Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 54

Just for context's sake, Government of Canada has up to 25,000 people who work in Information Management and IT professions in forty-three departments. The Office of the CIO is about two hundred to two-hundred fifty people to coordinate privacy, access to information, AI, data, service delivery, architecture, project oversight for major projects, open government, people hiring policies, you name it.

I had a whole bunch of silos within my own team. I could not ask the rest of GC to integrate digital with everything if in my own team, say, privacy people did not even talk to architecture people. Or if tech people were creating products without the privacy and policy people along. We had to get our functions working together before expecting the rest of government to do it.

I also remade the immediate team around me. We went from eight to ten direct reports to three as I built my team on the three legs of any kind of change in a modern organization: people, governance, and technology. I consolidated all the policy work together, all the people work together, all the tech stuff under a government CTO to oversee architecture and project oversight. Over time, as we continued influencing the system and got more money to do more things, those roles became more senior.

Also, I wanted to make sure I did not become the single point of failure myself. If you have eight to ten divisions with silos and you are not around to coordinate and orchestrate, like if you get hit by a bus, there will not be a lot of integration left. My three reports had to work together so that if I was hit by a bus, the next day the organization would continue delivering in an integrated way.

I also needed to change the culture in the office. I needed to have my direct reports comfortable with the fact that I would not go to them for updates but would have the team come into my office for an update—like we did with Skunkworks. It takes a lot of trust to work that way. They needed to trust their teams to brief properly. So, I did on purpose create a different flow of conversation within my office, leading to everybody able to replace everybody or at least understand everybody's job.

Getting past silos and getting the conversation flows going took a lot of informal effort. You know, people want to have fun when they work hard. If they have fun together, they are increasingly working better together as well. The office had never even had a Christmas party. We did an offsite party and against all doubts a whole bunch from our team showed up. We started doing Winddown Fridays, basically once a month sitting together and going for a beer or glass of wine. Winddown Fridays even started attracting people from other departments to join. All of a sudden, we were running out of room.

It meant that we got people talking and it reduced the government hierarchy and silo structure. It was sort of our attempt of attacking the Industrial Age organizational structure of the government bit by bit all the time. Unless you do it relentlessly with a series of micro adjustments, like our Winddown Fridays, the system will win because it has been there longer than you.