Digital Government Excellence. Siim Sikkut
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was going on and not going on, and what they would change.
I also sat down with all divisions and units within the CIO office; I sat down with other CIOs of other departments. It was basically just a lot of listening because I had certain assumptions coming in. You need to talk to people because they are probably the most important leg in this “stool” with three “legs” to digital government and any change: the governance, the tech, the people. People compose the one “leg” that will make it all fall apart if they do not do the work or want to follow—even if you have the best tech stuff and the best governance. I wanted to understand how the people on the team and around us did technology and what were the existing governance processes.
Another thing was to leverage the political support that we had when I came in. For the first time ever, we had in Scott a minister at the Treasury Board who was willing to say “no” to IT projects submitted if the right technology architecture was not being deployed. That veto power had been there before, but the problem was that pulling this lever is the last step. The preferable option is to engage with the department before you get to that point and try to fix it. Pulling the minister veto and sending them back to the drawing board is a very nuclear option. It means that you are delaying programs, delaying services to Canadians.
What we then could do instead is to set direction; for example, departments would have to do things in the cloud. Then six months later we would make sure they were using the cloud. So, we wanted to start with precision direction from a central agency quickly. This took a lot of political leadership at first, as the mandate of policy did not exist at first. So, we quickly started with the longer-term policy renewal and legislative renewal.
I also launched a series of Skunkworks projects—stuff that was close to my chest and that I managed with the staff directly. Things like doing open procurement really quickly, or I wanted an AI policy in place really quickly, or restart having a big govtech conference (which became the FWD50 series). Things like Talent Cloud to change how government hired by taking it down from a year-long process to thirty days and breaking a lifelong career model into six-month bursts where people could come in and out of the civil service more easily.
I kept those close because I wanted to show that we were going to set the tone and how we were going to work differently. I did not want to leave that to anybody else, to have a series of quick wins and special projects that we could start announcing to the world.
How Hard or Easy Was It to Maintain Your Focus on the Skunkworks as Time Went On?
I managed to do it with the help of a very strong chief of staff and my inner core team. People asked why I was meeting staff six levels below in the organization about this little project and I said that it was important. I had my chief of staff and my administrative support make sure we had recurring meetings with these people, that we would always find me time. Even if I had to be called into parliament for something, we would reschedule these meets as top priorities for me. I just had a really good set of people around me who knew that those things were important to me and understood why.
I made sure to also find the time to do “follow-through” because too many times leadership just does not follow through on stuff. Those projects needed my support, they needed an umbrella so that the white blood cells of government would not come in and kill the innovation that they were driving.
Usually, as you get to the top of a pyramid in an organization, you have to delegate; otherwise, you cannot survive. So, you delegate to your second in command, they can do the same, then someone will execute the task, and then everybody is happy. But in the digital world the products need to move faster, the decisions need to move faster, the collaboration needs to be broader.
If you are not directly involved as a leader in two or three or four key initiatives that target your organizational culture or your country's future, and you are not personally following through by meeting with these teams weekly or monthly, I think you are not executing your leadership duties properly in this day and age. You just run out of time. So, it is up to you to be super-disciplined to make time for those priorities.
It also helped to retain the focus that we were speaking about those things publicly. This made us kind of stuck to deliver them—you cannot let it die, because people would ask. Doing something in public adds another coat of Teflon to pushing change through because nobody could say you did not warn them. In addition, if you involve more stakeholders by being public, nobody can say they were not involved. Plus, it keeps you accountable. That is why we made those priorities very public and very important, so that we were able to follow through on them.
You Spoke about the Need to Work Very Openly and Transparently—How Did You Do That Really?
We had had the Phoenix conundrum that put the spotlight on government tech in a way that it had never had. However, this was not good media coverage; the media was all over how that system was mishandled.
Our strategy was that media was not going to be our friends, and if we do not talk on social media about the good things that the civil service is doing, nobody will. So, we needed to get out there on newer platforms and start talking about our own messages.
I encouraged every single employee in the CIO Office to talk about the projects that they were working on. Not because I wanted media attention, but because I wanted real-time collaboration with other sectors. Often in government, we see policy consultation with a beginning date and an end date. This way you are just limiting collaboration opportunities by not engaging continuously. With LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social media platforms, we could collaborate 24/7 now. The government way of doing business had not changed so far with the tools we had at our disposal.
Our way of being open by default meant saying continuously, “Hey, this is what I am working on.” I wanted the vendors to know, I wanted the provinces and regional governments to know, I wanted other departments to know. People just had to start talking about the work they were doing. It was great, even if it is a double-edged sword because it adds more attention to your work.
It also meant that we had to start talking about the failures better because some of these projects did not work well. Government does not like to talk about failure, right? Like I keep joking, fail is four-letter word that starts with the letter f and that you are not allowed to utter in government. We had to make it known that failing fast and small is better than failing slow and massive, like Phoenix.
You Did End Up Taking the Work of Saving Phoenix into Your Own Portfolio. How Did You Go about Fixing It?
The more you start to demand that the system of government or a large corporation change, the more you are preaching about it, the more people will say, “Well, do something.”
We were never charged with fixing the existing Phoenix; I still do not think that was doable anyway. Nothing worked in it: government staff were getting overpaid, underpaid, not paid. There was no architecture done, no data, no testing, no backup plan, you name it. There was no way to get out of that mess in any other way than starting a new system.
In parallel, we had been telling all the procurement officers in the GC doing digital procurement to please stop giving specifications out and instead give out the problems for procurement instead. Then the really smart people that do tech outside of government can come up with a whole bunch of different solutions. And we might use them all, why use just one? So, we gave ourselves the task to run the country's most important open procurement up to that point to replace Phoenix. We started putting our policies to work to execute, pulling all the tools we had brought in and out.
We went to the market and said, “We want a cloud-based software-as-a-service human resources and pay solution; who is interested? We got about a dozen interested parties in a room. Then we said that the process is going to be like the Hunger Games, with gates to go through where we would up the requirements as they passed through the gates. We did not want any paper response; we wanted to see the actual software change