January/February 2022 // Canadian Government Executive / 27 INTERVIEW Eleanor Taylor: Yeah. So, thanks very much, Ali. We’ll always be so grateful for what it was that IBM was able to help us solve and just to paint the picture from my perspective. So back in June, when I realized that we had a lot of people still in Afghanistan, who we had worked with, that we had served with and fought with, I started to have people from Afghanistan reach out to me. And I could’ve made a connection with the person who I had worked with my former interpreter, whose 10-year-old son, his parents, his two brothers and his sister were still in Afghanistan. And they were moving from house to house to stay safe as the situation devolved. We were helping people fill out application forms when the process was eventually opened. We ourselves had a list of 33 families and we were trying to update their names. And then as we coalesced around other veterans and people who were invested in this effort, we eventually found this space where we were part of five partnered NGOs who were meeting twice daily on the issue. We realized that we were really failing in being able to represent adequately the applicant population, both in terms of our ability to advocate to IRCC, but also in our ability to understand who was ready to be evacuated. And so, one of the things we tried that Ali referred to [was] a Google Sheet document. We had five organizations and 34 users all trying to update a Google Sheet document with private, personal information that was being shared with us for this purpose. But we were failing, we were absolutely failing because we needed to be able to record whether they were approved, what sort of documentations they had in order to serve them. That information was constantly changing. And so, on Labor Day weekend, we reached out to IBM Canada. One of our members of our group had a contact and the team met with us that weekend. Within 10 days, we had a solution that enabled the applicants to update their own information and to filter it and use it in a way that was meaningful. Within that first two-to-three-week period, we had 13,000 people represented in that initial product, and that product then evolved in a way by which applicants could go back and have their own profile and change that information as it evolved. And so, if their application was approved, we could then see that and we could put them in a pile to evacuate. If they suddenly got their passport that they didn’t have before, it opened up options for them. If we didn’t have this tool that allowed them to update their own information, we would absolutely not be in a position to serve them in the way that we are now. The other thing that it did for us, is it really increased our credibility with our government partners, because we were able to demonstrate that we really understood the needs of the population. And because of that credibility, it opened doors for us, which I think has just served us all collectively. So, it’s been such a privilege and the team at IBM has worked so hard with us over this period, on a daily basis to evolve this product into something that’s going to meet the needs of these people and eventually get them to Canada. Arjun Grewal: I don’t know if I can add to that. I think one thing that we need to remember is that this crisis came up very quickly. The first couple of weeks of us trying to solve this problem was in an environment that the information was changing daily. I think that’s the power of soldiers, we are very good at addressing complex problems in resource constrained environments and coming up with solutions. I think the Excel documents and Google Sheets are a perfect example of that. IBM and their partnership really took us from a tactical employment concept to a strategic one. What we have now is really a database and an information collection tool that really augments government processes. We’ve done so by listening to our end user. One thing I forgot to mention during my intro is I’m a proud former IBMer, I spent four years with IBM Cloud and Business Analytics. And to see how IBM does that, very client-centric development, it’s something that we applied to this problem as well. t was also really great to engage our Afghan population in asking what is the best solution for them? What sort of agility and timelines do they need to take advantage of? We built a tool that reflects that. Q: Thank you so much. That is such a fascinating story in partnership, cooperation, collaboration, and communication that deals with a life and death situation. I don’t want to get away from the human element of it all, but I do want to ask about the cloud, because I know that this is going to be of interest to our listeners in terms of thinking about how the concept of your initiatives are transferrable to other situations. If I can ask, how did you leverage the client innovation center for cloud modernization to develop this platform? Ali Shakil: Maybe I’ll go first and talk a bit about our CICs and the premise that it’s built on. So, the Client Innovation Centers that we have across Canada are a core part of our consulting business and how we deliver value to our clients, and the premise of our consulting business is “accelerate together”. What that means for us is - how do we bring together talented people? We have hundreds of employees across our CICs in Canada that can assist our clients with some sort of outcome. It’s not about the technology, it’s about what type of outcome can we deliver? Our CICs are the embodiment of our IBM Garage Methodology, which is what we use both in virtual spaces and physical spaces. And what we do as part of that methodology is we really think about end users at the center. We apply design, thinking, what do these end users need? Where are their pain points? Where are the challenges they’re facing? How do we actually empathize with them? How do we co-create a solution? So, it’s all about the design of that solution with our client; in this case, Aman Lara really understood the end user. A lot of them were on the ground in Afghanistan and knew what they were going through. Little things like, “how do we make this very mobile friendly and make it available in an environment where you may have a signal drop here and there?” So, making sure we’re configuring things around that. How do we also co-execute the solutions? We worked very closely with our counterparts at Aman Lara to actually do the build efforts - iteratively building components of this solution, making refinements once we got feedback and then go quickly to IBM and their partnership really took us from a tactical employment concept to a strategic one. What we have now is really a database and an information collection tool that really augments government processes.
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