Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 44

We had a really good head of Treasury Board Secretariat, the agency where my position sat—Yaprak Baltacioglu. She, her deputy, and I sat down, also Minister Scott Brison and I sat down to talk about what the scope of work was going to be. We talked about the need to do a lot of cultural change, and we could not do cultural change from behind the desk—we would have to be very public about this change. This meant getting public servants onto social media giving their opinions, which was a new thing. We needed to change the culture in the mind of public servants through the media, because the Phoenix failure had become all-consuming for the GC at that time. As soon as people said the word tech, they cringed because of Phoenix.

We had to come to an agreement on how we would work together in this different way, and then we figured out how the traditional ways that government worked would cause friction. So, there were a lot of those kinds of discussions for the first month or two before everybody thought that my joining was going to be the right idea. Honestly, it worked super well from there, because that pre-stage created a communication with the elected side for most of my term.