Journey to Digitopia: The Government of Canada's Quest to Modernize Services

Thank you, Brett and Luke.

So up next is the amazing story from the Government of Canada. Denis Skinner is Executive Director of the Digital Change Sector, which is part of the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. They set policy for technology for the entire Canadian government, which includes over 20,000 technology workers, enabling the work of over 270,000 civil servants.

Part of the strategy is to create a phenomenal set of shared services that can be used across every department, much like we heard from Julia Harrison from the UK Government Digital Service and Mike Bland from 18F in the US federal government in years past.

He will be presenting with Marc Brouillard, who is currently CTO for the Government of Canada. You will learn about their audacious and beautiful vision of how government can best serve Canadians. It's been amazing to learn about their vision of how they want to transform technology, as well as how they were able to respond to the urgent needs of the COVID crisis: everything from delivering COVID emergency relief benefits to people who needed aid the most, to citizen notification, border control, and more.

I trust you will find this presentation as inspirational and mind-expanding as I did. Here's Denis and Marc.

Thank you, Gene. My name is Denis Skinner, and I'm the Executive Director of Digital Change. My work involves accelerating our journey to digital government and maximizing the potential of our workforce talent. I am so happy to be here today, and I'm joined with my colleague, Marc.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Marc Brouillard. I'm the Chief Technology Officer for the Government of Canada, and I had the honor and pleasure of being the acting Chief Information Officer of Canada during these very unprecedented times that we live in.

So now, we don't have to tell you the why of digital. We, in this room, all understand that the fourth industrial revolution, the digital revolution, has arrived, and that its impacts are widespread and being felt across sectors and borders. Computers and smartphones are now ubiquitous, enabling real-time connectivity and driving expectations on services to be available anytime, anywhere, and from any device.

Every company is a technology company. That's not just true for Silicon Valley unicorns. It doesn't matter what industry: technology has transformed from the back-office function to a critical part of the business strategy, and that means for government, too.

This includes the Government of Canada, where 270,000 public servants work each and every day in the service of Canadians. We deliver services and programs to a captive audience of more than 36 million people, whether they're citizens, businesses, temporary or permanent residents, or even prospective future residents of Canada.

That's a daunting task. And unlike all but the oldest of companies, we're dealing with rules and administrative frameworks that are more than 150 years old. As a result, we not only have technical debt, but also organizational debt. There's a tightly wound historical administrative framework, one that is fundamentally analog in its design and conception. And the rules of this framework were set when the weaving looms that inspired the earliest punch cards were being made by hand.

We can make this scene-setting one step further as well. We have an ever-evolving set of stakeholders. On the one hand, as government employees, we work for Canadians, but we also report to our elected officials, and as governments change, so do priorities. On the other hand, the makeup of Canadians is always changing as well. We have our First Nations, Inuit, and Metis populations. We have Canadians who have been here for several generations, and we also have new Canadians who come from around the world. This adds a richness of diversity to our country, but it also challenges us to be able to deliver digital services to those for whom English or French is not their first language.

At the Government of Canada, we firmly believe that transformational change is needed to better serve Canadians in the ways that they need and expect in the digital age. And as mentioned earlier, our ultimate goal is to transition people's experiences of federal services and transactions by enabling every user to access the services that they need at any time, from any place, and from any device.

Key areas of focus to achieve this digital vision are modernizing the way we replace, build, and manage major IT projects; supporting departments in meeting their digital operational needs; building whole-of-government platforms and components that make it easy for Canadians to find and use government services; and finally, overhauling the institutional barriers to change that have held us back.

Concretely, this will mean no more paper forms and faxes, no more confusing and hard-to-find government benefits and services, no more having to call and sit on hold to get an update on our applications or transactions, and no more complicated logins with credentials that are easily forgotten. Plus, when fast and easy digital transactions with the federal government are available for those who need them, more frontline service staff are freed up to give better in-person services for those who need it.

The digital transformation was already set in motion pre-COVID. With the release of our Digital Operations Strategic Plan in 2018, which set strategic direction that we will take for the integrated management of services, information management, data, IT, and cybersecurity in the Government of Canada. The idea behind this is to get rid of services that reflect cumbersome government-centered processes and to design person-centered digital tools and solutions that operate as one and are secure, reliable, and easy to use.

I'll turn it over to Denis to tell you more.

Thank you, Marc. The first of these foundational enablers aligns with the Third Way from the Three Ways of DevOps, creating a culture of continual experimentation and learning. By recognizing that our people are our most valuable asset, we have been focused on harnessing and developing a high-achieving team of public servants from across the country.

This spring, we launched the Canada School of Public Service Digital Academy in 2018 to help public servants gain the knowledge, skills, and mindsets they need to thrive in the digital age. Through tailored curricula, we've made investments in supporting all levels of public servants in increasing their digital acumen. This includes the conception of Digital Series, a set of foundational offerings that help public servants navigate today's new digital reality by introducing practical skills, tools, and techniques on issues such as data, cloud, agile, and artificial intelligence.

The Digital Academy also offers more traditional comprehensive courses on topics including data literacy, human-centered design, cybersecurity, and best practices for digital transformation. These are complemented by a regular publication of blog articles on salient digital issues and event series on topics of interest to the public service community.

In addition to the training and development opportunities that I just talked about, public servants are guided in their work by a set of digital standards, which are the North Star for digital government. They were designed to be iteratively and frequently improved upon to describe the currently best-known ways of working, as I like to call them. Our playbook of digital standards, which was co-created with the public and with key stakeholder groups, clearly outlines the guiding principles for how all public service must work. The playbook lives in the open on canada.ca, and we regularly share a public version on Google Docs that anyone, anywhere can comment on. We look forward to collaborating with many of you in the future to help ensure the Government of Canada continually aligns itself with modern best practices.

To develop these digital standards, we've pulled heavily from sources including IT Revolution and other related materials. For example, we've extracted general concepts from War and Peace in IT to discuss incorporating user needs into service improvements, and The DevOps Handbook to discuss the importance of discovering issues early to reduce the cost of fixing them later. In the spirit of continuous improvement, we strive to remain as up-to-date as we can, iterating upon the digital standards to ensure that they don't become dated, but rather remain the currently best-known ways of working, even as the best-known ways of working evolve.

The first of these standards articulates our belief that it all starts with designing with the users in mind. For far too long, we would develop a service, put it together, roll it out, only then to receive feedback from the people actually using that service at the end, and by then it was often too late to make meaningful changes to that system.

We can all think of infamous examples of catastrophic failures resulting from taking a high-risk big-bang approach to complex product rollouts, such as the Phoenix pay system disaster in Canada. Now, the Phoenix pay system in Canada, completely unrelated to The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, is coincidentally about a failed HR-related pay system, just as in the opening pages of The Phoenix Project. In the Canadian context here, the project is often our go-to example for many of the shortcomings of traditional project management approaches that many of us in the DevOps community are striving to overcome in our organizations.

Marc, you have an example for us on digital standards in action.

Thanks, Denis. I do. Our number one digital standard is design with the user in mind, or user centricity.

When I think about this, I love to think about the concept of the Airbnb 11-star experience. And if you haven't heard about it, there's great podcasts that are easily searchable to hear their full story. But the crux of their thought experiment involves thinking about how could you deliver services to your customers with no restrictions? If you had no barriers, if you had no constraints, what would that look like? And so they go through their whole experience about how they could deliver Airbnb experiences at an 11-star experience.

So I like to think about that in terms of government. What would an 11-star experience look like for a government service? The one I love to think about is, imagine you're booking travel and you're on a travel booking site, and as you go through the purchasing process, you're entering your travel information, and we've all gone through the pre-booking information, and you have to enter your passport number. What if that site could automatically, through an API, register that your passport's about to expire? What if it could automatically send you a reminder and send IRCC a request to renew the passport? You don't have to give them any additional information. IRCC would then contact you directly and connect with whatever relevant information they needed. And then what if that passport could then be delivered back to you electronically in a digital passport format? This could all happen seamlessly without you ever having to leave the house, without even having to ask for the service.

That's what 11-star services can start to look like. We have to have those thought experiments. We may not always be able to deliver them. There are many restrictions and many good reasons for those restrictions, but trying to get to the ultimate frictionless experience is what we should be striving for.

Another example of that is a colleague of mine whose uncle served in the Canadian military for 10 years, right out of high school. After retiring from self-employed work many years later, he knew that he probably was entitled to a very small pension from that 10 years of service in the government. But he just felt it was too complicated and not worth the effort, not worth the bother to go trying to figure out how to apply for that pension, how to register, how to get that information from the right department to be able to claim those services.

Years later, almost in his mid-70s, a friend of his told him that he was eligible for services such as helping with cutting the grass or shoveling snow. And when he went through the application process, they also notified him that he had this pension. And because he had waited so long, he was actually entitled to a one-time lump sum, a sum that actually made a difference in his life.

Those are the types of integrations of services that really are user-centric. They're putting the user at the heart of everything we do. There's many, many other examples where we can do these types of service delivery integrations, and we have to constantly strive to make them better. Stories like this are what motivate us as public servants, being able to see our vision and hard work making a real difference in the lives of Canadians.

Denis, back to you.

Thank you. Now, the federal public service needs to be reflective of the diverse Canadian population that we serve. Talent Cloud is an example of how digital can be leveraged to improve inclusion and diversity outcomes. It was a three-year experimental project hosted in the Office of the Chief Information Officer of Canada, with three key project goals of advancing diversity and inclusion, optimizing fit-to-team, and reducing time-to-staff. Talent Cloud aimed to explore the digital-age concepts for modernizing the government approach to talent and recruitment.

As part of this experiment, a live staffing platform was designed and built in-house. The Talent Cloud platform was designed, tested, and continuously iterated upon with a diverse user group to ensure inclusion was built in from the start. Design efforts included prioritizing accessibility, promoting remote work as a default even before the pandemic, applying anti-racism and gender theory to all components, starting with Indigenous input when designing the Indigenous talent portal, and developing methodologies to recognize the skills of marginalized talent and those with unconventional career paths.

As an experiment, every staffing process on the platform was intensively researched and tested to generate data on research findings, as well as future-facing theories. Not only did qualitative data from applicants show positive experiences and outcomes, but practical tips for managers were also documented. The code is on GitHub, and a results report from this three-year experiment will be published online later this fall.

With all the uncertainties around the different COVID variants, and some countries being well in the midst of the fourth wave, it sometimes feels like this pandemic will never end. But let's rewind to early 2020 for a moment. Think about where you were when you heard the word COVID-19 for the very first time. Back then, I don't think that any of us could have predicted just how disruptive and devastating this pandemic would end up being. All of a sudden, every industry and aspect of our economies was literally upended, including our social interactions and the way we work.

And as a government digital leader, we had to be decisive in ramping up our IT infrastructure's capacity and resilience virtually overnight and quickly developing new digital tools and solutions. Some of our team members were watching videos of the other recent DevOps summits and were laughing at what has now become the pandemic cliche: what used to take years and months can now be done in days or weeks. We heard that a lot in government, too.

And in doing this, one of the very first things we had to do was to ensure that our public servants were properly equipped with the digital tools and equipment needed to continue working remotely and delivering essential services during the crisis. Looking back, it's pretty incredible how far we've come in terms of getting things done. We increased the GC secure remote access from about 33% of all public servants to well over 68%, now supporting over 280,000 employees being able to work from home. We increased the enterprise internet bandwidth by 50%, enabling us to stay connected with Canadians and allowing for greater GC-wide information sharing. We activated Wi-Fi calling for all 183,000 mobile accounts in the public service, allowing telecommunications in regions with little or no cellular coverage. And we increased teleconferencing times from 1.6 million minutes per day to over five million minutes per day, supporting collaboration from remote locations.

So armed with an enhanced digital infrastructure and a team of passionate public servants, we knew that we were well positioned to help Canada deliver an effective digital response to COVID-19. And at the onset of the pandemic, as talks of social distancing measures were starting to emerge, we quickly realized that digital would become our principal means of interfacing with the public. So we worked hard to adapt existing in-person services, simplified many rules and processes, and prioritized delivery over risk.

If COVID has showed us one thing, it's that we can get almost anything done digitally when we have clear priorities and we're willing to think outside the box. And with this mindset, we managed to quickly and effectively roll out programs and supports to make sure that Canadians could pay their bills and employers could protect their jobs with a view of them being able to hit the ground running when their business picks up again. The two departments responsible for these programs rolled them out in weeks, handled user traffic like we've never seen, processed almost 10 million unique applications, and ultimately delivered billions of dollars in benefits to Canadians in need within weeks and months.

Indeed, if there's a silver lining to this very dark cloud, it has been the acceleration of our government's digital journey. Speaking with colleagues in the private sector, it sounds like this was also the case on the industry side. During COVID, we all did a lot of things that we wouldn't otherwise have been able to do. Denis, over to you.

Thank you, Marc. One such example of a DevOps success story is the Notify app, developed by our colleagues at the Canadian Digital Service, CDS. Notify became one of the Government of Canada's key tools in the fight against COVID. Now let me quickly walk you through a story of how this app, which aimed to provide a simple and efficient way for the government to send email and text notifications to keep people updated as they used government services, was conceived.

Discovery for Notify lasted roughly 10 weeks, from July until mid-September 2019. After that, CDS launched into an alpha phase, with the onboarding of the first services taking place in November 2019. When it comes to development of Notify, given the premium that the Government of Canada places on collaboration, CDS leveraged international partnerships and set up two one-hour sessions with the UK Government's Digital Service, GDS, as well as a one-hour session with the digital team from Australia, with whom they chatted about the problems they had run into.

However, they quickly realized that in the Canadian context we have different needs, given multiple languages and time zones, so the team forked the code from the UK. In addition, in contrast with the GDS team, which was supported by an internal platform team that runs their application, the CDS Notification team is responsible for running the application, so they needed a highly managed solution. At the time, GDS used Pivotal Cloud Foundry for development, which CDS did not feel comfortable with using. So they dockerized the entire application and are currently running on a Kubernetes cluster in Amazon Web Services. Now, operations experts are embedded in this team.

Using DevOps best practices has shortened the timeline on ensuring those conditions. For example, using modern tools, they could automate a lot of the accessibility issues found during testing and development. And although automated tools found about 50% of issues, it still required a multidisciplinary team to get to an acceptable standard.

What the CDS team also realized is that DevOps tooling was really only one part of the solution to building a successful production service. They spent a lot of time ensuring that users were steered towards sending notifications with clear content and the information that recipients really needed. DevOps and automation helped free up resources so that the team could advance to making the service more inclusive.

In terms of assessment, as per the four core metrics from the State of DevOps Report, given the changing team conditions during the pandemic, these metrics were difficult to measure in a meaningful way over the lifetime of the service. But based on individual pieces of evidence, the following observations were made this year. Mean time to recovery was usually less than 30 minutes. There were five incidents this year, and each was resolved within that timeframe. Change failure rate was relatively negligible, as CDS has a staging environment that catches most issues before they make it to production. Deployment frequency is every three to five days as the product has become more stable. In the early days, it was common to deploy to production multiple times per day. Lead time, again, is highly dependent on the feature being developed. CDS aims to have the pull request deployed to staging within 24 hours of being marked as ready. And so once they have deployed to staging, the production release is automatically generated, which can be deployed immediately if need be.

Notify is a resounding success. It's currently in use by over 150 government services, and to date, 20 million messages have been sent. These are key messages coming from official sources like the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada. This was the main source of reliable information to Canadians during the pandemic. The service was also used to communicate to Canadians about COVID relief benefits to businesses and individuals. It's quite the service.

Another example of a team that was able to score comparatively well on the State of DevOps Report grid and was able to quickly build tech solutions to help Canadians stay safe during the pandemic was the conception of ArriveCAN, an application for incoming travelers to use to submit their mandatory information for entry to the country.

The idea behind ArriveCAN was launched in April 2020, which was after four weeks of in-house development and deployment, which enabled Canada's Public Health Agency to more easily manage contact tracing and border officers to assist in COVID risk for travelers. ArriveCAN went from idea to working app to demo to users in just four weeks. This was enabled by a sense of urgency and approval from the highest levels of Canadian Border Services and the Public Health Agency of Canada, which were obtained relatively quickly, with some traditional processes being sidestepped. The conception of the application did not follow any exact framework or process. Rather, it was based on an agile approach. And I remember Waldo Jaquith from 18F using the term demos over memos to describe this dynamic at the Michigan State Appropriations Committee a few years ago.

Given the complexity of this project, expertise was pulled from various parts of government, and a multidisciplinary team was made of jacks and janes of all trades working on the development of ArriveCAN. The core team also included representation from policy, operations, communications, and there was regular engagement from key stakeholder groups. Collaboration on this project occurred at all levels, from working-level employees to senior executives, including the presidents and ministers of both government organizations. The app was actually ready faster than governments could green-light its release.

Now, ArriveCAN is available on the Apple iOS and Google Play stores in English, French, and Spanish, and on canada.ca/arrivecan in English and French. And it boasts a 4.6-star rating on the Apple Store and 4.3-star rating on Android, aggregated from a total of over 75,000 reviews. Not bad for a government app, I have to say.

Over the course of its existence, the ArriveCAN application has had approximately 70 releases combined from a total of mobile and web platforms. And as the COVID situation evolves, ArriveCAN will also adapt to meet the emerging needs. For instance, ArriveCAN has now been leveraged so that travelers can upload their proof of vaccination prior to entry into Canada.

The key takeaways from the ArriveCAN project when it comes to successes include the notion that collaboration at all levels of organizations is required to get rapid feedback and the required approvals; the need to leverage a multidisciplinary cross-functional team, not just in the tech side, but also in expert scenarios such as operations, policy, communications, privacy, legal, security; and taking a demos-over-memos approach enabled us to have working software over comprehensive documentation.

And learning being a critical part of the innovation process, I also took stock of lessons learned from this project, including the notion that being a high performer requires urgency to gain approval from the highest levels of the organization to bypass the traditional ways of working. Subsequently, it takes continued dedication to keep the gains made during the urgency once the urgency has expired.

In this particular case, after the initial success was complete, the white blood cells of the organization kicked in and returned to more traditional ways of working to pull the organization further from the desired state of a high DevOps performer. The initial implementation was a tremendous success, delivering incremental value to users without traditional artifacts from those traditional project management approaches. There is, of course, reason to backfill the steps skipped in the name of urgency, but in the spirit of modernizing processes and continuous learning, there's an opportunity here to learn, and it is possible to make delivery faster and value to users commonplace while maintaining assurance provided by those traditional artifacts. In the Government of Canada, these are the questions we're trying to solve, and it will take some work across disciplines from development, operations, auditing, policy, and the many other groups working together to solve these issues.

These are lessons that guide us as we continue our work and our journey towards increasing our DevOps adoption, and to have even more success stories to share with you. Back to you, Marc.

Thanks, Denis. Those were indeed some really inspiring stories, and there are many others in the public service who are striving to modernize their digital service delivery from the ground up. And while many of us are still tirelessly striving for nationwide success, we'd like to share some of the effective strategies we've learned during our efforts thus far.

One in particular comes to mind, as it will be familiar to those who have read Team of Teams. Often in our organizations, a blocker to improving deployment frequency, for example, are the silos within our organizations. One team wants to move towards continuous delivery, while the other prefers the traditional approaches to digital service delivery, blocking one from moving up to a high performer capable of on-demand deployments.

In Team of Teams, a feet-on-the-ground military expert was sent deep into the bureaucracy for the benefit of those on the ground deployed overseas. They referred to this position as the linchpin liaison officer, or LNO. They have to put acronyms on everything. The intent was to get a better idea of how the war looked from their partners' perspectives and to build relationships. We recommend you read the book, but the strategy was heralded as a great success, embedding some of our strongest operational resources in the offices of your strategic partners.

At Transport Canada, our colleagues have devised a similar approach by creating the Cloud Ambassador project. The idea is to embed a developer with expertise in DevOps approaches to service delivery and have them work inside the strategic partners within the organization. Similar to in Team of Teams, this positions the development team to better understand the perspective of their partners and gives the developers someone to collaborate with to make requested changes who has the proper access to action their requests.

For those of you looking for grassroots change and looking to introduce a culture of continuous learning for your staff and your allies throughout the organization you need on your side to make the transformations necessary, we recommend this approach for you as well. Just as Transport Canada created the Cloud Ambassador project and in Team of Teams they created the linchpin liaison officer, you too can create a position to help begin breaking down the silos within your organization to motivate the grassroots changes required to transform service delivery.

Denis, over to you.

Thank you, Marc. While we have discussed the government's high-level strategic plans, as well as some of our leaders in the space of agile and iterative service delivery, I would like to pivot to the Government of Canada's aspirational dreams.

I've discussed the digital standards, and to further inspire change, Canada's done a thought experiment that paints a picture of the perfect public service in an imagined government built from the bottom up. Now, in her book Accelerate, Dr. Nicole Forsgren eloquently built the case for the necessity to always be looking for methods to create the right culture, approach, and speed to support rapid value creation to remain competitive. And at the Government of Canada, we have also been looking into ways to rethink how we could provide services and respond to people's raised expectations.

From this derived another thought experiment. Its premise is as follows: Imagine a world where everything from government decision-making to service design and daily operations could be optimized for digital delivery. Enter Digitopia, a thought experiment exercise we're using to rethink our operations from the ground up, from soup to nuts, in winning people's hearts and minds early on as we continue to work towards building a new innovative model that will allow our government to deliver excellence to citizens and at speed and scale.

The Digitopia vision involves organizing our government operations to focus on more servant leadership and show-and-tell demonstrations of business value achieved for users, and less command-and-control oversight with fewer static progress reports; more detailed business value streams to support user-centric and user-driven services and programs, and less upfront cost estimation for big-bang, tied-down projects; more focus on value outcomes achieved for users, less attention to government outputs and milestones met; more stable, multidisciplinary teams working on system-wide mission-driven issues, and fewer siloed functional teams working strictly on advancing individual departmental mandates.

But being realists, we know that transformational change will not occur overnight, especially in a large bureaucracy. What Digitopia really aims to do is enable public servants to imagine the art of the digitally possible and provide a basis for experimenting with novel models that can incrementally move our organization forward. Marc, back to you.

And as we emerge from what is hopefully the worst of the pandemic, we have begun to take stock of the lessons learned from COVID-19 and recalibrate our strategy as we think about how to continue pushing Canada's digital agenda forward in a post-COVID world.

Indeed, while the pandemic has led to a paradigm shift in our base assumptions and has accelerated our digital transformations towards moving Canada to a digital-first government, it has also highlighted systemic pain points that will need to be rigorously focused on hacking away at.

These challenges include the realization that legacy challenges require innovative IT solutions. This approach needs to be leveraged to accelerate digital transformation and deliver enterprise value. Our IT ecosystem is also being challenged by technological debt from a siloed approach to IT management. We need to incentivize departments to modernize their applications. And it's important for our new agile ways of working to achieve efficiencies that can be translated into sustained models. These new ways include embedded teams, redeploying existing teams to support critical services, and streamlining governance.

In addition, we need to be balancing risk tolerance to maximize efficiency and results across the system, which allowed for streamlined processes. We need to give ourselves permission to improve. We can move at speed and at scale when efforts are allocated based on government priorities, not specific departmental needs. But this is only possible when priorities are clear and focused. And finally, data and information management issues hinder efficient service delivery, like the fact that Canada does not have a digital ID. We need to prioritize horizontal data integration to continue to enable these digital transformations.

At its crux, our belief is that the implementation of new tools without evolving our organization is a losing strategy, and we should be focused on broader culture changes, both in terms of the structure of our organizations and the way we work. This means our culture, our processes, and our business models have to change. Some of our thinking on this is articulated in the report we did on Pathfinders to Digital, a report circulated to senior executives in the spring of 2020.

In it, we argue that achieving transformational systems changes would require us to ask fundamental questions, such as, what are we willing to give up to change the way we work? For instance, we know that command-and-control governance kills agility, and agility is enabled through the ability to adapt and respond quickly. If we are to truly empower our teams to deliver high-quality, user-centric services, we need management to adopt servant leadership versus traditional command-and-control oversight.

When it comes to funding models, change is also needed for the models to be more agile and adaptable to change. As we know, current funding models tend to focus on upfront planning and the generation of outputs. If we ask how long it's going to take and how much it's going to cost, we will force that thinking. But while we can't predict the future, we can get better at adapting to it.

Product teams must also have, and be expressly permitted to have, all capabilities required to deliver their services within the team. This means truly multidisciplinary teams. To do this, our approach to classification and hiring processes must be adjusted.

But while we are tremendously proud of our team's contributions to the country's digital responses in the face of an emergency, we are also aware that prolonged periods of working extraordinary hours is neither desirable nor sustainable. And as we emerge from the worst of COVID, we are working to ensure that our colleagues can find better work-life balances and have the resources they need to fight the prolonged pandemic fatigue.

So, where do we need your help? Our challenge now is to continue to ensure that the digital acceleration that we have witnessed over the last 18 months does not go sideways or backwards. We know that progress is not always linear. It takes work to continue to be better at the way we do things, to keep learning, and to continually adjust to an ever-changing landscape. If we don't keep pushing, then we're just creating a new generation of technical and administrative debt for those who come behind us.

In ending, we'd like to put out a call to action to all of you. I talked earlier about how gratifying it is for us public servants to be able to build tech solutions that help make the lives of our fellow citizens better. Now, imagine if all of us here pitched in to make government services work better for everyone.

This is an important time, and as we emerge from this pandemic, digital capabilities will be more than ever mission-critical. And I think that I am not biased in saying that here in this room are some of the most brilliant techies in the world. So, in continuing to push our digital transformation and improve the services that millions of citizens use, we'd love your help, either through providing your input and making our digital standards better, or channeling your coding talent into helping make our open source software projects, such as our Notify and COVID Alert apps, more inclusive, more accessible, more secure, and more performant.

Thank you again for having us. We look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you so much.