Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 01

30 / Canadian Government Executive // January/February 2018 THE INTERVIEW accountability, and the strong culture that goes along with it can make collaboration across bound- aries and implement enterprise strategies quite challenging. How are you addressing this in your work? Our organizations have been designed in an analog fashion. And that’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way it has evolved. I took the job because I met the Secretary of the Treasury’s board, and then I got her sup- port to do things differently. The Minis- ter is also a big supporter of trying to do things differently in a digital way. We can- not continue to operate in an analog fash- ion. That applies to recruitment and mil- lennial-hiring as well. Organizations are created for a reason. It’s not just because it’s a fancy management trend. It’s just that you get things done quicker. And in every other sectors, speed and rapid execution are core. But we’re government. We’re not every other sector. We simply can’t screw up; we can’t create a policy that would cre- ate a negative impact on the country. So we have to be careful, but we also have to at least try to engage in the same sort of manner. And I don’t remember the last time government looked at its fundamen- tal business models policy development. We must change how we do policy devel- opment in the context of a digital, inter- connected, global, fast-paced, exponential- growth world that we are investing in ourselves as the federal government. That is the irony: We’re accelerating change here, but slower at adopting it internally. Q: I think that’s a really interest- ing challenge. How do you think this applies to the whole policy field, and how do we apply open government concepts – a more nimble, agile approach to engage- ment with citizens, using a digital engagement mindset – to our day- to-day work? It has to be the way we go because, to be fair, the other way hasn’t worked. Five to 10-year procurements. Five to 10-year de- ployments. I just mentioned that the iPad is barely seven years old, and yet look at how the watch is exploding now. Driver- less cars are going to have more data pro- cessing power than anything in the last 20 years. The Internet of Things is changing things. That’s where I said ‘digital’ is gov- ernment. We have to be where people exist, and more and more, their lives are digital. That doesn’t mean they’re online all the time. It means they’re digital. Q: You made a point earlier about evidence-based policy, utilizing science as an example. Govern- ment doesn’t have a monopoly on expertise, and now our policy is frequently challenged by scientific experts outside of government, as an example. So, one of the chal- lenges here is to try to engage that broader scientific community in building policy. Yeah. And we have the tools that we did not have a decade ago – literally – so let’s use them. And if anything, that should be where democracy goes. That’s why the job is so fun because I think, fundamentally, you can change how government does cer- tain things. I’m not here to deploy a new kind of technology. Ideally, it is about how the government changes how it does things so that we could figure out what tech to use – and in some cases, we’re talking about publicly available technology that my 13- year old can figure out in the basement. Q: I’m sure younger people don’t understand the current analog paradigm in government, as you put it. If you were born digital – as a kid, you didn’t get colouring books at the restaurant when you started crying, but you got momor dad’s phone – there is no way you could come into the public service and understand the vertical hierarchy. And that doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong. It means maybe it was designed in the pre-digital era. There is no new business that is starting that is not digital. You’d be hard-pressed to find one. And yet in government, we op- erate in an analog fashion. And again, for good reason, but the question now has to be, “What things can we change first that aren’t too risky?” Frankly, we still have to run a country, and whether digital is there or not, we’ve still done a pretty decent job of doing that. Q: I think its fair to say that our political leaders might see some threat in moving to a truly open platform for government, where policy options are developed in real time, and debate over evi- dence is done publicly. How do you convince political leaders that our work as public servants can be managed in a responsible fashion in this new world? I don’t know about necessarily talking in terms of political perspective. I think, in our case, we’re extremely lucky that the Minister really wants to see a modern public service. As a modern public service, that means we have to do things in more of an innovation ecosystem fashion, and we can’t do that behind closed doors. You can’t do that when the consultation phase has a beginning and an end. You have to adjust. You have to move. You have to react. I think that it’s the size of the system that is more of a deterrent to this than either elected of- ficials or public service officials are. I think the roadblock isn’t as much on the political or administrative bureaucratic side; I think it’s the size of the case. Q: Tell me a little bit about your leadership style? The Government’s digital policy has to focus on open platforms, we can not be the sole source of information and experimentation. We can’t deliver information and services in a linear way anymore. Especially when the rest of the world is going toward open and collaborative digital models.