Beginning right around the time that Heather and I moved to Whitehorse, I noticed that almost all of the ads I saw on Twitter were from the same company. Anecdotally around 19 out of every 20 ads that I saw on Twitter were IBM ads, for more than a year. Below is a series of screenshots of these ads, collected between October 2019 and October 2020.| sboots.ca
Over the past year, departments have made a lot of progress in improving access to online collaboration tools and other services. But, there’s still a pretty dramatic gap between departments that are more restrictive, and departments that are more forward-looking. “Is this blocked in my department?” is a crowd-sourced effort to track that gap, and this post looks at how the website and the departments reflected on it have evolved over the course of 2020.| sboots.ca
Cyd Harrell posted a great Twitter thread last week, resolving that “all government offices need fast broadband, fast wi-fi, productivity and collaboration software suites that play well with others, and the building blocks of modern website building and digital communication. Just like they need walls, a roof, and HVAC.” Public servants do critical, life-changing work with the most rudimentary tools. Equipping them with better tools is a big part of own public service mission.| 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
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