Ontario’s new hire wants to make government services more user-friendly
Hillary Hartley, the province’s first chief digital officer, wants to make it easier to things like update an address on a driver’s licence.

TheStar.com
June 10, 2017
Kristin Rushowy

Each month, as many as 50,000 Ontarians were going online to change the address on their driver’s licence and health card — but only about 10 per cent actually completed the task.

Turns out, an obscure question tripped them up, one “nobody could answer, so they gave up,” says deputy premier Deb Matthews, who is also the minister in charge of digital government.

“So digitally savvy people were able to figure out where it was that people got hung up, and they were able to identify it . . . so they fixed that and now I think we’re at 25 per cent.

“And that will grow because it’s just easy now.”

Making government services more user-friendly and faster is the big task on Matthews’ agenda, and why the government recently made a high-tech hire — Hillary Hartley, Ontario’s first chief digital officer.

Hartley said it will be “quick wins” like the driver’s licence dud — where users were asked for the last four digits of whatever identification they used when originally getting their health card — that she’ll initially look to work on as head of the recently launched Ontario Digital Service, which has a budget of $16 million and 84 staff members.

“What we are hoping to do is take small examples like that — what are the quick wins where we can say ‘there’s something online, but there’s a blocker here, there’s something that’s not working,’ ” Hartley said in a recent, sit-down interview.

Using data analytics, “you can very quickly understand,” she added. “Today, 10,000 people started this and 1,000 people finished it. What happened? It’s not just that everybody ran out of time and didn’t do it … you can see where they are stopping and you can inspect that page.

“Maybe there’s something wrong with that language there, or it could be the size of the button, it could be the colour of the button — it could be anything. So then you start testing, doing simple things to get it out in front of people to see if the uptake (goes up).”

Hartley is a co-founder of 18F in the United States — an office that aids government departments and agencies in implementing and improving digital services — and a former Presidential Innovation Fellow under Barack Obama. She, her wife and two young children will make their home here in Toronto.

The fact that the Ontario government was hiring a digital officer made it clear “that there was not only a strong foundation and something to build on, but room for me to have my own vision, but also a clear vision of wanting to make Ontario digitally savvy and digital first,” Hartley said.

“Honestly, the fact that Ontario said ‘we are going to create this position’ was enough to signal that this is a big thing, this is a big moment, and we want to carve out this space for this team to both exist and thrive and teach the rest of the government the way they think and work.”

Among other things, her team is now working on launching new pages for Ontario’s health ministry, as well as an improved Service Ontario location finder and hours.

Matthews met Hartley last September — via Skype. She was hired in April from among 400 candidates, and will be paid up to $311,050.

“I can tell you that Hillary’s name came up very early in our discussions about who we wanted as a chief digital officer — and we really wanted her, because she just walks the walk,” Matthews said. “She does it with such ease, she knows what needs to be done and she knows the challenges and the opportunities — and we knew she’d fit in really, really well.”

Governments have been moving toward more digital-first, streamlined services, with the U.K. getting on board early. Greg Elmer, a professor in Ryerson’s faculty of communication and design, said while such positions are more common, navigating both the bureaucrats and the politicians can be tricky.

“A more independent CDO might serve to shake up the government and its services by adopting a more ‘disruptive’ agenda — that is by seeking to engage on a more interactive level Ontarians and their experiences with the government, its agencies and departments,” he said. “This will be the first thing to watch, whether the CDO only serves to better manage current services, or if she uses digital solutions to better engage and mobilize Ontarians for their views on current and potential future services.”

However, with such a large bureaucracy, it won’t be an easy task. From eHealth disasters to the Ontario’s more recent social assistance payment snafus, “and we have recently seen for example a catastrophic employee pay system installed in the federal government,” he added.

“This is a reminder that digital solutions are not magic solutions, many require substantial financial investments and years of training and fine-tuning for specific organizations and workplaces.”

In addition, Elmer said Hartley “will also have to learn the political ropes … given the impending election in the province, I anticipate this will be in the CDO’s agenda practically every day of the work week.”

Hartley acknowledges that changing big organizations isn’t easy. “We used to joke that the biggest barrier was really just inertia, true no matter what large bureaucratic entity in government or not. Because ‘the way we’ve always done it’ is just prevalent and hard to break through.

“A lot of why we are here is for culture change.”

Hartley said some U.S. states have even stripped the governor’s photo from websites — “nobody clicks on that.” The state of Arkansas has a “Gov2Go” app that keeps track of when users need to pay property taxes and will send out reminders to renew things like licence stickers.

That state government also has an app that allows family members to deposit money into an inmate’s prepaid phone account, or get coupons for tourist attractions.

Despite the digital changes, in-person services will remain, Matthews said. And for her, success will be when government services rival the best of what’s out there.

“I think people have come to expect to be able to do a lot of things on their mobile phone, whether it’s banking or reservations or whatever, and I think the government needs to be every bit as good, and better, than what we are used to in everything else — sort of the ‘that was easy’ response.”