Business Readiness
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Why check for business readiness?
Checking for business readiness requires a thorough look at your existing service to identify issues that may need to be addressed when moving to a digital solution. The business readiness workbook will guide you through the process.
What is business readiness?
Business readiness is about checking to ensure that all the potential risks associated with delivery of a digital service are considered and managed. It starts with awareness. Is your team aware of issues and do you have understanding of the impacts of those issues?
Is there a legacy form? How will it change?
Is there a service standard associated to the service? Should there be? How is it measured today? Will that need to change?
Is there a need for data digitization (digitizing historical paper based records) to provide continuity for a digital service?
Is there a cost recovery component to the service? Should there be one?
Are there legislation changes (i.e. witnessed ink signature is no longer required) required or that are looming that may effect how this service is delivered?
Are there regulations changes required or looming that may affect how this service is delivered?
Will there be significant process changes to how the service is delivered or administered?
Business readiness workbook
Use the business readiness workbook to capture answers to key business readiness topics.
Access the business readiness workbook here…
What affects business readiness?
Business goals
What is the business trying to achieve by moving to a digital service? For example business goals might be to increase the speed for processing a service request, or to use fewer resources to process a service request. Typically a business goal can be translated into some form of measurable metric, to establish a baseline for the current service and to help determine if the business goals were achieved when evaluating whether the project was successful once the service is released.
Legislation changes
What is a legislation change? An example is if a service governed by legislation requires an applicant of the service to make a declaration that needs to be signed and witnessed by an administer of oaths, then in order to replace the current form with a digital form the legislation must change to eliminate the witnessing of the declaration. Until this legislation changes this service cannot move to a digital solution. Legislation changes can be a lengthy process, requiring minister level involvement and intense legal scrutiny. If a service does require legislation changes, always account for extra time.
Regulations changes
What is a regulation change? An example of a regulation change might be if Transport Canada starts accepting inspection reports from a third party organization. This change to regulations may provide additional option for an applicant.
Changing service standards
If there is service standard you must determine if the standard must change based on the change in service delivery, as well as determining if the means to measure the service standard must change as well. Where service standards are in effect it is required to tell the service applicant whether the standard was achieved or exceeded for a transaction.
Managing legacy form changes
Are there features of your legacy form (pdf) that should change due to a shift to a digital platform? When creating a digital service will you keep processing legacy forms? Will changes be required to the legacy form to align to new methods to process submissions?
Managing changes to process and workflow (change management)
Will there be a dramatic difference to how the service will be delivered or administered? If so then it is necessary to carefully manage the expectations of the stakeholders. You must notify stakeholders that changes will take place and provide an timeline when changes will impact them.
Managing data digitization
Does this service rely on data that resides in a non-digital format (paper)? Do applicants need to reference previous submissions that were completed in ink on a paper form? In cases like these digitization of legacy data would be required before a service could move to a digital submission process. Digitizing legacy data may require scanning paper documents into images, and in more extreme cases that use scanners with optical character recognition to turn the contents of each page into data.
Managing changes to Canada.ca service pages
Does the service have a Canada.ca service page? How will the pages content need to change? How can the the service can be accessed online and what will be required to do so (account)?
Enabling cost recovery
Does the the service have a fee an applicant must pay? How is it collected today? How will the collection of that fee change? Any service that has a fee associated to it must have a defined service standard. A service standard defines how long it will take for Transport Canada to process an applicants request. When service standards are exceeded some portion of the fee must be remitted back to the applicant, as per the Government of Canada Service Fee Act.