A regulation changes:
Changing the requirement may be relatively straightforward. Changing everything that happens because of it can be considerably more complicated.
Before a new requirement reaches the person applying for a permit, reviewing a licence or conducting an inspection, it may pass through legal interpretation, policy development, operational procedure and, increasingly, the digital systems through which government delivers its services.
At each stage, the requirement must be translated into something people—and eventually technology—can act upon.
That raises an important question: When policy becomes process, how do you maintain confidence that the intent behind the policy made the journey with it?
This isn’t simply a theoretical problem.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is currently examining what it calls the digital provision of law. Whenever law is implemented through a digital system, legal logic must somehow be translated from authoritative legal text into something the system can process.
Today, that translation often happens separately across public authorities, applications, service providers and technology vendors. The OECD identifies potential consequences including duplicated effort, inconsistent implementation, limited transparency and dependencies on individual systems and providers.
Government organizations don’t need to adopt emerging approaches such as Law as Code to encounter the underlying issue. It already exists wherever legislation, regulation or policy influences what an operational system requires people to do.
Somewhere between the authoritative requirement and those operational activities, interpretation becomes implementation.
Technology introduces an important distinction.
There is the question of whether an organization has correctly interpreted its legal or regulatory obligations. And there is the separate question of whether its operational processes and technology accurately reflect the interpretation the organization has approved.
Software cannot resolve the first question simply by executing the second. That remains the responsibility of the appropriate people within the organization. But technology can influence how effectively the second question is managed.
The Government of Canada’s service and digital guidance, for example, emphasizes defined accountability structures, documentation of decisions and decision-making processes, and governance of information throughout its lifecycle.
The issue, therefore, isn’t whether technology should interpret the law. It is how organizations govern the technology that puts their approved interpretation into practice.
“The issue, therefore, isn’t whether technology should interpret the law. It is how organizations govern the technology that puts their approved interpretation into practice.”
After a regulatory change, Legal or policy specialists may determine what the new requirement means. Operational leaders determine how the organization will administer it. Technology teams translate those operational requirements into system behavior.
Depending on the change, that might affect business rules, workflows, application requirements, reviews, assignments, fees, inspections or approvals.
The challenge is maintaining a common understanding across those handoffs.
That suggests several useful governance questions:
These aren’t questions for Legal alone. Nor should Legal teams be expected to become system administrators.
They are questions about shared governance across policy, operations and technology.
Configurability has become an important characteristic of modern government technology. Organizations whose processes continually evolve need systems capable of evolving with them.
But ease of change isn’t the only consideration. As systems become more configurable, organizations also need to consider how that ability to change is controlled.
These questions don’t diminish the value of configurability. They make configurability more useful.
The objective isn’t simply to make government systems easier to change. It is to give organizations appropriate mechanisms for managing change according to the responsibilities, controls and governance practices they establish.
“Configurability has become an important characteristic of modern government technology. Organizations whose processes continually evolve need systems capable of evolving with them.”
This is one of the principles underlying the POSSE Platform.
The extent of these capabilities varies according to the POSSE product, implementation and complexity of the requirement. More complex changes may require specialized configuration, integration work, technical assistance or product enhancement.
And these capabilities have important boundaries.
POSSE does not interpret legislation on behalf of an organization or determine whether an organization’s interpretation of a regulation is legally correct. Configurable technology cannot substitute for the governance processes an organization establishes around the people authorized to interpret, approve and implement regulatory requirements.
Technology’s role is different. It can provide mechanisms through which approved operational requirements can be configured, controlled, tested and traced as they are implemented within the system.
Government regulations do not stand still. Neither do the programs, services and operational processes built around them.
That makes adaptability important. But adaptability alone may not be enough.
As more government activity becomes digitally mediated, and as automation and AI increase the role technology can play in public administration, the connection between what a rule means and what a system does deserves greater attention. The OECD’s current work identifies transparency, traceability, accountability and public control as increasingly important considerations as legal logic becomes more deeply represented in digital environments.
Perhaps, then, one measure of modern regulatory technology should be more than how quickly a system can accommodate change. It should also be whether the organization has appropriate mechanisms to manage that change deliberately.
Because when a regulation changes, updating the system is only part of the job.
The harder question is whether everyone can remain confident that what changed in the system reflects what the organization intended to change in the first place.
