New public service tech boss isn’t afraid to ruffle feathers
Since taking the reins of the government’s top technology job four months ago, Alex Benay has been the public service’s biggest booster — and one of its loudest critics.
The chief information officer has been using social media to offer running commentary on various government initiatives.
Recently, he applauded the launch of a federal Digital Youth Advisory Council, which will pick a number of Canadian teens to work with Treasury Board Secretariat to provide input on government services. The 15- to 17-year-olds will be given the chance to share their opinions and recommendations with various federal government departments on ways to provide new digital services to Canadians.
“Youth are born digital these days,” he said. “We have to get back to reconnecting with the people we serve. They add a different lens. Hopefully we can bring that lens to our projects and start designing things a little more empathetically than we have.”
Benay, 36, an avid user and fan of technology, likes to push boundaries. While in his former position as CEO of the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corp., he began to research and write a book, which will be released later this year, called Canadian Failures: stories from successful Canadians about how failure got them there. Benay believes his previous posting, surrounded by Canadian technological breakthroughs, was the perfect place to research his book because “the museum is actually a museum about failure.”
He’s taken his unique outlook to his new post by pushing boundaries and broadcasting much of his struggle, often on various social media platforms, with government bureaucracy.
“Every day ... fighting your own system in order to engage with the citizens and stakeholders ... every single day ... is quite exhausting really,” he wrote on Facebook. “No wonder people don’t see government as efficient, transparent, etc.; we literally hide behind rules created pre-computer age ... process often trumps leadership too often.”
He said he has received a lot of pushback while trying to get government to be more collaborative and make decisions at a quicker pace.
Before his role with Canada Science and Technology Museums Corp., Benay was an executive with software firm OpenText Corp. He is originally from a town just outside of Quebec City.
He took the reins as CIO earlier this year after John Messina left the position, which he’d held since August 2015.
Despite his experience, Benay admits nothing could have prepared him for the job as chief information officer for the government of Canada.
With so many moving parts, he said, it’s a lot like taking a drink from a fire hose.
“The government technology landscape is over $6 billion a year in spend. Seventeen-thousand employees, hundreds of vendors, 40-plus departments; it’s one of the largest technology operations in the country. There are a lot of moving parts. I don’t even know if a fire hose is a good enough analogy for it,” he said.
“The biggest challenge we have is keeping up with the pace of change. The world is moving to a world of platforms where 10 people can launch a company like Airbnb and completely disrupt the whole industry. These are fast-changing times and government doesn’t move that quickly.”
Benay said the traditional government approach to handling projects — which takes long periods of time to define a project before it’s sent out to be bid on through government procurement systems — doesn’t work in the modern era.
He has helped to push forward an initiative called Open by Default, a pilot project that will see four government departments actively promote their upcoming contracts, problems or requests for proposals, to make the procurement process more transparent. The departments will use social media, such as Twitter, and a specially designed website to talk about various initiatives in the open. Treasury Board, Heritage Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Public Services and Procurement Canada are all taking part.
In August, Benay is spearheading talks to help rethink the way government talks about large-scale technological initiatives in all federal departments, and beginning consultations over how the federal government can effectively leverage cloud computing.
There’s also the soon-to-belaunched Government of Canada’s Developers Exchange, which will offer contracts under $10,000 to small and independent businesses. It’s a bid to help government departments tackle issues more quickly. They’ll be allowed to post small projects for software developers to bid on.
“In today’s world, instead of spending a few years trying to define our requirements, a few years trying to procure something and then three, four or five years deploying it, maybe we can accelerate the pace of change in government if we engage differently with the outside world and procure differently,” Benay said.
“We can take a problem or a challenge to the streets, so to speak, and actually let the expertise help us solve the problem in a much more rapid way. It’s a spark that has to be nurtured and hopefully it can become the norm.”
Benay’s thoughts on how he wants to see the government change are centred around offering better services to Canadians while avoiding large-scale catastrophes like the issues plaguing the Phoenix Pay system, the Canada. ca website and email standardization.
“I don’t think you’d get anybody that I’ve spoken to here so far saying that they are happy with the results of those projects,” he said.
“We tend to do these massive, big projects instead of breaking them down into smaller pieces and focusing on that. Maybe we should look at scaling back the scope and taking it one small step at a time as opposed to the home-run approach.”