road ahead for government on-line, The

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In a special report to TIG, Canada's federal CIO talks about GOL, Pathfinders and Secure Channel

Michelle d'Auray, Canada's federal CIO for the Treasury Board Secretariat, has been at her job for a year now. Chris Bishop talks to d'Auray about the past year's accomplishments and future challenges to e-government.

TIG: What would you highlight as the major achievements of the past 12 months?

d'Auray: First, we have set out the main components of the Government On-Line agenda and established the governance mechanisms across departments and agencies to achieve their implementation.

This includes the common infrastructure for the Government of Canada that is required to facilitate and ensure electronic service delivery across a range of services and activities. This also includes the required policy issues, frameworks and standards that are essential to GOL such as privacy, security, information management and procurement. These are either being reviewed, developed or confirmed, (and we are) measuring and communicating our progress and getting feedback from citizens and business.

Secondly, we are getting a fair amount of movement on actual electronic service delivery through what we have called "Pathfinders." The progress we have achieved is exemplified in many respects by the launch, early in 2001, of the redesigned federal site and its three main gateways, and the advertising campaign surrounding it.

The third achievement is the common infrastructure, specifically the Secure Channel and the work to shape the secure service broker. This is critical to our rollout of electronic services in a secure environment. The Secure Channel is also key to the common IT infrastructure architecture developed by my predecessor.

TIG: How is the Government On-Line program doing?

d'Auray: I am pleased with our progress to date. just as in many large change initiatives, it is important that we keep the momentum going through the continued engagement of senior management and ongoing funding. On both fronts, I believe that we have been successful, thanks to the work of a tremendous number of people across departments and agencies, but more specifically, the committee of deputy ministers (TIMS), which has been critical in advancing this initiative. I am confident that the momentum will be sustained on both these fronts.

TIG: Procurement reform has been a challenging area. What is happening now?

d'Auray: The results of the procurement effort for Government On-Line - the setting up of the GOL procurement mechanism - was very instructive, both in terms of the results and how we achieved them. We organized roundtable discussions with the private sector through the Public Policy Forum to help design the procurement instrument. So far, all the companies that qualified under the instrument are satisfied with the way it is going. Over the next year, we'll have an opportunity to capture lessons learned to help us further refine the instrument.

TIG: When do you expect to see the limitation of liability issue resolved?

d'Auray: We need to have more discussions with the industry, but we have made some headway on this front. We have found some interesting solutions which will make clear the areas of responsibility and liability for IT procurement. I am hopeful that we will be able to resolve this issue by the end of the calendar year.

TIG: The Public Sector CIO Council (PSCIOC) is made up of the federal, provincial and territorial ClOs. Do you see this as an effective body?

d'Auray: The Council has been and continues to be a very effective platform to discuss some of the key issues that face all public sector ClOs. Our focus has been on issues that are fundamental in nature those that are critical to our ability to work together over the long-term rather than short-term or "burning" issues. For example, we are developing an approach to data standards to help us better manage information within and across jurisdictions.

We have a workplan of priorities that one or more jurisdictions have taken the lead on. For example, Saskatchewan has been leading the work on an information management framework and Nunavut and Quebec have jointly agreed to take the lead on XML standards. The approach we have adopted for the PSCIOC is a useful way for us to share limited resources, pool expertise and reduce duplication. At the same time, we get the benefit of a useful platform to move our agendas forward.

TIG: What do you see as your key goals for your office over the next few years?

d'Auray: One of the biggest challenges with an initiative of the size of GOL is maintaining the momentum. Securing on-going funding is key to achieving this. As we move towards increased online service integration, the governance challenges will be increasingly important. We have gotten this far by establishing a de facto governance structure around the Government of Canada site to prioritize service delivery initiatives. Ontario has done a lot of work to identify governance structure models to deliver on horizontal, cross-government service delivery. We clearly have to do more work in this area.

Some of the policy issues we'll have to deal with include data management, content management of portals and gateways, and portability of information across departments and cluster groups to reduce or avoid the need to re-enter data and to ensure our sites are kept current.

Managing citizen or user expectations is another challenge. As we move forward, the demand for greater functionality will start being felt. As we provide increasingly more functionality in online service offerings, we will be driven to do more, faster. We will need to balance expectations with our capacity to deliver.

By Chris Bishop

Special to Technology in Government

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Oct 2001
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