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
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
The apps and services that underpin government programs should practically always be open source. Public trust in things like the EI system, filing taxes, or as a public servant, getting paid, would be higher if people could see the inner workings and understand that software is working as it should. Open source code reduces vendor lock-in, improves the quality and interoperability of software, and increases public trust. What’s not to love?| 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
As governments and organizations around the world have grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, their efforts to reuse and remix others’ work have stood out as a bright spot. Within Canada and around the world, there’s a lot of neat ways that people and teams have been learning from and sharing with each other. This should become the norm, not the exception.| sboots.ca
In early 2022, the President of Shared Services Canada (SSC) announced that he was retiring. In what has accidentally become a tradition, below are some suggestions for the next president to take on the role: start moving to zero trust networking and away from perimeter defence; enable the rapid, secure adoption of third-party software-as-a-service tools at scale; and incrementally make SSC services optional instead of mandatory.| 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