something is going to go wrong! You are just tempting the tech gods to really blow something up.
So, Phoenix had just failed to launch and it got worse and worse over time, too. Everything you could do wrong was done wrong with it. It just highlighted the fact that the profession of technology in government had been neglected for a long time. It had not been seen as a priority because in government here in Canada the policy and communications are the drivers for senior leaders through their careers. You do not become the top person in government in the public service through tech. But often technology failures are what make governments turn.
I was also having super fun in the museum work. We were about to launch a new museum, had a great team, a great mandate, a great budget. But in civil service you learn that sometimes you are needed elsewhere and so you do it.
Given This Context, Did You Have Conditions or Requests to Take the Role?
We had a really good head of Treasury Board Secretariat, the agency where my position sat—Yaprak Baltacioglu. She, her deputy, and I sat down, also Minister Scott Brison and I sat down to talk about what the scope of work was going to be. We talked about the need to do a lot of cultural change, and we could not do cultural change from behind the desk—we would have to be very public about this change. This meant getting public servants onto social media giving their opinions, which was a new thing. We needed to change the culture in the mind of public servants through the media, because the Phoenix failure had become all-consuming for the GC at that time. As soon as people said the word tech, they cringed because of Phoenix.
We had to come to an agreement on how we would work together in this different way, and then we figured out how the traditional ways that government worked would cause friction. So, there were a lot of those kinds of discussions for the first month or two before everybody thought that my joining was going to be the right idea. Honestly, it worked super well from there, because that pre-stage created a communication with the elected side for most of my term.
What Was Your Own Motivation for the Role?
I fundamentally believe that digital government can change the nature of the interaction between a citizen and his government forever. I told everyone that we had the opportunity to do that, right now. That we were not talking about adding new programs; we were talking about changing the nature of the relationship.
For example, it means that a citizen can choose to get a government service from its bank. We should make it so seamless and transparent, automated, and ethical. This means decisions quite high up—because the plumbing of the government needs to change. It means that the government has to accept that they are no longer going to be the sole provider of a service. That they could actually give that right to other groups.
In all fairness, we were doing some of it in Canada already. Third-party companies can fill out your taxes, for example. We have shown then that we can do an omnichannel approach if we want to. I fundamentally believe that I was waking up to do some of that work every day. It is the government-as-a-platform approach and on steroids.
What Was the Concrete Mission Set to You through These Conversations by Your Bosses?
We set these targets through our conversations together.
Step one: fix the boring governance stuff. At least half of the job of a national CIO is going to end up being about governance and policy. The broad stroke of mission was to update all of our digital government policies, because nobody had done it in a decade. Our IT policy, our information management policy, our security policies—all of it had never been done right.
Then we had to create new legislation and new policies that would permit the government to steer the ship to where it wants to go digitally. It meant that we should create legal levers in order to be able to go into a department that was rolling out something like a Phoenix and stop it. It was not clear before that we could do it, but we needed to react to this perhaps biggest failure or debacle in the history of the public service in Canada. Unfortunately, governments tend to be reactive as an institution. We were able to create new authorities, new policies, and direction in government because we had Phoenix, a big failure. That kind of trigger was necessary.
We needed to create the right governance in order to review all of the budgets, review all of this spend, have the legal right to create a national architecture, and have the departments and the ministries execute against that architecture.
We also decided that we would do a lot of work on artificial intelligence, a lot of work on people to get the right kind of succession planning in place, and so on. It was to be a complete overhaul really.
Besides Phoenix and Outdated Policies, What Was the State of Digital Government and Strategy in GC?
Probably, if you look at the level of digital government maturity from on-premise to transactional to service-centered to intelligent, Canada had been somewhere near the transactional level at the most. There was not a lot done about putting users first digitally or what you could do with digital service delivery; there was not an appetite to do a “digital first” service delivery. Lots of fax machines, lots of counters were still there around the country.
We had—and still have—departments as groups that do not talk to each other. Citizens, or customers, if we can call them that, have to know which department to go to in order to get a service. We impose that on them. The other thing you have to understand is the legislation in Canada is very vertical. Every department has its own set of legislation and its own authorities, which means it can execute certain things and it creates a great confusion.
It is a system that is designed so that one person cannot make a quick decision. You should make the decisions together for the better of the citizens, but this does not really work that quickly as it should in the digital area. As opposed to measuring twice and cutting once, you could actually cut a thousand times digitally, and you could do it faster, too. Some departments out of the forty-three were doing quite well in this regard, but others were not.
Because the policies had not been centrally updated then nobody used the cloud, as an example. That is why we had to come in with new policies and new ways of doing things, forcing a little bit of modernization on a system that was not really service-centered.
What Were Your Levers besides the Legislative Powers You Asked For?
It was mostly governance and steering. The government CIO role sits at the Treasury Board Secretariat, where all the funds are decided. Departments do not get new funds if they do not follow the policies. So, we had the stick and the carrot right there. There was a whole mechanism for reviewing technology projects along the other spending requests coming in, which we could tap into.
However, we started also delivering some things ourselves as a central agency to show change. We started having a heavier hand in building some AI products so that we could do more than just “that is the policy, and you should follow it.” Instead, it was going to be “here is the policy on AI, here is the framework to use it that we are developing.” For example, we did an Access to Information Portal for all departments that was AI-based.
For me, it was important that I just not preach on a soapbox and the team to get used to not being in an ivory tower, but actually delivering some stuff itself. In a similar way, when we started talking about doing agile procurement and an open procurement for the first time, we did the very first open procurement process in the history of the Government of Canada ourselves. So, we would get our hands dirty,
