Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 02

34 / Canadian Government Executive // March/April 2018 TECHGOV FORUM I n my career in the Public Service, I have seen a lot of tech- nological change, including the arrival of the first word pro- cessors, the first cell phones, the first fax machines, the first Internet, as well as cyber-attacks, smart phones and social networks. Technological change is not new, but your challenge is to figure out what is different about this particular wave of technological change. Are there lessons learned from howwe have experienced previous waves? Did we adapt successfully or not, both internally and externally, so that we do not have to start from zero every time? How can we learn previous waves of technological change as we take on the next one, whether that is blockchain or artificial intelligence, or learning software? What we have been through before will inform where we are going next. Governments come and go, Parliaments come and go, but it is the public servants who anchor the Westminster system of gov- ernment, and that is one of my favorite topics – which you can read about in many of my speeches on my website. The Public Service is a complex entity. There are, at last count, more than 250 distinct orga- nizations, everything from the massive Cana- da Revenue Agency, to small agencies with a dozen employees, and everything in between. We are a big institution, or family of institu- tions. We have over 600 distinct walk-in points of service in Canada, and over 170 missions abroad. Our payroll is over 50 billion dollars a year for over 400,000 people – 260,000 in core public service, and of course the RCMP and the military – with over 650 distinct classifi- cation bands. 84 per cent of our work force is unionized. 54 per cent of our workforce is women, and that share that is climbing in the executive ranks. I am very proud of that. We use, occupy, rent, or own 32,000 distinct buildings. We spend, and I am sure this is of interest to some of you in the room, at least 20 billion dollars a year on government procure- ment. We process more than 300,000 procure- ment transactions and contracts every single year – mostly small contracts with small businesses. We D I G I T A L E N G A G E M E N T I N N O V A T I O N F O R U M TECH GOV Michael Wernick, Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet, delivered a keynote address at TechGov in Ottawa on January 29, 2018. We reprint here, with the permission of the Privy Council Office, excerpts of his speech. Innovate in the Two Official Languages; make it fully Accessible and Secure