Digital Government Excellence. Siim Sikkut
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a citizen and his government forever. I told everyone that we had the opportunity to do that, right now. That we were not talking about adding new programs; we were talking about changing the nature of the relationship.
For example, it means that a citizen can choose to get a government service from its bank. We should make it so seamless and transparent, automated, and ethical. This means decisions quite high up—because the plumbing of the government needs to change. It means that the government has to accept that they are no longer going to be the sole provider of a service. That they could actually give that right to other groups.
In all fairness, we were doing some of it in Canada already. Third-party companies can fill out your taxes, for example. We have shown then that we can do an omnichannel approach if we want to. I fundamentally believe that I was waking up to do some of that work every day. It is the government-as-a-platform approach and on steroids.
What Was the Concrete Mission Set to You through These Conversations by Your Bosses?
We set these targets through our conversations together.
Step one: fix the boring governance stuff. At least half of the job of a national CIO is going to end up being about governance and policy. The broad stroke of mission was to update all of our digital government policies, because nobody had done it in a decade. Our IT policy, our information management policy, our security policies—all of it had never been done right.
Then we had to create new legislation and new policies that would permit the government to steer the ship to where it wants to go digitally. It meant that we should create legal levers in order to be able to go into a department that was rolling out something like a Phoenix and stop it. It was not clear before that we could do it, but we needed to react to this perhaps biggest failure or debacle in the history of the public service in Canada. Unfortunately, governments tend to be reactive as an institution. We were able to create new authorities, new policies, and direction in government because we had Phoenix, a big failure. That kind of trigger was necessary.
We needed to create the right governance in order to review all of the budgets, review all of this spend, have the legal right to create a national architecture, and have the departments and the ministries execute against that architecture.
We also decided that we would do a lot of work on artificial intelligence, a lot of work on people to get the right kind of succession planning in place, and so on. It was to be a complete overhaul really.
Besides Phoenix and Outdated Policies, What Was the State of Digital Government and Strategy in GC?
Probably, if you look at the level of digital government maturity from on-premise to transactional to service-centered to intelligent, Canada had been somewhere near the transactional level at the most. There was not a lot done about putting users first digitally or what you could do with digital service delivery; there was not an appetite to do a “digital first” service delivery. Lots of fax machines, lots of counters were still there around the country.
We had—and still have—departments as groups that do not talk to each other. Citizens, or customers, if we can call them that, have to know which department to go to in order to get a service. We impose that on them. The other thing you have to understand is the legislation in Canada is very vertical. Every department has its own set of legislation and its own authorities, which means it can execute certain things and it creates a great confusion.
It is a system that is designed so that one person cannot make a quick decision. You should make the decisions together for the better of the citizens, but this does not really work that quickly as it should in the digital area. As opposed to measuring twice and cutting once, you could actually cut a thousand times digitally, and you could do it faster, too. Some departments out of the forty-three were doing quite well in this regard, but others were not.
Because the policies had not been centrally updated then nobody used the cloud, as an example. That is why we had to come in with new policies and new ways of doing things, forcing a little bit of modernization on a system that was not really service-centered.
What Were Your Levers besides the Legislative Powers You Asked For?
It was mostly governance and steering. The government CIO role sits at the Treasury Board Secretariat, where all the funds are decided. Departments do not get new funds if they do not follow the policies. So, we had the stick and the carrot right there. There was a whole mechanism for reviewing technology projects along the other spending requests coming in, which we could tap into.
However, we started also delivering some things ourselves as a central agency to show change. We started having a heavier hand in building some AI products so that we could do more than just “that is the policy, and you should follow it.” Instead, it was going to be “here is the policy on AI, here is the framework to use it that we are developing.” For example, we did an Access to Information Portal for all departments that was AI-based.
For me, it was important that I just not preach on a soapbox and the team to get used to not being in an ivory tower, but actually delivering some stuff itself. In a similar way, when we started talking about doing agile procurement and an open procurement for the first time, we did the very first open procurement process in the history of the Government of Canada ourselves. So, we would get our hands dirty, and do policy and architecture at the same time.
Given Your Overall Mission, Did You Set Yourself Any Concrete Goals or Deliverables to Reach?
We do need to consider the stresses of the CIO kind of job on people because these are not easy jobs. I did not think I could survive more than three years because in a town like Ottawa you have interests and lobbying. When you come in and shake the trees, being disruptive, you upset many people. That is the reason why some of the policy things had not been updated for a while because it had not been a priority politically, and on a civil service level, you avoided putting off influential groups. Like if you pushed for using the cloud, someone supplying hardware would not be happy.
That is why the goal number one for me was that I needed to survive and needed to be comfortable in making some decisions that were not going to be crowd-pleasers. I set the aim of making them anyway because I had been around the tech space in Ottawa long enough and I knew that the decisions might not be popular, but I knew they were going to be the right ones to make for the Canadian citizens. So, number one goal was to survive.
Survival would mean that I was going to do my job in the most transparent way that any senior civil servant had ever done in history. In a way that would make everybody know what we were doing.
Second goal was that I knew what we had to do, and these things I wanted to accomplish. I knew that AI was important, that we needed the cloud, that we needed to start looking at changing procurement.
My goal was that I will change what I can control. People often ask, “How do you change the culture of government?” The answer is you do not do it by waking up in the morning as an individual, and saying, “I am going to change the culture of government today.” Your job will become depressing as all hell very quickly because it is an impossible task. A lot of policies and the legislation are designed for people who are quite comfortable in the old model. So, you cannot change the whole of the government culture at once. But you can change what you are in charge of and radiate it out.
With All This Load Ahead of You, What Did You Start With? What Was the Focus for Your First Months?
I always start in a position with the people I have in front of me. The first thing was holding all staff meetings regularly, and then booking one-on-one meetings with staff members and especially with a mixture of people I had heard to be “problematic” on the team. Usually, those are the people that are the most frustrated because they want to make the biggest difference. So, I purposely sat down with them