Canadian Government Executive - Volume 26 - Issue 01

January/February 2020 // Canadian Government Executive / 9 TECHNOLOGY “I was counted on to understand the impact of technology on government’s business enough to explain it to similarly tech-illiterate ministers and senior decision-makers.” near the techie qualifications that I would have thought necessary to support the job. Rather, I was told that my knowledge of the processes and business of govern- ment would be key. I was counted on to understand the impact of technology on government’s business enough to explain it to similarly tech-illiterate ministers and senior decision-makers. I quickly realized that Y2K represented a unique public sector project – one pos- sessed of a truly immovable deadline. No court-ordered or cabinet-set deadlines could be extended – and extended again. Rather, we were literally up against the clock with a deadline that could not be reset. I also determined that, at least from a technology perspective, everyone was facing the same problem. If you had com- puter systems involved in your business, you needed a Y2K remediation plan. With no proprietary rights in play, this opened the possibility of widely sharing Y2K “best practices” across public and private sec- tors in Canada and around the world. Project management practice frames projects with three core components – people, processes and technologies – sup- ported by a capacity to communicate and manage change inherent in the project. In the grand scheme of things, the technol- ogy component of the Y2K project was the least complicated. It was certainly broad- reaching and involved time-consuming heavy lifting by many people. But the technology fix was, for the most part, a repetitive process of remediation applied system-by-system. The project’s process component involved some choices of cre- ating new management procedures and deploying established ones. Add to this the fixed deadline and Y2K, in the opinion of BC’s Auditor General, represented “a project that [has] challenged the ingenu- ity and resources of the BC government and launched the most widespread coor- dinated strategic effort in recent history.” 1 No small undertaking. Our most important Y2K success factor was the clear setting of managerial ac- countabilities across the government. As CIO, I was responsible for establishing Y2K compliant remediation processes and standards as well as cross-government