ODS: RIP
National, regional, and local governments are creating digital service teams to address 21st century citizen needs. But Ontario just dissolved theirs. Why?
News from the north
Just heard today, via a Civic Tech Field Guide email, that the Ontario Digital Service (ODS) team has been fully disbanded. According to a discussion on the r/OntarioPublicService subreddit, this is just the final step in a politically-driven dismantling that has been going on for months or perhaps longer.
There are a lot of unfamiliar Canadian government acronyms in the Reddit discussion, so I’m not getting a nuanced understanding of what happened. But a more formal — very brief — article helped a little. It was posted March 27 by The Logic: Ontario government disbands remnants of Ontario Digital Service [email registration required].
The only official Ontario government comment, obtained by The Logic from an internal memo, claimed the latest changes completed “…the alignment of digital services into the broader ministry to support service delivery excellence at enterprise scale.”
Armchair analysis
Having initiated reorganizations myself, and having been reorganized by others, I can imagine both sides of these disagreements. There can, in fact, be good cases made for big structural changes even when things are going well. So maybe disbanding ODS makes sense?
But dissolution of a government digital service team bucks the international trend of assembling digital teams, with the requisite cross-section of abilities in software, design, user experience, research, and so forth. I enjoy bucking trends, too, but if you do it, you have to explain yourself; you have to share why your new approach is better than the past approach or better than the most common approach. You don’t have to be “right,” but you owe it to the people involved to use internally-consistent logic to support your approach.
In this specific case, if there’s logic in this Ontario move, it’s been well-camouflaged so far.
Indeed, The Logic offered this assessment that may expose the government’s likely mistake (boldface mine):
Over a series of reorganizations… [ODS has] become a division within the service-delivery ministry under an assistant deputy minister, falling two management levels down. What remains of that division is now on borrowed time, managing provincial websites while the government decides who will take that over.
If that’s an accurate assessment, then the decision to bust up ODS doesn’t sound thought-out. It sounds like politics, not public service. It reminds me of the proverbial startup division inside a larger corporation getting strangled once the legacy business figures out their profits or fiefdoms are threatened by the new division.
Whatever the truth, my condolences to the digital public servants affected, not to mention the missed opportunities that will impact digital service delivery to Ontario’s citizens. All reorganizations incur costs to culture, operations, and results. Sometimes those costs are worth bearing. But poorly-run reorganizations break the fragile trust between employer and employee, even if the new structure is more “productive” than the last.
Best wishes from your southern neighbor, Ontario.