Alex currently serves as Global Lead, Government Azure Strategy at Microsoft, where he helps governments around the world adopt cloud technologies. Prior to this, he was a partner with KPMG, where he led the national digital transformation practice.

      In 2017–2019, Alex was a Deputy Minister at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and the Chief Information Officer of Canada, and before that the President and CEO of the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation. From 2009 to 2014, Alex was a Vice President at OpenText, Canada's largest software company.

      In 2018, Alex was named to Apolitical's international list of the one hundred most influential people in digital government. He serves on the board of the World Wide Web Foundation and is cofounder of CIO Strategy Council of Canada.

      He is also the author of books Canadian Failures, an anthology of essays from prominent Canadians openly talking about failure, and Government Digital, an in-depth look at how modern governments are tackling digital change.

      With Alex, we just hit right off somehow. He became one of the closest friends in the international digital government gang. We both are straight-talking, too-much-talking, and fast-talking; both appreciate deadpan and satire.

      We both are eager to not just kick the can down the road in our work but take on the machinery of government as widely and deeply (and in case of Alex as loudly) as we can.

      Alex is very impatient; that is why doing the GCIO gig must have been hard. But he came to the role with experience and wits to employ this impatience as a strength. Although he may not have managed to turn the Government of Canada fully around (it is huge, too!) in his short term, his bold attempts and bold ideas led to quite a few lasting changes in how digital is done there.

      We copied quite a bit off from each other on what works—to me, the Canadian architecture governance mechanisms is world class, for example. He was taken to Estonian digital ways to the extent that he has covered our practices in his talks on so many occasions that it would be hard for me to even attempt to match it. Sorry about that, eh.

       —SIIM

How Did You End Up in a Digital Government Leader Role for the Government of Canada (GC)?

      I probably have a very eclectic route and background. I started in government, moved over to the private sector for four or five years in a Canadian tech company. Then I came back because I needed a break from traveling and ran some of our national museums. Knowing tech and getting to know some of the senior leadership in Canada through my work, people started asking if I would be interested in taking the government CIO job.

      I said “no” at first, like every sane person should. Then after talking about it a little bit, I realized that maybe it would be a good thing for me to take a stab at it, having always been around the tech scene and around the public sector in Ottawa. I had a commitment in my head that I would do it for about three years.

Why Did You Say “No” at First?

      In Canada, some of the policies had not been updated in over a decade. Digital considerations were not integrated with policy decision-makers as much as it seemed to be in other countries. Doing a new service digitally, properly, is not at the forefront of decision-making. Digital economy or infrastructure, like digital identity, require accelerating the digital economy and is not integrated with policy view.

      That is why the government CIO is a very challenging role, because you are not privy to all the decisions—but you are privy to “Oh, well, we tried to do it this way, and it did not work. Can you please fix it?” You always get the garbage at the tail end of the stream.

      Also, the role was not at a deputy minister level at first, and I did not have all the right tools needed to do the job. Also, they had just launched in Canada about a year before I took over the job of an upgrade of our government-wide human resources and pay system called Phoenix. A little lesson here—you should never, never, never call a tech project Phoenix because you are just tempting fate that something is going to go wrong! You are just tempting the tech gods to really blow something up.

      So, Phoenix had just failed to launch and it got worse and worse over time, too. Everything you could do wrong was done wrong with it. It just highlighted the fact that the profession of technology in government had been neglected for a long time. It had not been seen as a priority because in government here in Canada the policy and communications are the drivers for senior leaders through their careers. You do not become the top person in government in the public service through tech. But often technology failures are what make governments turn.

      I was also having super fun in the museum work. We were about to launch a new museum, had a great team, a great mandate, a great budget. But in civil service you learn that sometimes you are needed elsewhere and so you do it.

Given This Context, Did You Have Conditions or Requests to Take the Role?

We had a really good head of Treasury Board Secretariat, the agency where my position sat—Yaprak Baltacioglu. She, her deputy, and I sat down, also Minister Scott Brison and I sat down to talk about what the scope of work was going to be. We talked about the need to do a lot of cultural change, and we could not do cultural change from behind the desk—we would have to be very public about this change. This meant getting public servants onto social media giving their opinions, which was a new thing. We needed to change the culture in the mind of public servants through the media, because the Phoenix failure had become all-consuming for the GC at that time. As soon as people said the word tech, they cringed because of Phoenix.

      We had to come to an agreement on how we would work together in this different way, and then we figured out how the traditional ways that government worked would cause friction. So, there were a lot of those kinds of discussions for the first month or two before everybody thought that my joining was going to be the right idea. Honestly, it worked super well from there, because that pre-stage created a communication with the elected side for most of my term.

What Was Your Own Motivation for the Role?

      I fundamentally believe that digital government can change the