Alternative Service Delivery (ASD)

Alternative service delivery (ASD) is the organisational and structural dimension of improving the government's performance in delivering programs and services to Canadians.

ASD has two parts:

• establishing the appropriate organizational forms within departments, outside traditional departmental structures or outside the public sector, to improve organizational performance; and
  
  
• bringing together organizations from across government, between levels of governments, or across sectors, through partnerships (for example, "single windows," co locations, or clustering of services to citizens) to provide more seamless and citizen-centred services.

The government is constantly reviewing its programs and services in order to identify opportunities for innovative ways of improving services to Canadians. The following four commitments act both as drivers for innovative organizational arrangements for service delivery and as constraints and tests to ensure that such arrangements are in the public interest and contribute to good governance:

The scope of ASD currently encompasses (but is not limited to):

A new Policy on Alternative Service Delivery came into effect on April 1, 2002. This policy provides a framework to govern and account for the development of federal ASD initiatives.

For more detailed information and guidance on the Policy, see the ASD Toolbox.

Responsibility for implementing the new policy, and for advising on ASD matters in general, rests with the Alternative Service Delivery team, part of the Expenditure and Management Strategies Sector: of the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.  The ASD team provides policy and operational guidance and expertise to departments and agencies in the development of innovative organisational arrangements aimed at achieving improved results in the delivery of services and programs to Canadians.

ASD team members are available for consultation on any initiative.