Digital Government Excellence. Siim Sikkut
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at each gate.
The procurement people at first thought we would have to pay the suppliers as they were going through the process. I said no to that. So, we did three gates, five months, the last gate was with real anonymized user data and suppliers had to show that they could pay the people properly. We ended up with three final suppliers—not by prescribing a solution, but by working with suppliers at each gate and working from the problems up. In less than six months, the government had three viable options, whereas nothing had been achieved for years before.
We put our money where our mouth was, and we showed what can be done with a different approach. It shows that you have to get your hands dirty on some of this stuff.
How Did You Build or Rebuild the GCIO Setup to Achieve the Changes?
Just for context's sake, Government of Canada has up to 25,000 people who work in Information Management and IT professions in forty-three departments. The Office of the CIO is about two hundred to two-hundred fifty people to coordinate privacy, access to information, AI, data, service delivery, architecture, project oversight for major projects, open government, people hiring policies, you name it.
I had a whole bunch of silos within my own team. I could not ask the rest of GC to integrate digital with everything if in my own team, say, privacy people did not even talk to architecture people. Or if tech people were creating products without the privacy and policy people along. We had to get our functions working together before expecting the rest of government to do it.
I also remade the immediate team around me. We went from eight to ten direct reports to three as I built my team on the three legs of any kind of change in a modern organization: people, governance, and technology. I consolidated all the policy work together, all the people work together, all the tech stuff under a government CTO to oversee architecture and project oversight. Over time, as we continued influencing the system and got more money to do more things, those roles became more senior.
Also, I wanted to make sure I did not become the single point of failure myself. If you have eight to ten divisions with silos and you are not around to coordinate and orchestrate, like if you get hit by a bus, there will not be a lot of integration left. My three reports had to work together so that if I was hit by a bus, the next day the organization would continue delivering in an integrated way.
I also needed to change the culture in the office. I needed to have my direct reports comfortable with the fact that I would not go to them for updates but would have the team come into my office for an update—like we did with Skunkworks. It takes a lot of trust to work that way. They needed to trust their teams to brief properly. So, I did on purpose create a different flow of conversation within my office, leading to everybody able to replace everybody or at least understand everybody's job.
Getting past silos and getting the conversation flows going took a lot of informal effort. You know, people want to have fun when they work hard. If they have fun together, they are increasingly working better together as well. The office had never even had a Christmas party. We did an offsite party and against all doubts a whole bunch from our team showed up. We started doing Winddown Fridays, basically once a month sitting together and going for a beer or glass of wine. Winddown Fridays even started attracting people from other departments to join. All of a sudden, we were running out of room.
It meant that we got people talking and it reduced the government hierarchy and silo structure. It was sort of our attempt of attacking the Industrial Age organizational structure of the government bit by bit all the time. Unless you do it relentlessly with a series of micro adjustments, like our Winddown Fridays, the system will win because it has been there longer than you.
I Know That You Also Made a Big Push for the Team to Work in the Open. How Did That Work?
We would have our GCIO office all-staffs quarterly and have them mandatory. We also started recording these meetings, because we were the policy center, and I wanted the operational departments to know what we were talking about. We would livestream the meeting or just send the record out to all other departments. The direction setting to me is always about open and transparent communications, plus letting people challenge the direction.
With my own team, we would also do periodical “ask me anything” hours so that people could air out some of the issues there.
Openness and transparency are huge because they mean that we are also forced to deliver. Enabling the staff members to talk themselves about their projects and their programs was a small thing that turned into a big deal. They made themselves accountable by talking about their work online. The effect of open-by-default working on self-discipline at the staff level became apparent through the work we were doing.
We also very openly sang praises about the successes, including to other departments, which had done a great digital project. We started using for it the online platforms we had created for ourselves. That was a way to publicly show the change that was going on, and it became a carrot on its own to other departments and our own team, frankly.
In an era of global digital collaboration, it does not really compute if public servants are anonymous and hide behind their desks. Governments need to be way more transparent, open-by-default on everything they do as long as it is not a national security matter. Why are policies developed behind closed doors? Why cannot every Canadian citizen whom the government serves have access to the draft of the policy before it is signed off and comment on it? The world would be a better place if governments went even a bit further down the road of being open and transparent and collaborative. It is better for the economy and better for the democracy if people participate. That is why we started doing all in the open.
My open-door policy worked great in other ways, too. There are twenty to twenty-five thousand people in GC. I basically said to them, “If you have a great idea, contact me,” and some did. Most people did not because they thought you cannot talk to a deputy minister if you are a technician. Yet, this is where the good ideas usually come from. They are not going to come from me. A great example is our Talent Cloud, which had the aim of bringing a “gig economy” approach to allow GC to hire short-term employment more easily and faster. There was a person with a vision on how to do it; she only needed some air cover and support. She came to me with the idea, we brought her in, and she got it done. Others had called her crazy before for what she wanted to do and how bold her vision was.
Tell a Bit More on the Skunkworks Approach—How Did That Working Method Really Work?
To get these projects off the ground, we usually did one or two meetings a week for the first month. My chief of staff was always amazing at keeping action items, at keeping people's feet to the fire on them, and keeping people honest about them. Once proper cadence and routine emerged with the concrete Skunkworks project lead, we would maybe meet weekly, then maybe once every two weeks. If I felt that the work was falling off the rails, then we would get back into twice-weekly mode.
The meetings were stand-up, half an hour each time, rapid fire or blitzing it, going very specific. The people who were working these projects were delighted that the CIO was giving them all the attention. It also kept them on their toes: we just talked, another meet was coming, you have to be ready and bring in your new work. So, the need for follow-through was not just from me, it had to be from everybody. My direct reports also worked hard to get their teams ready for these briefings, but they also watched out to not to get in the way for them.
In the meetings, I asked mainly, “What is in the way right now?” Meaning, what prevented the team from moving ahead? We might bring then someone in for the next meeting to get it fixed or decided. Like if the issue was privacy, we would have a privacy analyst along for the next meet and make a decision there and then to move things forward. I think a lot of civil servants are not necessarily used to making decisions on the spot. We did it; the team then told the deadline for the next step and had to update me by that time. With the hierarchy gone, delivery was that much faster.
Of course, as the CIO you cannot work this way for everything