like procurement and incentivizing innovation. And we talked about how it seems like we're stuck in t...

(Help shape the future of this podcast! Take our Season 2 listener survey at LetsThinkDigital.ca ) If there’s a running theme this season on the podcast, it’s about how we seem to be stuck in the mud when it comes to our efforts to modernize government for the digital age. Check out our previous episodes this season for some insightful and thought-provoking perspectives on why this might be the ca...

A few weeks ago, I got a late night message on our team’s Slack that made me do a double-take and was - to be frank - a real shock. It was a link to a Reddit thread that was titled “Ontario Digital Service is Officially Dead.” ODS had a simple but ambitious mission: transform Ontario’s government services and practices for the digital age. It was led by Hillary Hartley, a veteran of digital transf...

It's only been a year since our last episode on artificial intelligence, but already a lot has changed. It seems like Generative AI is everywhere and everyone, including governments, are struggling to keep up. So on this episode Ryan is joined by a special co-host Jen Schellinck, Think Digital Associate and our resident expert on AI and cognitive science to talk about what you need to know when it...

If you haven’t heard of FWD50, you should! It’s one of the premiere conferences on digital modernization in government and exists to help answer one vital question: How do we use technology to make society better for all? Many of this season’s podcast conversations were recorded on location at the conference in Ottawa last November. On this episode of Let’s Think Digital you are going to get an op...

It’s fair to say that most governments don’t choose to use open source by default. Despite efforts over the past two decades to make open source solutions a viable, or even default solution in government, there's still a lot of skepticism. Those in decision making positions often raise concerns around security and reliability compared to proprietary software that is viewed as being “safe” even if...

We want government to be innovative and not be left behind in the digital revolution. But this comes up against the reality of the structures, incentives, and culture of most public sector organizations that resist change. As a result, and as we’ve been talking about on this podcast, our efforts to push forward digital transformation and modernize the business of government seems to be stuck in th...

As digital technologies become increasingly embedded in the fabric of the built environment, there are real questions about whether our cities, where 8 out of 10 North Americans live, are truly ready to be digital or smart cities. Do we have the right levels of transparency for citizens to know what data is being collected, how, and for what purpose? And are governments ready to use data and techn...

You've probably seen any number of stories about how some founder in Silicon Valley says their startup can tackle a big societal problem better and cheaper than the public sector because government just can't do anything right. Or maybe you've heard about a public sector executive immediately dismissing an idea that came from the private sector on how to do things differently because government's...

How do we get stuff done? If there’s a broader theme for this season of the podcast, it’s that. How do we get unstuck from the mud that we seem to be in, and get on with actually realizing our digital ambitions in government? It would be easy to chase the next big digital technology. But this episode we're talking about why need to pay attention to the "plumbing." We have to think about the underl...

Can government do the things that it says it is going to do? One of the hardest things that public servants have to do is implement and it gets to the heart of a state's capacity to deliver. In the digital era, that means being able to deliver digitally. And when we think about state capacity in this context, it often seems that we find our institutions coming up short. State capacity is something...

We're back for Season 2! This week, we have Sean Boots, an open government manager and a veteran of digital transformation efforts in the Canadian federal government. In this conversation we talk about how we seem to be stuck in the mud on our digital transformation journey, and Sean's recent presentation at the FWD50 conference and open letter to the Clerk of the Privy Council that lays out his r...

On June 16, we had a special livestream to celebrate the conclusion of Season 1 of Let's Think Digital! Listen to the Think Digital team to talk about how social media has been changing our world, the future of work, and reflections on the previous episodes. We also took some audience Q&A. Thanks to Mike Kujawski, Rebecca Hollett, Mel Han, Aislinn Bornais, Meghan Hellstern, Jen Schellinck, Mik...

This week, Meghan Hellstern, Trainer and Facilitator with Think Digital, co-hosts with Ryan and reflects on her time at the 2023 Code for America Summit in Washington, D.C! In this episode, we hear about how digital transformation is as much about people, as it is technology. Big thanks to Hillary Hartley, Dorothy Eng, Ariel Kennan, Amanda Renteria, Karina Rider, Natalie Talis, and Luke Simcoe for...