Using online collaboration tools has been a big part of making it possible for federal public servants to work from home during the pandemic. That’s a big change for Government of Canada departments, who have historically been very reluctant to allow access to these tools. Since 2019, I’ve tracked where online services are allowed or blocked at “Is this blocked in my department.ca”, with anonymous submission forms that let people report which sites they can access in each department. ...| sboots.ca
“Shadow IT” is one of those terms that you hear tossed around by government IT executives on a regular basis. It’s an anxiety-ridden phrase filled with fear and insecurities. Public servants using shadow IT isn’t the actual problem, though – instead, it’s a symptom that people aren’t being equipped with the tools they need to work effectively. I think we should embrace shadow IT instead of trying to squash it. Here are some fun re-branding efforts to help with that.| sboots.ca
Monday is election day! Back in December 2019, I wrote a set of suggestions for the next GC Chief Information Officer. In the same tradition, here are some suggestions for the next Minister of Digital Government. Digital government work – and public service reform, which is what it ultimately is – isn’t really a newsworthy election topic. It’s near and dear to my heart, though, and I’d love to see more conversations about it from public servants, politicians, and the public alike. W...| sboots.ca
One of the themes of this blog is that access to modern tools has a huge impact on public servants’ productivity and effectiveness. There are a lot of online tools available today – for team collaboration, for communications, for data analysis, for software development – that historically haven’t been easy for public servants to access. Paying for paid tiers of these tools has been even more difficult, but thanks to last week’s new Directive on Management of Procurement, it just got...| sboots.ca
Enterprise IT systems in government are often enforced as mandatory solutions that other teams and departments are required to use. In comparison, leading tech companies turn their internal systems into external products, to see if they are commercially viable. Making enterprise services optional creates feedback loops, generates adoption-rate data, and incentivizes continuous improvement.| sboots.ca
This year’s FWD50 conference was a couple weeks ago. It’s home to a lot of interesting conversations on technology, governments, and society. One new event this year was a game show-inspired “pitch competition”, where public servants pitched ideas for policy changes that could better enable digital work in government. My pitch was about procurement. And also about urban planning, as a way of combining two of my favourite topics. Here’s a recap of the presentation.| sboots.ca
If you’re working on IT or service delivery projects in public sector organizations, I have one very specific rule for you to follow: avoid vendor lock-in. To do that, you should own your data, own your front-end interfaces, own your software source code, and avoid long-term contracts. This post dives into why vendor lock-in is a problem, and how those strategies can help prevent it.| sboots.ca
It’s been two months and a bit since the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically adjusted life in Canada. Amid the social and economic upheaval that took place, government responses – public health activities, emergency benefit programs, and more – have played an essential role. The urgency and constraints of working in a crisis force us to reconsider assumptions and processes that are long-established, and they also remind us of why our work matters.| sboots.ca
It’s been about a month now since federal government employees have been asked to work from home. The sudden shift to a fully remote workforce quickly overwhelmed the IT infrastructure used to access corporate networks from home. The future fix to this problem is to move away from having corporate networks entirely.| 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
With a new Minister and new Mandate Letters, it’s an exciting time to be working in digital government in the federal government. With a new GC CIO likely arriving in January, it seemed timely to put together a “new year’s wishlist” of suggestions to help put wind into the sails of digital teams across government.| sboots.ca
One of the long-held norms of government IT is the perceived benefit of “commercial, off the shelf” software solutions. In government environments, being able to buy ready-to-go software products to meet government IT needs is appealing. In many cases, though, extensive customization requirements means that COTS purchases don’t live up to their promise. They’re marketed as a car and they turn out to be boxes of car parts: lots of time-consuming assembly required. Here’s a rule of th...| sboots.ca
SRE's approach to IT Service Management, Use software engineers to design scalable and reliable systems. Innovation and improve product development.| sre.google
