Building digital services and IT systems in a government environment is complicated. The federal government in particular has a lot of rules to navigate, and it’s easy for these to overwhelm people and siphon their time away from designing and building user-friendly software. This short guide was written for an audience that’s used to building digital products in the private sector, to better understand what’s new and different in a government context. Enjoy!| sboots.ca
Delivering good services to the public, in the internet era, depends on designing and developing good software. Although there are about 17,000 IT professionals in the Canadian government (and an estimated 60,000 contractors and consultants), there are very few senior developers within the public service. Here are a few reasons why.| sboots.ca
In mid-October, Heather and I moved to Whitehorse. So far we’ve really enjoyed it – Whitehorse is a lovely city, full of friendly people. We both feel really lucky to have the chance to live and work somewhere new, and to see a part of Canada we hadn’t seen before.| sboots.ca
Make the impossible, possible with Trello. The ultimate tool to boost your productivity. Escape the clutter and chaos—stay efficient with Inbox, Boards, and Planner from anywhere, even on mobile.| trello.com
Enjoy the collection of professional creative software in Adobe Creative Cloud including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro & more on desktop, mobile & web.| www.adobe.com
Leah Lockhart captures in a profound way why government systems and software tend to be so bad. Bad government software – the user-hostile, complicated, enterprise systems that public servants everywhere are accustomed to – trains public servants to have low expectations of government software systems. Then, as they progress over time into leadership roles, they make IT decisions based on the low expectations they were trained to expect.| sboots.ca
When you’re prioritizing what activities to work on, it’s usually not that hard to tell if something is responding to a user need or a government need. Does the activity help understand an actual person and how they’d use the service you’re building? Does it let particular users more effectively interact with your website or online services? Does it generate data that can help inform future improvements? If it’s not doing any of those things, it’s probably solving for a government...| sboots.ca
The government’s legacy IT systems have been in the news recently. Within the government, there’s a growing concern that these systems – software code and mainframe computers that underpin critical services and benefit programs for millions of Canadians – could fail unexpectedly at any moment. The complicating factor in discussions around legacy IT systems (and their need for replacement) is that many of the services that these systems support don’t work well as-is.| sboots.ca
If you work in government IT, you’ve probably heard this before: “We’ve got one standard database product.” “We’ve standardized on this programming language.” “This software is our standard for case management systems,” and so on. There are a number of important downsides, though, to standardization efforts: one size all ends up fitting nothing well, they act as a placeholder for more informed technical discussions, and they end up being a barrier to continual change.| sboots.ca
Amazon Aurora is a global-scale relational database service built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility.| Amazon Web Services, Inc.