After 24 years, big tech show’s future appears uncertain
After 24 years of allowing government bureaucrats to mingle with technology industry bigwigs, the annual Government Technology Exhibition and Conference (GTEC) is suddenly facing an uncertain future.
Immediately following the closing of the 2016 event, GTEC organizer UBM Inc. posted a message on the conference’s website, saying there would be no event in 2017. Officials with UBM were uncertain if the event would ever return to the nation’s capital.
“UBM has valued being part of the GTEC community and have served as the organizer of this leading public sector information and communication’s technology conference for almost 25 years,” says the statement. “Unfortunately, the event no longer aligns with UBM’s strategic objectives and (we are) postponing the event for the foreseeable future.”
People close to the show said ending GTEC was a business decision. The revenues generated by the show simply weren’t enough to continue the effort of planning and running it.
The end of the conference hasn’t come as a total surprise to the federal government, which annually sent more than 6,000 public servants to learn about new trends, discuss new methods of service delivery and rub elbows with private sector technology companies to learn new skills.
The government has been tossing around the idea of abandoning the popular trade show, which is the largest of its kind in Ottawa, annually taking over the Shaw Centre for an extended period each fall.
Alex Benay, the government’s newly-appointed chief information officer, posted to his LinkedIn profile on April 15 that the government should plan a new fall conference to showcase the technological advancements being made by federal departments to better serve Canadians.
The government “needs to replace GTEC with a service to citizen first (sic) conference/gathering/opportunity,” reads Benay’s post.
“We are going to be looking to engage in dialogue on this soon.”
Benay said Nicholas Wise, the Treasury Board of Canada’s executive director, is in the midst of planning a new conference.
Alain Belle-Isle, a spokesperson for Treasury Board, confirmed that talks to create a new federal trade show are ongoing.
“The Government of Canada is focusing on engaging citizens and improving their service experience,” Belle-Isle said. “There is an interest in bringing academia, business, government and other sectors together to foster a national collaborative approach to designing and delivering digital solutions to address the needs and expectations of Canadians.”
Belle-Isle refused to provide any further information on the new conference or the fate of GTEC. Repeated requests for comment from Benay, Wise and Jean-Luc Ferland, a spokesman for Scott Brison, president of Treasury Board, were not answered.
The end of the conference marks a significant void for the federal government, which used GTEC to not only reach out to private sector businesses, but also to hold its annual Awards of Distinction, which highlighted initiatives by public servants who used technology to modernize government service delivery to Canadians.
The conference drew thousands of attendees and hundreds of exhibitors to Ottawa. GTEC was created as a venue to bring government power brokers and private industry together to talk about modernizing the delivery of public services.
The inaugural GTEC show was held in Ottawa in 1993 with the theme: “How the federal government could adopt new technologies to help better run the country.” That year, more than 6,000 people attended and more than 450 companies showed off their products and services to government officials.