Speech by Reg Alcock President of the Treasury Board to the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation's Government Opportunities Program Check Against Delivery January 24, 2005 Crowne Plaza Hotel Ottawa, Ontario Thank you, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I have a rule about making speeches. I don't mind if people in the audience glance at their watches while I'm speaking. But I always try to finish before they start shaking their watches to see if they're still working. So my opening remarks will be brief, because I want to save time for your questions and comments. I'm always happy to discuss one of my favorite subjects: harnessing the power of information technology, especially with a group of experts like you. OCRI is one of Canada's most successful high-tech partnership organizations. It brings people, ideas, and resources together to enhance Ottawa's knowledge economy and superior quality of life. From a national perspective, that's an important part of my job as well. I know that OCRI's Government Opportunities Program has two chief goals. The first is to help equip your members with the keys to open the doors to government contracts. Unfortunately, I can't do that today. For one thing, I don't want to scoop any of Scott Brison's material for his speech to you next month. In addition, it's still early days for getting specific about private-sector IM contracts. We want to make sure there's some real substance behind those doors before you try to open them. However, I can - and will - meet the second goal of this program: to provide a better understanding of the requirements, roadblocks and opportunities facing the government's IT initiatives. So, while I can't give you the keys to those doors today, I think our session will provide some useful directions for pursuing opportunities in the future. But before I get to what lies ahead, let me begin with a bit of context on where we're coming from. My love affair with IT began in 1980. I was a new manager in the provincial government of Manitoba. My first computer had 48K of RAM, and 150K of storage. Pretty puny, by today's standards. But that little box taught me a lot: It helped me fundamentally reframe the way I did business. Most important, it showed me how information technology can transform the way we create value in government. During the intervening years, those lessons have assumed increasing importance during my career in public service. Today, citizens want government information that's relevant, up to date and easy to use. They're looking for convenient, single-window, multi-channel access to government services, seamlessly integrated across programs, departments and jurisdictions. The Government of Canada has undertaken a number of transformative initiatives to meet these public expectations. Over the last decade, we've spent a lot of time building IM/IT capacity. We introduced a number of initiatives to build a core of public servants who were knowledgeable in this area. In the initial days, we simply wanted to build systems that allowed us to test the technologies, to see how we could use them to provide services. Since that time, we've had some very real successes: About 70% of all our financial transactions, payments and transfers are now done through our electronic banking network with Canada's financial institutions. The Canada Revenue Agency has become one of the world's most highly automated and efficient taxation administrations. Many large departments now operate major enterprise management systems similar to private sector organizations, such as PeopleSoft for HR management or SAP for financial management. Public servants across all departments are interconnected with their colleagues and the public with modern email and messaging systems, and supported by office productivity tools. We've also had a few failures, largely because our approach didn't fully incorporate the realities of public management Thankfully, we've come a long way in the last couple of years. For example, Canada has earned a well deserved reputation as a global leader in e-government. This government has made a commitment to be known around the world as the country most connected to its citizens by 2005. And we're making real progress. The most recent Accenture report on leadership in this field notes that, "Canada's e-government program continues to set the standard for the rest of the world." For example: Our Secure Channel Network is fully operational for all departments. On-line authentication for citizens and businesses has been piloted successfully, and is now being implemented. And all of our 130 most commonly used services are now on-line. We were ranked number one for the fourth year in a row, largely because of our citizen-centered vision. Am I proud of that distinction? Absolutely. But I'm not ready to break out the champagne just yet. We still have some mountains to climb. At the moment, we lack the enterprise-wide view necessary to coordinate our IM/IT change initiatives. For example: Departments and agencies don't consistently track service delivery costs or performance. We don't have common definitions or means to collect data. And we need shared mechanisms to monitor, report, and assess performance across government. Part of the problem is the sheer size of the federal government. We are the largest organization in Canada by more than an order of magnitude. We have 411 lines of business, spread across 119 organizational entities. We have to generate more value by building new links across organizations, programs, and departments until we begin to function like one government, not more than a hundred separate agencies. We're also trying to get a better "horizontal" view of government activity, because we often find that it's not just one of our departments that's delivering services to a particular client group, we may have many. I think the most strategically important thing we're doing now is finally bringing all this activity together in a common IM framework. We would not have been able to attempt this in the way we're doing it if we had not spent those earlier years building the capacity and getting people used to working on-line. We're now working on an enterprise-wide information infrastructure that allows us to build a common view of what government is doing. We want to give managers the tools to understand their line of business and where it fits into the rest of what government's doing. And that's not just limited to IM/IT. We're looking for ways to find efficiencies through a whole series of operational reviews, including IT management, that range across the entire federal government. We've got government-wide initiatives under way in 12 areas that address functional activities across government. For example, we're implementing a new on-line expenditure management information system. We're trying link the information to the government's policies and strategic objectives, with the plans and actual expenditures and the results of those 411 lines of business. We're also pursuing key initiatives that allow us to create significant changes in how we manage. Take supply chain management and procurement. We're now moving to rationalize that procurement system, our holdings of real property, our contracting systems. Improving IM and IT is also part of that list. Our report should be complete later in the first quarter of 2005. The horizontal reviews we're conducting focus on management, delivery, accountability, reporting and the possibilities for re-aligning spending and program delivery. It's entirely possible that this exercise could create future opportunities for OCRI members to contribute. For example, we are currently doing some work on federal policies for outsourcing and public-private partnerships. So far, I haven't engaged the vendor community, but we will be moving in that direction soon. And PWGSC has already begun this process with the IT community through the Public Policy Forum project. We will continue to work closely with you, business associations and key stakeholders, to monitor the impact of the changes in our procurement policy and to address concerns as they arise. I think the private sector and the vendor community have always understood the value propositions of IM/IT better than the public management sector. The public sector has benefited immensely from our relationship with the vendor community. You've driven us to go further, identified creative solutions, and kept moving the bar higher. It's been enormously important. A couple of months ago, you heard my colleague Walt Lastewka discuss government-wide plans to improve general procurement. And next month, my Cabinet colleague Scott Brison will be addressing this group. All three of us are responsible for different parts of the puzzle. But we all share the responsibility to get government right and strengthen public sector management. In my case, the focus is very much on new IM/IT solutions. And that brings me back to those doors you wanted the keys to. Since I became President of Treasury Board, I've resisted the pressure to rank my change priorities in order of importance. Why? Because, in very, very large organizations, if you only change one dimension of what you're doing, the inherent rigidity in the system will probably pull everything back to where it was before. What I'm attempting to do is to deal with the structural components that re-order the way in which information is held and shared, and resisting the urge to micro-manage the outcomes. I've also consciously avoided issuing a defining vision for another reason that's of particular relevance to this group. One of the things that concerns me about strengthening IM/IT is that, as soon as you attach an "e" to something - as in e-government or e-democracy - you introduce a different dimension in the minds of a lot of people. As long as we define our work in the context of "e", we separate it from our everyday operations - which is definitely not conducive to the kind of change I want to see in the federal public sector. E-government has to become an integral part of the way we do business. In fact, let's drop the "e" and think of on-line services as simply one key element of good government. It's not a question of the boxes and the wires and the software. The next step is about how we fundamentally reorganize how we work together. In fact, I think information and application integration is the killer app for the future of IM and IT in the federal public sector. By correlating information across domains and levels of government, we could produce revolutionary results¿and pleasantly surprise a lot of skeptical citizens. We need to carefully integrate the right IT tools, and exploit them as the foundation for strengthening public sector management. That way, we'll significantly enhance transparency, strengthen the democratic process, and build more trust among our citizens in what we do on their behalf. The goal is not better tools; it's better management. Easy to say. Not so easy to achieve. Change is difficult for everybody, and it's especially challenging in the public sector. Private-sector organizations tend to have fewer business lines, and they have the magic of profit and loss, which means they can self-correct pretty quickly. They can also manage change in a way that allows more flexibility than the public sector does. In the public sector, people's resistance to change tends to be higher because their place in the information stream tends to be more of a defining issue than it may be in other organizations. But I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of public servants who now get the urgency of finding better IM/IT solutions. I haven't found a department yet without a cadre of people who have a real sense of the value proposition, and who are prepared - even eager - to drive change in this filed within their organization. We're working very hard to introduce modern, real-time information systems to track spending and provide better tools for more effective scrutiny and decision-making. And we will meet that commitment. We're serious about service transformation. But to make this work, to really position Canada as the world leader in public sector IM and IT, we'll need your help and your wise advice and counsel. We'll still have to do some heavy lifting, but in spite of the many challenges, I'm looking forward to the future. I hope my remarks today have you given you a few reasons to share my optimism. Thank you.
