time.
Given Your Overall Mission, Did You Set Yourself Any Concrete Goals or Deliverables to Reach?
We do need to consider the stresses of the CIO kind of job on people because these are not easy jobs. I did not think I could survive more than three years because in a town like Ottawa you have interests and lobbying. When you come in and shake the trees, being disruptive, you upset many people. That is the reason why some of the policy things had not been updated for a while because it had not been a priority politically, and on a civil service level, you avoided putting off influential groups. Like if you pushed for using the cloud, someone supplying hardware would not be happy.
That is why the goal number one for me was that I needed to survive and needed to be comfortable in making some decisions that were not going to be crowd-pleasers. I set the aim of making them anyway because I had been around the tech space in Ottawa long enough and I knew that the decisions might not be popular, but I knew they were going to be the right ones to make for the Canadian citizens. So, number one goal was to survive.
Survival would mean that I was going to do my job in the most transparent way that any senior civil servant had ever done in history. In a way that would make everybody know what we were doing.
Second goal was that I knew what we had to do, and these things I wanted to accomplish. I knew that AI was important, that we needed the cloud, that we needed to start looking at changing procurement.
My goal was that I will change what I can control. People often ask, “How do you change the culture of government?” The answer is you do not do it by waking up in the morning as an individual, and saying, “I am going to change the culture of government today.” Your job will become depressing as all hell very quickly because it is an impossible task. A lot of policies and the legislation are designed for people who are quite comfortable in the old model. So, you cannot change the whole of the government culture at once. But you can change what you are in charge of and radiate it out.
With All This Load Ahead of You, What Did You Start With? What Was the Focus for Your First Months?
I always start in a position with the people I have in front of me. The first thing was holding all staff meetings regularly, and then booking one-on-one meetings with staff members and especially with a mixture of people I had heard to be “problematic” on the team. Usually, those are the people that are the most frustrated because they want to make the biggest difference. So, I purposely sat down with them first to find out the history, what was going on and not going on, and what they would change.
I also sat down with all divisions and units within the CIO office; I sat down with other CIOs of other departments. It was basically just a lot of listening because I had certain assumptions coming in. You need to talk to people because they are probably the most important leg in this “stool” with three “legs” to digital government and any change: the governance, the tech, the people. People compose the one “leg” that will make it all fall apart if they do not do the work or want to follow—even if you have the best tech stuff and the best governance. I wanted to understand how the people on the team and around us did technology and what were the existing governance processes.
Another thing was to leverage the political support that we had when I came in. For the first time ever, we had in Scott a minister at the Treasury Board who was willing to say “no” to IT projects submitted if the right technology architecture was not being deployed. That veto power had been there before, but the problem was that pulling this lever is the last step. The preferable option is to engage with the department before you get to that point and try to fix it. Pulling the minister veto and sending them back to the drawing board is a very nuclear option. It means that you are delaying programs, delaying services to Canadians.
What we then could do instead is to set direction; for example, departments would have to do things in the cloud. Then six months later we would make sure they were using the cloud. So, we wanted to start with precision direction from a central agency quickly. This took a lot of political leadership at first, as the mandate of policy did not exist at first. So, we quickly started with the longer-term policy renewal and legislative renewal.
I also launched a series of Skunkworks projects—stuff that was close to my chest and that I managed with the staff directly. Things like doing open procurement really quickly, or I wanted an AI policy in place really quickly, or restart having a big govtech conference (which became the FWD50 series). Things like Talent Cloud to change how government hired by taking it down from a year-long process to thirty days and breaking a lifelong career model into six-month bursts where people could come in and out of the civil service more easily.
I kept those close because I wanted to show that we were going to set the tone and how we were going to work differently. I did not want to leave that to anybody else, to have a series of quick wins and special projects that we could start announcing to the world.
How Hard or Easy Was It to Maintain Your Focus on the Skunkworks as Time Went On?
I managed to do it with the help of a very strong chief of staff and my inner core team. People asked why I was meeting staff six levels below in the organization about this little project and I said that it was important. I had my chief of staff and my administrative support make sure we had recurring meetings with these people, that we would always find me time. Even if I had to be called into parliament for something, we would reschedule these meets as top priorities for me. I just had a really good set of people around me who knew that those things were important to me and understood why.
I made sure to also find the time to do “follow-through” because too many times leadership just does not follow through on stuff. Those projects needed my support, they needed an umbrella so that the white blood cells of government would not come in and kill the innovation that they were driving.
Usually, as you get to the top of a pyramid in an organization, you have to delegate; otherwise, you cannot survive. So, you delegate to your second in command, they can do the same, then someone will execute the task, and then everybody is happy. But in the digital world the products need to move faster, the decisions need to move faster, the collaboration needs to be broader.
If you are not directly involved as a leader in two or three or four key initiatives that target your organizational culture or your country's future, and you are not personally following through by meeting with these teams weekly or monthly, I think you are not executing your leadership duties properly in this day and age. You just run out of time. So, it is up to you to be super-disciplined to make time for those priorities.
It also helped to retain the focus that we were speaking about those things publicly. This made us kind of stuck to deliver them—you cannot let it die, because people would ask. Doing something in public adds another coat of Teflon to pushing change through because nobody could say you did not warn them. In addition, if you involve more stakeholders by being public, nobody can say they were not involved. Plus, it keeps you accountable. That is why we made those priorities very public and very important, so that we were able to follow through on them.
You Spoke about the Need to Work Very Openly and Transparently—How Did You Do That Really?
We had had the Phoenix conundrum that put the spotlight on government tech in a way that it had never had. However, this was not good media coverage; the media was all over how that system was mishandled.
Our strategy was that media was not going to be our friends, and if we do not talk on social media about the good things that the civil service is doing, nobody will.
