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
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
Nicole Wong wrote a great piece last month titled, “Building a Tech Policy Movement”. It captures something that really resonates: there’s an urgent need for people who are fluent in both technology and public policy, and a real shortage of those people. Outside a small handful of researchers, no one is teaching public policy students how to be technology-savvy, or teaching computer scientists and IT specialists how to be government-savvy.| 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