Canada: a collegiate approach to technology
Peter Alexander, acting chief executive of Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency, has high praise for Canada’s model of delivering digital and IT programmes.
“They have some really rigorous processes in terms of how they fund digital and ICT and then hold it to account in terms of delivery – it’s a very good model, we’re quite envious of them,” he says. “Rather than separating politicians and bureaucrats, senior ministers and officials have good discussions together and make decisions and then have good assurance and investment management processes.”
Paul Glover, president of Shared Services Canada, says this open, candid approach is all part of the maturity that the civil service is beginning to develop in terms of technology.
“We have realised for a number of years – and certainly over the last year with Covid – that policy is important, but it has to be deliverable. And, increasingly, that implies digital delivery. So we have gone out of our way to make sure that deputy ministers [the top officials in a department] like myself understand not just policy but also digital and operations.”
About two years ago, all deputy ministers took part in a digital bootcamp involving senior figures from the tech industry. “The goal was not to make them experts – the goal was to give them the tools to ask the right questions of their chief information officer, their chief financial officer,” he explains.
There has also been a clear instruction from Canada’s most senior civil servant – the clerk of the Privy Council – that information on existing and proposed digital systems should be included in advice to ministers. “They may have policy ambitions but we’ve got some work to do on those systems and, if they go faster than us, they could break them,” Glover explains.
He says that educating ministers about the technical debt inherent in old systems has led to greater investment, and this collegiate approach was a blessing when designing the response to Covid, as considerations about risk shifted from cost and schedule to execution and outcome.
“With some of the benefits we rolled out, ministers knew that we couldn’t develop a system so tight that there wouldn’t be some things that slipped through the cracks,” he says. “But the risk tolerance was understood and accepted, by both deputy ministers and ministers, because the outcome was clear. There were explicit conversations and I think that’s a game changer.”