The End of the Ontario Digital Service and What it Means

Let's Think Digital

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 transformation efforts like 18F in the United States Federal Government, who took on the role of not just leading ODS but serving as the first Chief Digital and Data Officer for the Ontario Government.

ODS did groundbreaking work for government: New digital service standards and legislation, building user research labs, and creating really great apps and digital tools. But ODS was about more than just digital products. It was just as much about people. Passionate public servants driven by the belief that interacting with government should be easy and, in Hillary’s words, delightful.

So it came as a shock when I found out that the Ontario Digital Service was being shut down. Not with a bang, but quietly and without fanfare via an internal memo informing staff that ODS was being disbanded. There has been little public discussion on what ODS’ contribution to the Ontario government has been, nor what this decision might mean for other government digital teams or the digital government movement more broadly.

On this episode of the podcast, we tell the story of the ODS over the past 7 years, and what it means now that it has ended, from those who were there at the beginning. We hear from Hillary Hartley about leading the ODS as Ontario's first Chief Digital Officer. We also hear from Karim Bardeesy who was Director of Policy and Deputy Principal Secretary for Premiere Kathleen Wynne when ODS was first being conceptualized. Tanya Coyle, was a long time public servant in Ontario who became one of the co-founders of this new digital startup team in the heart of the Ontario government. And Honey Dacanay was part of the founding team of ODS when it was still what we sometimes call in the tech world a “two-pizza team”.

Related Links

• Ontario Digital Service is officially dead (Reddit)
• Ontario government disbands remnants of Ontario Digital Service by David Reevely, The Logic
• First blogpost by the team that set-up ODS
• Byte-Sized Progress: Assessing Digital Transformation in the Government of Canada, The Dais
• Ontario Digital Service

Watch on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-nZ3G14zyU

Chapters

00:04 Introduction

03:11 Hillary Hartley joins the ODS

04:33 The role of political leadership

11:50 Accomplishments of the ODS

21:11 What does the disbanding mean?

28:14 Hillary reflects on the end of ODS

34:22 Conclusion