Mobile is the mantra
Clement touts ‘enterprise’ agenda as annual conference begins
All those in attendance during the first day of the 2013 Government in Technology Conference agreed Tuesday that government needs to become more mobile and increase access to digital information.
While the message has been echoed in various forms at the show in years past, this time everyone, from members of Parliament to senior government bureaucrats to privatesector businesses — all seemed to be on the same page.
“We are in a period of great transition, but also of great opportunity,” said Tony Clement, president of Treasury Board, while officially opening the show on Tuesday. “We need to be bold. Giving up on an idea because it doesn’t fit within how the government is supposed to do business is not a legitimate excuse.”
Clement has been trumpeting the transformation of government since he took the Treasury Board portfolio in 2011. He is also acknowledged as the party’s social media guru and is leading the initiative to open up access to data and information, a move he says will forever change the way citizens interact with their government. He said government must be managed like an “enterprise” and should work closely with industry for government-wide solutions and insist that all IT spending must result in improved services to Canadians.
Shared Services Canada is the Conservatives’ flagship agency that is taking over the running of government IT services from individual departments. Shared Services is introducing a single email system across government that officials hope will save $50 million a year. It is also planning similar consolidation projects for data centres and networks.
Clement said the email project sets the marker for the kind of “ruthless standardization” the government needs to operate as an enterprise. He argued the government isn’t special or unique and should run and think like any other company does.
Over the past year, he said, the government charged ahead with modernizing the “back office” by standardizing and consolidating applications for key support functions across government, particularly human resources, finance and web content. “Back office” typically refers to internal services that all departments use, such as finance, human resources, information technology, communications and procurement.
The next big step is consolidating human resources and financial management systems, and the government has been discussing with industry how to replace the patchwork of systems across departments.
But Clement said the transformation of government business isn’t about modernizing processes or updating old systems, but rather a “leap frog to the forefront of new technology.”
Clement’s comments were echoed in a followup panel about the importance of mobile communications in today’s world.
‘Giving up on an idea because it doesn’t fit within how the government is supposed to do business is not a legitimate excuse.’
TONY CLEMENT
Treasury Board president
The panel, led by Louise Séguin, director of production operations and service management at Transport Canada, talked about the importance of providing information on government websites in a format that can be accessed by mobile devices.
Séguin said that, in 2011, 48 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 were regular users of a mobile device. In 2012, that jumped to more than 69 per cent.
“We primarily deliver our information through websites, but now people are accessing that information through tablets,” she said. “Tablets are now king. But whatever we build has to be future-proof.”
The government is frantically trying to overhaul the way it shares information with the public, due to outdated infrastructure and policies that have long needed to be updated.
Séguin said that, to ensure that all government departments are moving in lockstep on the accessibility issue, Treasury Board passed a policy last year requiring all departments to begin offering mobile accessible websites as of April 1, 2013.
Many federal employees are being equipped with tablet computers and other mobile devices to help them to get out of the office and spend more time in the field.
Séguin said 40 per cent of the employees at Transport Canada are now equipped to be mobile.
The mobility movement is one that more of the government should embrace, said Cheryl McKinnon, principal analyst with Forrester Research, especially if the federal public service hopes to continue to attract the best and brightest minds available.
“Work is not a place you go anymore. It’s what you do,” she said.
However, as the workforce becomes more mobile, one thing overlooked by organizations is how to best deal with the mass of new electronic files that are being created by employees in the field.
“We need to start thinking about a records management system that was not born in the era of paper,” said McKinnon. “We are in this phase of moving from paper records management to digital records management. The status quo is not sustainable; it will continue to get worse.”
The World Economic Forum reports 1.8 zettabytes of data were created in 2011. That is equivalent to every person on the planet writing three tweets per minute for 1,210 years. Industry researcher IDC expects data creation to hit 40 zettabytes by 2020, marking a 20-fold increase in less than a decade.
Dealing with the digital deluge, while cataloguing, indexing and protecting records created in years past, must become a priority for all organizations, including government, according to McKinnon.
In his opening speech, Clement said the federal government is moving to web-based, cloud-computing storehouses to better prepare for the massive influx of information while lowering service delivery costs to Canadians. He touted the creation of Shared Services Canada, which has created a single email storage system for all of the federal government, saving more than $50 million annually. He also touted the creation of data.gc.ca, which aims to provide information about Canada’s demographics, population, geography and multiple other references and data points that can be accessed by anyone anywhere.
The goal is to make the information available so industry can mill through it and create new applications aimed at helping people plan their retirement, find a local park or avoid traffic congestion. The service is provided thanks to publicly available open-source software called Drupal, which enabled public servants to build the data repository and maintain it at very low cost.
“We are just beginning to understand the benefits this new resource offers,” said Clement. “Now more than ever the public service needs to be innovative.”
The day’s theme played to the overall theme of the 2013 show: “agile government, open data, collaboration, and making the federal workforce more mobile.” The three-day show is expected to attract more than 7,000 public servants and private-sector technology workers to the Ottawa Convention Centre this week.