Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 43

In Canada, some of the policies had not been updated in over a decade. Digital considerations were not integrated with policy decision-makers as much as it seemed to be in other countries. Doing a new service digitally, properly, is not at the forefront of decision-making. Digital economy or infrastructure, like digital identity, require accelerating the digital economy and is not integrated with policy view.

That is why the government CIO is a very challenging role, because you are not privy to all the decisions—but you are privy to “Oh, well, we tried to do it this way, and it did not work. Can you please fix it?” You always get the garbage at the tail end of the stream.

Also, the role was not at a deputy minister level at first, and I did not have all the right tools needed to do the job. Also, they had just launched in Canada about a year before I took over the job of an upgrade of our government-wide human resources and pay system called Phoenix. A little lesson here—you should never, never, never call a tech project Phoenix because you are just tempting fate that something is going to go wrong! You are just tempting the tech gods to really blow something up.

So, Phoenix had just failed to launch and it got worse and worse over time, too. Everything you could do wrong was done wrong with it. It just highlighted the fact that the profession of technology in government had been neglected for a long time. It had not been seen as a priority because in government here in Canada the policy and communications are the drivers for senior leaders through their careers. You do not become the top person in government in the public service through tech. But often technology failures are what make governments turn.

I was also having super fun in the museum work. We were about to launch a new museum, had a great team, a great mandate, a great budget. But in civil service you learn that sometimes you are needed elsewhere and so you do it.