Canada's CIO outlines strategy for IT in 2003

Chris Bishop, president of Public Sector Research Inc., a company that conducts public sector IT research, recently interviewed federal CIO Michelle D'Auray about some of the steps her department has taken over the past year and where she expects to go during the next year.

CB: You have made some organizational changes and changes to the governance structure in your office. Can you explain what benefits you hope to gain?

MD: One of the main goals was to more closely align the relationship between Government Telecommunications and Informatics Services (GTIS) and ourselves, especially with respect to the secure Channel initiative. What we were finding was we had a project management office and so did GTIS, and people were tripping over each other. I asked (assistant deputy minister) Michael Turner of GTIS if we could establish a joint project management office, with Treasury Board Secretariat director general Nancy Desormeau managing the common infrastructure, of which the Secure Channel is the largest component. In October we established a virtual office with Ms. Desormeau reporting to both of us. It makes the project management easier, there is one project management office and there is one reporting system. Also, there is one common contact point for the departments and agencies regarding infrastructure.

Getting a grip on IT spending

The second point is I wanted to get a better picture of government expenditure on information technology. Mainly we wanted to get a better sense of whether we were making, collectively, the right investments, whether we were making them in the right places and at the right time. We were also starting to look at the renewal of our federated architecture plan and match that with an understanding of our investment in IT and IT asset management, and have that dovetail with a better understanding of the infrastructure, both that which is shared and that which is owned by the departments. The departments at many levels are interested in the cost of their asset base - not just the cost of development, but also the costs of maintaining and renewing it. Also, the work being done on the Secure Channel and online service delivery requirements clearly needs a more integrated approach. If you take user centricily as a driving principle, it does force you to look to how you are organized and what you need in terms of infrastructure to support that. We are trying to get a more complete picture of what is happening. We have a series of distinct projects or initiatives that departments must file with us when they make Treasury Board submissions.

Other than that, we don't really have a good picture of trends or opportunities, so that is why we are working with the departments and agencies. The trend we are seeing now is that many departments have a much better handle on what they have installed and what they have in their asset base and they are able to tie it more closely to the business drivers. Industry-wide there are very few organizations that are as diffuse as governments are. No company of our size would be in the state we are in. The private sector is also recognizing this. We must understand the assets we have. Everybody is trying to get a handle on the expenditures and what the business drivers are that justify these expenditures. This is the crux - the business drivers are forcing us to look at what we are spending and what we are spending it on.

From the organizational viewpoint, I have changed the portfolio management group to feed into a broader view of stewardship and managing the IM and IT assets of the government. The objective is to leverage the investments, while maximizing the common parts and giving the departments the free rein for their own needs. Our goal is to leverage the investments we have made more effectively.

From a governance perspective, one change that took place at the beginning of the fiscal year was joining service improvement with the GOL agenda. We now have the basket of responsibilities for driving service improvement, cross-channel management and the GOL agenda together. This meant that we had to make some organization changes and now Helen McDonald, assistant secretary of government online in TBS, has both the GOL and the service improvement agenda.

Linking frameworks

We are also trying to get more integrated decisions. As one looks at the online agenda one cannot view the online channel on its own, it has to fit into the broader service delivery framework. For example, citizens will search online and then call the call centre and then search again, so it is important to ensure that those links are maintained between the channels. The policy frameworks must be linked; the infrastructure platform must be linked. We were doing it piecemeal, now we have the ability to bring it all together, so that when decisions are made we now have a number of forums to thrash them out.

CB: The GOL funding approved last year was less than hoped. What does this mean to that initiative?

MD: Everyone would like more money. However, that said, what was important to us was to stabilize the funding base over the next four years and we were successful in achieving that. We also added another year to the mandate, which was important because, after 9/11, a number of the departments we were working with had much of their attention diverted towards the security agenda.

Therefore, many departments welcomed having another year to complete the agenda. This included CCRA, which has a very important role in the security agenda. It does, however, mean that we now have to leverage existing expenditures to deal with sustainability after 2005-2006, which, when you lake that with our approach to IT stewardship, is a nice mix. The bulk of the funding was to pay for the common infrastructure and we expect that this approach will reduce the departments' expenditure, or at least provide cost avoidance within the departments, and ensure that we avoid duplication of infrastructure.

It also allows us to map out the electronic service delivery requirements over a longer time frame. For example, some of the work we are doing at HRDC - helping them rethink how they provide services to virtually the same client across six different programs - is benefiting from the adjusted schedule.

It gives us more time to work this through with more planning time.

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Jan 2003
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