“I hoped the system would have had more capacity for institutional reform than it has.”

Those are the words of Mike Bracken, the former head of the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service (GDS), as he reflected on his departure back in 2015. “We now have a different set of ministers, a different group of permanent secretaries, and you have to win these arguments over again. Just because you’ve won them once doesn’t mean you’ve won them permanently, especially in a system that will roll back to what it knows… If government continues to not look at institutional reform as a necessity to enable better digital services, then it is destined to repeat the failures of the past.” This past September marks a decade since I joined the Canadian federal government, as part of the team that became the Canadian Digital Service (CDS). I was already a fan of the UK’s GDS; I had written my end-of-grad school research paper on it, in 2013 as it was really ramping up. It was thrilling, a genuine dream to be part of the team trying to hatch a Canadian version. Which, in September 2016,…