The federal government reached outside the public sector last spring for a new face atop the Chief Information Branch at Treasury Board Secretariat. Corinne Charette, most recently vice-president and CIO at Transat AT of Montreal, comes to the assignment with something of a government background, however, as she explained in a recent meeting with editor-in-chief Robert Parkins.
To begin at a very general level, you’ve been on the job for for a few months now – since May 4. What’s the learning curve been like?
I was fortunate to have had a stint in the federal government between 2003 and 2006, when I was CIO at FINTRAC. Certainly there’s a big difference between the private sector and the public sector, and so I learned about government during my term at FINTRAC. Of course, FINTRAC is a small agency, not necessarily involved in the full extent of everything that other agencies can get involved in from an IT perspective, so it was a great introduction to government. But I had not really really had a lot of extensive discussions or dealings with Treasury Board, so I really wasn’t that knowledgeable about it. And so, this has been a great three months to learn about CIOB’s mandate and the full extent of it and to learn about Treasury Board’s role and the full extent of it. You know, the government is a huge enterprise and I’m sure I will continue to learn something about how it works and who does what for the next 10 years.
What are the big issues that CIOB is looking at now? Let’s pick three.
Well, not necessarily in order of importance but certainly top of mind is IM/IT security. When I was in France (recently), I was watching the news on cybersecurity threats and incidents here and there and everywhere, and it’s kind of scary. More and more citizens and businesses are doing business online because obviously it makes sense. It’s accessible, it’s 24/7 and you can be remote, you can do business that’s more cost effective and so on. But unfortunately, this comes with a heightened requirement for better security. So, certainly the government of Canada remains focused and committed to the proper level of IMIT security. It certainly is a key policy area for CIOB.
Are the bad guys going to undermine people’s confidence in electronic service delivery enough that it becomes problematic?
Well, when I first started working in e-business in 1996, the number one deterrent to online banking, for instance, was confidence and trust. Now, as with the adoption of online banking, some say there’s a lack of trust in e-service. But people continue to use e-service, more and more. You also have to look at the demographics. My sons are 23 and 26, and they’re wired. And the generation after them is wired. And everybody in the workplace is accessing the Internet every day. So, in many ways, I’d say that the voraciousness and the ubiquity involved with Internet access and e-service has by itself reduced the fears that people have. People are expecting to operate and do business this way.
A few months ago, the e-health database in the state of Virginia was hijacked and encrypted and someone tried to ransom it for $10 million. That guy was caught quickly, but reports like that still make people get a little edgy.
Well, the government has been vigilant from an IM/IT security perspective from the get-go, from the original Government On-line project, and we continue to put a big focus on this. It’s not necessarily a glamorous thing to invest in – security – but it certainly has its rewards – that everybody’s information is secure and protected and life goes on the way it should. You have to invest in it, you have to put focus on it, you have to have discipline and rigor, you can’t let your eye off the ball for a second.
So that’s one of the key issues. What are the others?
Number 2 is effective project management. My predecessor was also focused on this, and I wish I could claim the credit, but the team that’s here has done a great job coming up with a new enhanced management framework for projects across government. It’s very important. Government invests a lot of money in IT because we’re a big enterprise; it’s just normal. But government may not have spent the effort to get business owners in sync with the IT folks in project delivery. So in the project management framework, we’re putting a big emphasis on collaboration with the business in shared project delivery as a basis for success. Frequent, rigorous tracking, frequent reporting and what we call “project gates” allow systematic reviews of project health and independent outside reviews of project health at regular defined intervals, depending of course on the size of the project. You’re not going to do this for small projects, but the bigger the project, the more independent reviews, the more frequent the gates and so on.
A project in this sense would be basically implementing a new solution for some program delivery mandate – some IM and IT software service, whatever – and working with business to ensure collaborative, shared project delivery according to rigorous on-time on-budget (standards) to deliver the anticipated outcomes. Project management discipline is something we’re putting a big emphasis on – not because the government hasn’t been doing a good job, but we’re not getting the good press that we deserve. People are quicker to point out whatever anomalies they can find than to find out successes, so we’re making a big focus on rigorous, transparent reporting as a way of showing that the government is doing an excellent job.
We’ll come back to your third point, but this is an excellent issue. You mentioned in passing Government On-Line, which was sunset a few years ago and was a kind of public iteration of e-government. Is there another round in mind, possibly in a Government 2.0 context?
Not necessarily in Goverment 2.0 although Government 2.0 is something that we are definitely focus on with GCpedia, wikis, NRCan’s wiki, the innovation campaign and so on, but there’s no question that we are on the verge of initiating throughout the government a series of new projects of e-services, be they at CBSA or in Passport or all over. We have a huge demand out there for the delivery of e-services and this is going to require the implementation of new systems and platforms. This is just the natural evolution from Government On-Line. Government On-Line put us on the map as being a jurisdiction that was ahead of its time with other jurisdictions and we got out of the gate quickly; we have these programs already in place in many areas. One of the best examples is CRA’s e-file. But now we have a whole slew of initiatives about to be launched across government that will continue that and evolve it in newer and different programs.
And it will have a public face.
Absolutely. It’s what the citizens want. They want to be able to interact that way, it’s certainly what businesses want and it’s good for government, it’s just more cost effective, it’s 7/24, it’s just a smart way to do it. That doesn’t mean you don’t provide service in person, but we’re in a multi-channel delivery environment. This is true in business and it’s true in government. Citizens want to be able to interact with the government sometimes in person, sometimes on the telephone and sometimes online and they want to be able to go back and forth, depending on where they are, what their need is. W
