Skills and Work in the Emerging Digital Public Service: the need for knowledge synthesis
The digital era offers many opportunities, yet presents new and growing challenges. Governments are focused on helping their citizens and industries prepare for the coming digital future. Yet are governments themselves—and the public service that supports them—prepared for the looming changes? As the initial impacts of the digital era are being felt, this project seeks to identify, synthesize, and understand the state of knowledge on the implications of the digital era for the public service. Modern governments need the capacity to take advantage of emerging opportunities for managing the public service, developing and delivering citizen services, and responding to evolving challenges of public governance stemming from the rapid adoption of digital technologies across society. This Knowledge Synthesis project will assess how the digital era raises new skill and capacity requirements for governance, and how education, training, and career development offerings in digital tools and methods for public servants in Canada are being developed in response.
Digital technologies are presenting governments with opportunities to transform the management of the public service and the delivery of citizen services (Roy, 2017), while also highlighting the need to strengthen the capacity of the public service to develop public policy in response to digital era challenges (Clarke & Craft, 2017). Yet when deployed by governments, these technologies can raise ethical concerns, unintended consequences, and the need to ensure that the capacity of the public service is capable of managing their implementation and monitoring their impacts. And when these same digital technologies are used in the private sector, they carry a range of societal impacts, regulatory concerns, and policy implications that governments must anticipate and respond to.
As these technologies are being developed, and policy and administration being transformed, what it means to be a public servant and to work in the public sector is rapidly changing (Clarke et al., 2017). Leaders in public-service digital transformation understand that first-wave ‘e-government’ responses (i.e., applying computer technology to government processes) are no longer sufficient (Dunleavy et al., 2006; OECD, 2014) and that effective governance in the digital era requires more than just adopting digital technology (van Laar et al., 2017). Rather, it will require recruiting a new generation of public servants with new skills and new ways of working, while providing opportunities for increasing the digital competency of those already in government, thus creating the energy for transforming the public sector while at the same time preserving crucial public service values (Lindquist, 2018 a).
In building this new model of a 21st century public service, specific digital skills and literacies will be required including undertaking data analytics in support of decision making, leading user-centric design that supports the provision of digital citizen services, deploying and monitoring advanced technologies in support of public administration and policy development (such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, drones, sensors, virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), blockchain, Internet of Things devices, and 3D printing), engaging citizens and stakeholders through channels such as social media, animating cross-organizational knowledge sharing and computer-supported collaboration, and ensuring cybersecurity and digital privacy protection (Craft & Spicer, 2020).
Yet it is not currently clear what the specific skills and literacies are that stem from these broad topics, and how the capacities needed to meet these challenges are to be built. These knowledge gaps—and, thus, the need for a knowledge synthesis and knowledge mobilization—exist in both the public service and the academic programs that train the future public service. At this crucial juncture—as the initial impacts of the digital era are being felt, and governments and post-secondary education (PSE) institutions are experimenting in how to respond—our knowledge synthesis project will undertake an assessment of how the digital era is creating a revised set of skill and capacity requirements for governance, and how education, training, and career development offerings in digital tools and approaches for established and aspiring public servants in Canada are being developed in response. Given the speed with which the imperatives of the digital era are emerging, and the various ways in which training and education responses are attempting to keep pace, a knowledge synthesis is warranted.