In today’s digital age, governments—massive organizations with extensive bureaucracies—rely heavily on computer technology to manage their complex operations. Yet the future of public governance and administration will require more than just the application of computer technology to the traditional business of governments.

Digital governance encompasses the intersection of our increasingly digital world with government administration. Conversely, governance in the digital era involves governments steering and responding to social and economic activities in this new landscape. Together, these concepts present both challenges and opportunities for governments.

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are now ubiquitous in the public sector as most administrative processes and government services now rely on technology in some substantial way. Digital technology is used in public administration to collect, accumulate, and manage data, to share public sector information within bureaucracies, between governments, with external stakeholders and citizens, to support decision making, to streamline operations, to find and leverage efficiencies, to facilitate citizen and stakeholder engagement, and to provide citizens with access to public services.

Everyday externally facing service applications include web sites where citizens and businesses can apply for benefits and permits, access public records and open government data, or submit tax returns and make payments. Digital government also aims to transform traditional processes, making them more user-centric, efficient, and cost-effective. It seeks to actively engage citizens in governance through open, transparent, accountable, and collaborative processes. This approach integrates digital tools and strategies into policy analysis, service delivery, citizen engagement, and administrative operations.

The scope of digital governance extends beyond internal operations. Governments also play a crucial role in regulating technology use in society, facilitating adoption, addressing potential harms, supporting private sector investments, and managing disruptive innovations.

Public sector governance intersects with digital technology through its legislative and regulatory roles, providing the framework for the use of technology in society, facilitating and incentivising its adoption and deployment, reacting to unanticipated uses that harm individuals, supporting private sector investments, and attempting to regulate disruptive technologies.

One way to think about those challenges and opportunities of governing in the digital era is along three lines: in managing the public service internally, in delivering public services digitally, and in governing at the speed of wider expectations.

Managing digital workplaces includes understanding and addressing the evolving landscape for public sector management, changing as a consequence of advancing technology. Themes in this category include: managing employee expectations and abilities in new organizational forms, and applying communications and other technologies to support new work arrangements like teleworking and agile organizations; open organizational knowledge sharing using computer-supported collaboration technology and ‘inside-the-firewall’ social media; and planning for workforce adjustment as developments such as automation, robotics, and AI replace some functions, allowing staff to focus on more cognitively complex tasks.

To focus on just one example: the impact of technologies such as generative AI on policy analysis conducted within governments should not be underestimated. Given a brief prompt, a tool like ChatGPT can now produce a briefing note in seconds that rivals what a junior policy analyst can produced in an afternoon.[1] AI isn’t likely to replace policy analysts; but policy analysts who know how to effectively use AI will replace those who don’t.

Delivering citizen services digitally involves efficiently and effectively providing services to the public using digital methods and tools. Concepts here include: engaging citizens and stakeholders in open government processes via digital tools such as social media, open data, collaborative platforms, and virtual and augmented reality[2]; using natural language processing to derived sentiment from large-scale citizen engagement exercises; using big data and analytics to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery; and applying artificial intelligence to improve compliance and risk management, fraud and corruption detection, citizen service delivery, virtual service agents, and analytics for decision-making and policy design across applications such as public decision making, healthcare, transportation, security, citizen and stakeholder relationships, and regulations.[3]

Algorithmic decision making can improve procedural fairness and efficiency, with appropriate attention paid to the risks of systemic and invisible bias. In late 2018 it was revealed that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has been using AI for at least four years to process immigration visa applications.[4] The federal government is now in the process of developing a system of predictive analytics to automate certain activities currently conducted by immigration officials and to evaluate some immigrant and visitor applications. Several administrative law concerns surrounding the use of algorithmic decision making and procedural fairness, however, accompany the use of AI in decision making, including: the right to be heard, the right to a fair, impartial, and independent decision-maker, the right to reasons or right to an explanation, and the right of appeal. Such risks are what the federal government’s Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA)[5] approach is designed to address the potential use of an algorithmic system in context to better understand potential harms or risks and take a proactive “procedural fairness by design” approach.[6]

Governing for the digital era means adapting to new regulatory and policy responsibilities, and heightened citizen and stakeholder expectations, emerging as a consequence of the advance of digital technology. Themes include: providing more timely regulatory decisions to keep up with changes being explored by industry across a range of emerging technologies (e.g., regulating private sector use of AI); developing governance and regulatory frameworks for new industries and new economic and social models, such as cryptocurrencies and the gig economy; responding to changing circumstances in society as a consequence of digital innovations, such as the reemergence of the digital divide as a result of increased working-from-home and learning-from-home during the COVID-19 pandemic; and safeguarding election integrity while expanding voting options.

Can governments competently regulate how AI is used, whether in the private sector or the public sector? Rapidly advancing technologies like AI represent a sufficiently different technology that may require the creation of a new regulatory agency, led by a “regulator that actually understands this file”.[7] Policy‐relevant issues related to the development and adoption of AI that will become increasingly important include: job displacement and the skills necessary for humans to work alongside AI; the protection of consumer rights and the privacy of users’ data; the unintended uses of AI (such as the production of “deepfake” video and audio, where images, audio, and video are combined and manipulated to produce realistic looking revisions); the need for public education aimed at increasing digital literacy generally and AI literacy specifically; public consultation to ensure a broad representation of perspectives in the development and governance of AI; and regulation and legislation of AI to ensure transparency and accountability.[8]

As digitization accelerates globally, governments must keep pace with not just technological advances but also evolving expectations from citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders. As Canada’s first federal Minister of Digital Government once remarked: “we can’t be a Blockbuster government serving a Netflix citizenry.”[9] Canadians increasingly live their lives in digital spaces, and they expect their governments to operate at the same speed.