Public Service Reference Model circa 2006 (original image by Neil Levette).
This is a quick post to share some work that was done by the Enterprise Architecture Division of the Chief Information Branch of the Government of Canada back in 2006. I became aware of it at a conference entitled Transforming Government – better outcomes for citizens, and in a way, it is directly responsible for my interest in working for the feds.
This is no longer really my space but chatting with some folks I realized that if you are involved in the current wave of digital service transformation you should at least be aware of it – building on what came before, avoiding reinventing things, and all that.
The thing is called GSRM (Government Service Reference Model) and at it’simplest the idea is that all of Federal Government services can be distilled into one of 17 or so basic service types. For each service type, there can be a library of patterns covering variations. All services are described and architected using a common lexicon.
Now I don’t know about you, but the Enterprise Nerd in me gets pretty excited when I think about the implications of such a thing. Common service architecture would presumably enable better data management, security, evaluation and potentially even my current fantasy of intelligent policy that evolves based on data. Sorry, I digress.
To be clear, I had nothing to do with the development of any of this. I became involved with the GoC originally to try and sell the idea to departments and agencies because I wanted an efficient, responsive government. At the time there was a team of very smart people who are now mostly retired working on GSRM as part of a bigger project called BTEP (Business Transformation Enablement Program). Unfortunately, in 2007-10, through a series of unfortunate events the Federal Government never really managed to adopt the standards. But others across Canada did, in fact, if your city offers 311 services it probably has its origins in the municipal version of this idea.
The upside of the failure to adopt the standard was that we pursued the idea of using a wiki for a collaborative architecture library which morphed into GCpedia which evolved into the GCTools and the first government-wide collaboration platform.
Ok, back to GSRM and the purpose of this post. I rummaged through my old files and put a few documents in this google drive.
The quick note will give you an overview while the service types document outlines the 17 service patterns. The other two folders contain some related material if you want to dig deeper, including a foray into applying GSRM to knowledge policy.
There is likely more documentation hiding somewhere on the internet. Let me know if you find any of this useful or if you already have something better.
Happy Transformations!
Thom