Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 49

We do need to consider the stresses of the CIO kind of job on people because these are not easy jobs. I did not think I could survive more than three years because in a town like Ottawa you have interests and lobbying. When you come in and shake the trees, being disruptive, you upset many people. That is the reason why some of the policy things had not been updated for a while because it had not been a priority politically, and on a civil service level, you avoided putting off influential groups. Like if you pushed for using the cloud, someone supplying hardware would not be happy.

That is why the goal number one for me was that I needed to survive and needed to be comfortable in making some decisions that were not going to be crowd-pleasers. I set the aim of making them anyway because I had been around the tech space in Ottawa long enough and I knew that the decisions might not be popular, but I knew they were going to be the right ones to make for the Canadian citizens. So, number one goal was to survive.

Survival would mean that I was going to do my job in the most transparent way that any senior civil servant had ever done in history. In a way that would make everybody know what we were doing.

Second goal was that I knew what we had to do, and these things I wanted to accomplish. I knew that AI was important, that we needed the cloud, that we needed to start looking at changing procurement.

My goal was that I will change what I can control. People often ask, “How do you change the culture of government?” The answer is you do not do it by waking up in the morning as an individual, and saying, “I am going to change the culture of government today.” Your job will become depressing as all hell very quickly because it is an impossible task. A lot of policies and the legislation are designed for people who are quite comfortable in the old model. So, you cannot change the whole of the government culture at once. But you can change what you are in charge of and radiate it out.