and not to judge things upfront, especially when new technologies or ideas or systems are being presented to me. Before, I used to shut down often in these cases. In Smart Dubai, I learned to listen, to allow others to elaborate more, to showcase and to convince others. If they are convinced, then the issue is with me and not with the technology or idea itself.
So, I pushed myself more into practicing this new way of thinking or seeing things in a more open-minded and in less judgmental way. I also see it more in my own life now, as my daughter has grown up from being a teenager to an adult and starting her own business now. I have learned to let her go by supporting her and trusting her.
What Do You Think Are the Key Skills One Needs to Do Your Kind of Role Well?
To be passionate, first of all. Passionate about the sector or area that you want to grow in.
Be open-minded.
When they say that we need to have new skills such as coding or understanding of data, these you can learn in any school or training. One of the major issues that we will face is how to work in teams and to let go your own perspective. We—and especially our kids—they need to understand the need to work in collaboration with others. We cannot work in isolation from others. The moment you say, “I want to work in collaboration with others” you need to have this kind of setup in the brain to accept the others, their ideas, or their ways. Even if it conflicts with your own ideas, you need to reach to a point wherein we can both survive or live or work in the same space.
What Are Your Three Recommendations from Your Experience—What Does It Take to Do a Digital Government Leader's Job Well?
Have the project or program close to the main decision-maker in that city or government—have a proper sponsor or a champion, have it in his or her daily dashboard.
Have champions all over the organization who do believe in the vision. This will expediate change.
Revisit the road map and the strategy. Not every three years, but every year. The speed and the momentum of changes that are happening today are much faster than they used to be. Do not feel shy and embarrassed to do changes, even if you change the direction from east to west.
Notes
1 1. Dubai Internet City is a free economic zone targeted for IT companies. Dubai International Financial Center is a special economic zone for financial industry in Dubai.
2 2. The tribe model management is product development approach popularized by Spotify (and others) to scale agile development whereby teams working on products are separated to autonomous units working on specific parts of a product. Holacracy is a model for decentralized organizational governance and management, focused on spreading decision-making to self-organizing teams rather than arranging it through a management hierarchy.
CHAPTER 2 Alex Benay: Canada
Alex currently serves as Global Lead, Government Azure Strategy at Microsoft, where he helps governments around the world adopt cloud technologies. Prior to this, he was a partner with KPMG, where he led the national digital transformation practice.
In 2017–2019, Alex was a Deputy Minister at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and the Chief Information Officer of Canada, and before that the President and CEO of the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation. From 2009 to 2014, Alex was a Vice President at OpenText, Canada's largest software company.
In 2018, Alex was named to Apolitical's international list of the one hundred most influential people in digital government. He serves on the board of the World Wide Web Foundation and is cofounder of CIO Strategy Council of Canada.
He is also the author of books Canadian Failures, an anthology of essays from prominent Canadians openly talking about failure, and Government Digital, an in-depth look at how modern governments are tackling digital change.
With Alex, we just hit right off somehow. He became one of the closest friends in the international digital government gang. We both are straight-talking, too-much-talking, and fast-talking; both appreciate deadpan and satire.
We both are eager to not just kick the can down the road in our work but take on the machinery of government as widely and deeply (and in case of Alex as loudly) as we can.
Alex is very impatient; that is why doing the GCIO gig must have been hard. But he came to the role with experience and wits to employ this impatience as a strength. Although he may not have managed to turn the Government of Canada fully around (it is huge, too!) in his short term, his bold attempts and bold ideas led to quite a few lasting changes in how digital is done there.
We copied quite a bit off from each other on what works—to me, the Canadian architecture governance mechanisms is world class, for example. He was taken to Estonian digital ways to the extent that he has covered our practices in his talks on so many occasions that it would be hard for me to even attempt to match it. Sorry about that, eh.
—SIIM
How Did You End Up in a Digital Government Leader Role for the Government of Canada (GC)?
I probably have a very eclectic route and background. I started in government, moved over to the private sector for four or five years in a Canadian tech company. Then I came back because I needed a break from traveling and ran some of our national museums. Knowing tech and getting to know some of the senior leadership in Canada through my work, people started asking if I would be interested in taking the government CIO job.
I said “no” at first, like every sane person should. Then after talking about it a little bit, I realized that maybe it would be a good thing for me to take a stab at it, having always been around the tech scene and around the public sector in Ottawa. I had a commitment in my head that I would do it for about three years.
Why Did You Say “No” at First?
In Canada, some of the policies had not been updated in over a decade. Digital considerations were not integrated with policy decision-makers as much as it seemed to be in other countries. Doing a new service digitally, properly, is not at the forefront of decision-making. Digital economy or infrastructure, like digital identity, require accelerating the digital economy and is not integrated with policy view.
That is why the government CIO is a very challenging role, because you are not privy to all the decisions—but you are privy to “Oh, well, we tried to do it this way, and it did not work. Can you please fix it?” You always get the garbage at the tail end of the stream.
Also, the role was not at a deputy minister level at first, and I did not have all the right tools needed to do the job. Also, they had just launched in Canada about a year before I took over the job of an upgrade of our government-wide human resources and pay system called Phoenix. A little lesson here—you should never, never, never call a tech project Phoenix because you
