Deputy Minister of Canadian Heritage Daniel Jean, Deputy Minister of Industry Canada John Knubley and Associate Deputy Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada Renée Jolicoeur spoke at a government technology conference Thursday in Ottawa. The panel, moderated by Deputy Minister and President of the Canada School of Public Service Linda Lizotte-MacPherson, focused on the management of changes within government IT.
As technology rapidly changes, the government is trying to keep its IT services, like email and telecommunications, up to date. The panelists agreed that while the technicalities of new IT projects within and across departments are important, the hardest part is considering the public servants and clients who will eventually use them.
“If it’s well implemented and people are involved in the implementation of the system … then they use that system better than you ever thought they would. Because they are experts,” said Jolicoeur.
The deputy ministers said the new Shared Services Canada department is focusing on this approach as it works to streamline and consolidate email, data centres and telecommunications networks across 43 government departments.
Shared Services was created in August 2011, after a 2010 auditor general’s report found that the government’s IT systems were supported by old infrastructure and were, thus, at risk. The report recommended a government-wide approach to dealing with those risks. Shared Services’ mandate is to promote better value for money by creating more reliable IT infrastructure to support modern government operations.
Jean oversaw the 2010 administrative services review which led to the creation of Shared Services. During this review, he said many deputy ministers were concerned that departments were getting caught up in the technicalities of a project, rather than their ability to empower employees and citizens.
“About a third of them (deputy ministers) said that most of their time with their CIO (Chief Information Officer) … was based on commodity IT services — emails, data centres, these kinds of things. And so little quality time was spent with the CIO at the executive table on what would be truly enabling services for citizens,” said Jean. “In this world, where a lot of these services have become a commodity, most of their time was spent on that, not so much on how IT can enable.”
Today, Jean, Knubley and Jolicoeur’s departments have all adopted Shared Services. Knubley was working at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada when it became the first department to take up the Shared Services PeopleSoft cluster for managing human resources.
“The risk that I really worried about is could we get people to see the benefits and the vision and the opportunities of moving to this more enterprise or cluster-wide approach?” said Knubley.
The panelists said employees in their departments are embracing the Shared Services’ government-wide approach. While Shared Services seems to be moving ahead smoothly, Jolicoeur said the department has been realistic in its approach to inevitable technical challenges.
“Sometimes you think that things are easy because the concept is easy but to do it, technically, it’s a nightmare,” said Jolicoeur. “There are technical aspects that somewhat block you and I think that Shared Services presently is very cognizant of those … challenges that they have to face.”
Jolicoeur said that, based on her previous experiences consolidating the pay and pension administration for all federal public servants, momentum is key to overcoming technical hiccups along the path to completing a major government IT project. That means departments must take the time to hire the right public servants and private contractors to do the job, so that users are not shortchanged once the project is complete.
At the end of the day, the panel’s discussions continually came back to the same topic: the importance of people. While government IT work obviously focuses on technology, Knubley said the job has evolved, forcing IT professionals to consider how that technology works for users.
“Your job no longer is to really just get the right IT platform. It’s really to find the right solutions for clients and the right solutions for business.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Michelle Zilio
Quelle/Source: iPolitics, 11.10.2013
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