Later this year, alongside the next Yukon territorial election, we’re having a plebiscite on electoral reform in the Yukon. I am extremely stoked that this is happening, and I hope fellow Yukoners vote “yes” to changing to a new electoral system. Curious why? Read on!| sboots.ca
Technology, public services, and people. But mostly people.| sboots.ca
In early April, the Yukon government announced that it would no longer be using X (formerly Twitter) in response to new US tariffs taking effect. The Yukon government launched an official Bluesky account the same day. I’d love to see other Canadian jurisdictions and government organizations make the switch away from X, just like the Yukon did.| sboots.ca
Back in March I wrote about the elimination of the United States government’s two leading digital government teams. Beyond their digital service work, these teams also did a lot of heavy lifting to change processes and policies that held back better service delivery – including around procurement. As 18F and USDS were suddenly shut down, anecdotes about the hundreds of millions of dollars saved by helping departments and decision-makers make better technology choices quickly emerged.| sboots.ca
We’re six weeks into a new US government administration. The scale of deliberate and gleeful destruction of US state capacity on the part of the Trump administration is hard to process. As someone who writes about public service excellence it’s heartbreaking to hear so many stories of people’s careers, teams, and accomplishments being ripped apart. In my specific field of government tech, it was jaw-dropping to learn this past week that the US’s best digital government teams are being...| sboots.ca
I’m really thrilled that our research article on government IT procurement was recently published in Canadian Public Administration. It’s a bit over two years since Prof. Amanda Clarke and I began this research project, and this article being published is in some ways the final milestone of that work. The article is open access, and you can read it online (or download the PDF version). Here’s the upshot: We reveal that the federal government betrays accepted best practice in modern gove...| Sean Boots
On Wednesday, July 24, Prof. Amanda Clarke and I will be appearing at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) to discuss the research paper that we recently shared as a preprint. If you’d like to tune in you can watch via the ParlVU livestream starting at 11am Eastern Time (8am Yukon time).| sboots.ca
These two videos are a small celebration of why people choose public service careers. Brian Whittaker, Rebecca Croll, and I compiled these with the help of wonderful public servant friends across Canada and the United States. They were shown at the 2023 FWD50 conference in Ottawa. Part 1: Part 2: A big highlight of FWD50 this past year was being able to work with Brian on a panel celebrating awesome and inspiring public servants. Brian runs the Humans of Public Service project, a celebration ...| Sean Boots
Back in March I gave a presentation at one of Civic Tech Toronto’s weekly hacknights. It was really nice to be able to tune in from Whitehorse and talk about some of my past civic tech projects.| sboots.ca
This morning I gave a keynote presentation at FWD50, Canada’s leading digital government conference. It’s a really wonderful community and I’m really grateful for the chance to speak there. My talk was titled Revolution, not evolution, for federal public service delivery and you can see my slides here. In the presentation I talked about how Canada needs a revolution in how we operate as a public service – not just when it comes to technology work in government, but there in particula...| Sean Boots
It’s been almost a year since I stopped using Twitter on a regular basis. It was a big change given how large a role Twitter played in my professional life – connecting with public servants across Canada and around the world and learning from their experiences. Now that it’s 2023 and Twitter is both crumbling apart and morally suspect, I think we should make Mastodon our new community. If you’re at FWD50 this year either in person or virtually, I’d love to see you on Mastodon!| sboots.ca
Conversations around “state capacity” – can government organizations do big things? Can they meet the complex challenges of modern society? – have taken on a new urgency over the past few years. Pressing social and economic issues, confronting the consequences of climate change, and navigating disinformation campaigns and threats to democratic participation all require an effective, nimble, and robust public service. One of the themes of my writing here is that I really want our fede...| Sean Boots
This past week wildfires forced the full evacuation of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, as well as many other communities both nearby and across the territory. That evacuation is currently ongoing. As of this morning an estimated 28,940 people were under evacuation orders, in a territory with a population of about 46,000 people. Meanwhile, late yesterday Kelowna, BC residents were suddenly ordered to evacuate when a major wildfire crossed Lake Okanagan. Close friends of ...| Sean Boots
This past week I started work with the Government of Yukon, wrapping up almost seven years since rejoining the federal government and the team that became the Canadian Digital Service. In my new role, I’m the open government program manager within the Yukon government’s eServices for Citizens branch. Part of my responsibilities will be the Yukon open government portal, along with supporting a number of initiatives that the team has on the radar. eServices is a really outstanding and welco...| Sean Boots
Hybrid work is here to stay, which – for all of us as public servants – means a lot of hours in Teams meetings. (Or Zoom or Google Meet or your organization’s videoconferencing system of choice.) Whether you’re at home or in the office, chances are good you’re tuning in to video meetings on a very, very regular basis. We’re all getting better at un-muting before we speak, but even a few years into this it’s rare to go a week without an “I can’t hear you” or a “your sou...| Sean Boots
Update: As of May 1, 2023, a tentative agreement was reached between PSAC and TBS. You can read more about the agreement on the PSAC website. On June 23, the agreement was ratified by the federal government after being previously ratified by members of each bargaining group. Today the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) began strike activities. With more than 155,000 participating PSAC members, it’s one of the largest strikes in Canadian history. PSAC’s Frequently Asked Questions pa...| Sean Boots
Shannah Segal and Sheena Samuel lead the experience design and technology chapters, respectively, at the Ontario Digital Service (ODS). They’re brilliant and thoughtful leaders, and have brought experience from their careers in the private tech sector into government. Friends all across ODS speak very highly of working with them, and it was a real honour to hear about their experiences over the past nearly five years working in government. We chatted in late October. (Views here are their o...| Sean Boots
Over the past few weeks I’ve gradually been migrating from Twitter to Mastodon, an open-source, federated social network. You can find me there at @sboots@mastodon.sboots.ca. (In early January I moved to an individual instance – Gersande La Flèche has a great overview of that here, and the Fedi.Tips feed has useful instructions on how to migrate an existing account between instances.) If you’d like to learn how to migrate from Twitter to Mastodon, Patricia Aas has an introductory guide...| Sean Boots
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to present in-person at FWD50 next week. Prof. Amanda Clarke will cover the AMA on government-vendor relations in my absence – I hope you can all tune in for it (either virtually or in-person!) The FWD50 team is brilliant and I’m really grateful to have been invited to present. For those of you who are going in person, I’m so sorry to miss seeing you! For in-person and virtual folks alike, I hope it’s a fantastic conference. I’ll be tuning in to the ...| Sean Boots
Dan Hon’s newsletter (which is excellent) had a great anecdote last week about the New York City Sanitation Department hiring McKinsey to study and design a procurement for trash containerization. Which is exciting (urbanplanning!) but also, as Dan says, alarming: This kicked off my usual consultant-consulting-on-RFP threat-response mechanism, this time focussing on: under what circumstances and in what environment is an external consultant needed to design that organization’s RFP for the...| Sean Boots
(The answer is: about $4.6 billion dollars in the most recent fiscal year.) This week I’m coming up to the end of my Public Servant-in-Residence term at Carleton University. It’s been an absolute dream to work with Prof. Amanda Clarke and the School of Public Policy and Administration. A key focus of our research work over the past few months has been analyzing Government of Canada procurement contracts as a way of exploring how the federal government spends money on information technolog...| Sean Boots
Public service departments’ “return to office” plans have been a hot topic over the past few weeks. After more than two years where a large proportion of the federal public service switched to working from home, departments are planning to require that staff come back into the office at least a certain number of days per week. Meanwhile: COVID-19 isstillhappening. The reaction to messages and town halls from public service leaders as these plans have been announced hasn’t been pretty....| Sean Boots
Madelaine Saginur and Melissa Toutloff work at the Privacy Management Division for Health Canada and PHAC. They’re two of the most kind and most brilliant public servants I’ve ever worked with. We worked together from the earliest days of COVID Alert onwards, and the app’s positivereception from Canadian privacy experts is very much credit to the two of them and their (equally brilliant) director Andréa Rousseau. I learned so much from them both on privacy policy and legislation along ...| Sean Boots
A couple of months ago I wrote a post on my hopes for the future of digital identity in Canada. As someone who has lived in three different provinces and territories, and spent several years working outside of Canada, I have some thoughts on what I’d like it to look like! Most of the ideas I wrote were related to technical implementation details (to be fast, to be cross-department, to work with my authenticator app). The broader theme, though, was that I’d like to see the federal governme...| Sean Boots
A few weeks ago I was part of the second English-language episode of the FYN Unscripted podcast, organized and run by the Federal Youth Network. Brittaney Lewis from DND hosted a conversation with Sidra Mahmood from ESDC and I. The topic for the episode was “Building a reputation remotely”, and from there we dove into our early public service career experiences, finding friends across the public service and building a community, social media and blogging as a public servant, and our exper...| Sean Boots
During my Public Servant-in-Residence term at Carleton University, I’ll be working with Prof. Amanda Clarke as part of her larger research project on Trustworthy Digital Government. I’ll be studying the role and influence of information technology (IT) vendors in the public sector – the companies that provide software, technology equipment, cloud infrastructure, and professional services to governments. Why study IT vendors? The Government of Canada spends more than $6.8 billion dollar...| Sean Boots
This past week I officially joined Carleton University as a Public Servant-in-Residence, working with Prof. Amanda Clarke. I’m really thrilled to be joining the School of Public Policy and Administration, and the faculty and staff have been tremendously welcoming. I’ll be joining Carleton’s School of Public Policy and Administration remotely from here in Whitehorse; when my PSIR term wraps up in the fall I’ll return to my previous work at CDS.| sboots.ca
(More on my Public Servant-in-Residence work to come next week.) Why yes, I am writing this as a distraction from everything happening in the world lately. As public servants, we’ve mostly all been working from home for almost two years now. That might change to some extent in the months ahead, but I think it’s safe to say that some form of hybrid work (working at least part of the week from home) will be normal from here on in. Which is good! That means: meetings by MS Teams and Google M...| Sean Boots
Later this month, collective bargaining agreement negotiations are starting for the Economics and Social Science Services group (the EC classification) that I’m a member of. CAPE Local #527 represent! With these negotiations on the horizon, here are some things I’d like to see as part of the conversation: less pay, more time off; a better experience for new public servants; and permanent remote work options & access to modern tools.| sboots.ca
Last week the FWD50 team launched their annual survey on the future of digital government. If you haven’t already filled it out, don’t miss sharing your perspective. It’s something I look forward to each year, partly since I genuinely love filling out surveys (hello, fellow public servants) and partly since the results are always fascinating. They’re a deep look at how we all see and imagine the future of the public service – both how we work, and what issues we’ll be working on....| Sean Boots
I’m not quite sure how to start this piece. As I write this, we’re coming up on the third weekend of ongoing anti-government protests in Ottawa. These protests are different than past protests in a lot of ways: more dangerous, and more disruptive to the everyday lives of people who live near Parliament Hill. Others have written about this better than I can: Lucas’ newsletter from a couple weeks ago gives a first-hand overview; and Justin Ling, Judy Trinh, and Ian Austen have all provid...| Sean Boots
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
If you’re working in government communications, you’ve probably come across “vanity URLs” before. These are easily-written-out shortcuts to webpages that typically have longer, more complex web addresses. You’ll often see them in TV or online advertisements, spoken out on radio ads, or included on billboards, posters, and other printed communications. They’re really handy. Caption: An example of a vanity URL for the Government of Canada’s webpage on COVID-19 vaccines. Source: Yo...| Sean Boots
Paul Craig recently wrote a blog post on the massive amount of compliance documentation his team produced to launch a small public website in a Canadian government department. It’s a must-read lens into the current shape of public sector tech work in Canada. We have a public service executive class that isn’t equipped to lead technology initiatives. We’ve got widespread adoption of digital government words, but not digital government implementation. And we’ve got a political class tha...| 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
Update: In December 2021, I updated the methodology used in the end-to-end services analysis. Following the update, services that are all “not applicable” are no longer counted as fully online. Overall, 19% of Government of Canada services are online end-to-end, instead of 45%. This more closely matches the official methodology recently published on the GC InfoBase website. Back in early 2020 I wrote a blog post about the quality of federal government services (something that my career is...| Sean Boots
Matthew Cain in the UK published a great blog post recently titled “Leadership in a digital age”. It outlines a series of leadership attributes for digital leaders and organizations, and makes the great point that having a deeper understanding of technology solutions may not actually lead to a more effective digital-era organization. Technology expertise is not the same as “running a user needs-focused organization that works well” expertise, which is ultimately what public sector org...| 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
Our team often uses Jekyll and GitHub Pages to build micro-sites for project documentation. Jekyll is a static website builder, which makes it easy to build and deploy essentially indestructible (although usually not interactive) websites. Similar tools include Hugo (my go-to for mostcivictechprojects), Gatsby (which powers “Is this blocked in my department?”), and Eleventy (which I’ve only used once, but found really easy to use). Jekyll is the OG of static websites and it’s a bit da...| Sean Boots
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
Heather and I moved to the Yukon about a year and a half ago. Last February, shortly before the pandemic, the Yukon government did a public consultation on getting rid of daylight savings time changes. When the results came in, 93% of Yukoners were in favour of stopping seasonal time changes. Let’s just say… I was stoked. As someone who grew up in Saskatchewan and never experienced daylight savings time changes growing up (Saskatchewan is on permanent daylight time), I’ve always been my...| Sean Boots
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
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
A couple weeks ago, I was able to tune in to FWD50, an annual Canadian digital government conference. One of the themes from the first day onwards was this concept, that government institutions are tech companies without realizing it. Just like “every company is a software company”, public sector institutions need to think differently about how they work, and what leadership they have, in order to be successful today.| sboots.ca
A few weeks ago, there was a great profile in Maclean’s of the person behind the CAFinUS Twitter account. CAFinUS is the official account for the Canadian Armed Forces working in the United States, and the account is run by Capt. Kirk Sullivan, based at the Canadian embassy in Washington DC. It’s worth a read, especially given how much of an anomaly the CAFinUS account is in comparison to practically any other Government of Canada social media account.| sboots.ca
We’ve all been there, fellow public servants. You’re copying and pasting something from some obligatory government website into some obligatory government Word document. You hit “Paste”, and your Microsoft Word freezes up for a painful few seconds, then proceeds to turn the formatting of the entire remainder of your Word document into a strange and bewildering hybrid of the fonts and colours of the website you just pasted. It’s been this way for decades. The struggle is real: does a...| Sean Boots
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
Since the start of the year, one of my goals was to write a new blog post every few weeks. Although the blog here has been quiet, it turns out there’s been a lot going on over the past couple months! Getting back into a regular blogging routine is something I’m really looking forward to.| sboots.ca
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
The past couple weeks have seen an outpouring of grief, protests, and calls for change following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. Floyd’s murder, by police, is not a one-off. For Black Americans – and Black Canadians – police violence and systemic racism is an everyday and ongoing problem. As a white, male Canadian, it’s hard to know how to talk about police violence and racism without coming across as performative or inauthentic. Well-intention...| Sean Boots
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
It’s been a strange, unfamiliar, and in a lot of ways distressing past few weeks for people. My default approach is to try to find the silver linings in any situation; now doesn’t feel like the moment.| sboots.ca
I read a great post this week from Robin Rendle, about design systems and about the mismatch between how people describe their work publicly and how it’s really going on the inside: “My hunch is this: folks can’t talk about real design systems problems because it will show their company as being dysfunctional and broken in some way. But hiding those mistakes and shortcomings by glossing over everything doesn’t just make it harder for us personally, it hinders progress within the field...| sboots.ca
“Agile” gets mentioned enough in digital government work that can sometimes seem like it applies to everything: is anything not agile? But there’s a deeper meaning behind it that’s easy to miss: adding agile practices without removing established, “waterfall” processes that slow a team down is a recipe for frustration. Being agile means choosing one approach over another, and deliberately prioritizing what you spend your time on.| 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
A lot has happened since I originally planned to start a blog. On the plus side: I started a blog! I’m only 6 years or so late.| sboots.ca
Below are a set of radical (but implementable) ideas that would make the public service better equipped to handle the challenges of today and tomorrow. We need to invest in state capacity in Canada, and that starts with changing our public service structures, processes, and organizational culture for the better.| sboots.ca
Working on COVID Alert has definitely been a career highlight, in a lot of unexpected ways. As of this week more than 4.8 million people have downloaded the app, and 2,600 people have used it to alert people close to them about their COVID exposure. For everyone that has worked on COVID Alert, it’s humbling and daunting to be part of something at this scale. COVID Alert also included some extra geeky “firsts” in the Canadian government that I was really thrilled to see, all related to w...| sboots.ca
Deepika Grover is a strategist at Finance Canada, a member of the Free Agents program, and a long-time practitioner and advocate for equity, inclusion and anti-racism work in the federal public service. Deepika has played a role in many of the public service’s innovation programs over the years. We’ve been friends on social media for many years and I’m always grateful for her thoughtful and candid insights on how to make the public service better. We chatted by email in February, follow...| sboots.ca
Nick Wise is a long-time technology leader in the Canadian public service, most recently serving as the Chief Information Officer of Public Safety Canada. Previously as an executive director in the Office of the CIO, he was responsible for the GCtools team and for the small team that became the Canadian Digital Service. I’ll always be grateful for Nick’s insightful and humble style of leadership, and for his thoughtful stewardship of the teams he led. We chatted by email in October.| sboots.ca
Sameer Vasta is a founding member of the Ontario Digital Service and one of the kindest human beings I know. He currently works on the Talent team at the Ontario Digital Service and until recently taught the “Government in a Digital Era” course at the University of Waterloo’s Masters of Public Service program. Sameer is on the board of several community organizations, an advisor to a number of small non-profits, and a mentor to early-career public servants. We chatted by email in June.| sboots.ca
Ryan Hum is the Chief Information Officer and VP of Data at the Canada Energy Regulator (CER), a federal agency based in Calgary, Alberta. He’s an inspiration to so many of the best designers and design researchers I know in government, and he’s championed user research work at PCO, at IRCC, and in projects with a wide range of departments. At the CER, his team has done above-and-beyond work in data visualization, mapping, open data, and technology transformation. We spoke on July 7.| sboots.ca
Christopher Scipio is a long-time champion for a more diverse, equitable, and anti-racist public service. He’s currently the senior strategic advisor to the Black Executives Network, and has previously worked in a number of policy roles at DND, ESDC, ISED, and Justice Canada. We’ve been Twitter friends since 2014 and his perspectives on the challenges facing the public service today are always insightful, candid, and eye-opening. We chatted by email in August.| sboots.ca
Aubrie McGibbon is a long-time open data and public sector innovation expert with the Nova Scotia government. They’re currently the data strategy lead for the Nova Scotia Digital Service, and they previously co-led NS Govlab, Nova Scotia’s first social innovation lab. Aubrie and I have been Twitter friends since my very first month working in government; I’m so glad they could be part of the series. We chatted by email in June.| sboots.ca
Short feedback loops are the secret to good software (and good IT projects), and years-long, pre-planned waterfall approaches are a fundamental barrier to achieving them. In the Canadian government, “project gating” is the main form this takes, where departmental teams seek approval (one gate at a time) to initiate a project, to get funding, to outline a project plan, an implementation plan, and a variety of other steps that eventually lead to building or procuring an IT system. Project g...| sboots.ca
In the federal public service, so many of the building blocks of digital government and tech modernization are thanks to Chris Allison. An early leader of the GCtools team and the CSPS Digital Academy, he’s now the Chief Data Officer at the Public Health Agency of Canada. He’s also perhaps the only senior federal public service leader who is fluent in Python programming. He’s a lifelong hero and inspiration of mine; we spoke on May 3.| sboots.ca
A few years back I remember reading about bike infrastructure improvements in Seville, Spain, where the city had built 80 kilometres of protected bicycle lanes in 18 months. The key to Seville’s approach was starting and finishing the infrastructure project within a single mayoral political term. Government IT projects could learn a lot from this. DM and ADM turnover is estimated at 1-3 years in the same department; most major IT projects outlast the executives that are nominally in charge ...| sboots.ca
Beth Fox is a service designer and digital strategy lead at the Nova Scotia Digital Service. She’s an amazing public speaker, a champion for users, an occasional blogger, a maker of awesome stickers and buttons, and one of my first-ever public service Twitter friends. We chatted on May 3. Ask her about her (excellent) sound-check warm-up phrases.| sboots.ca
When I rejoined the federal government in 2016, our team’s desks were around the corner from a large team working on a financial management transformation project – the walls of their area covered in mesmerizing, plotter-printed posters. This was my first introduction to enterprise architecture. If you haven’t worked in government IT, it can be hard to describe, but if you’ve seen business capability models, target state architectures, TOGAF frameworks, or architecture review committe...| sboots.ca
Honey Dacanay is a digital government legend in Canada – part of the founding team at the Ontario Digital Service, and an early leader of the CSPS Digital Academy. She currently works on Service Canada’s Digital & Client Data team and teaches at McMaster’s Public Policy in Digital Society program. Honey is a longtime inspiration both for her digital policy and legislation work, and for her writing and speaking on digital government. We chatted on April 25.| sboots.ca
I’m really thrilled to be kicking off this series of blog posts with Rumon Carter, a hero of mine for years since I first saw his work with the BC Dev Exchange. He replied immediately after I reached out, rejected the “hero” label entirely, and we chatted the following day on April 21.| sboots.ca
Although our public service institutions are full of systemic issues and barriers to change, the people within these organizations are brilliant and inspiring. I’m really lucky to have met public servants that are lifelong inspirations, from the very start of my career to today. Over the months ahead, I’ll be sharing small interviews with public servants that I really look up to. I’m calling this series “Public service heroes”, because I think we should celebrate the awesome and oft...| sboots.ca
Last week, Kathryn May published an article in Policy Options titled “Speaking truth to power discouraged in public service”, based on a recent report from the Institute on Governance. It lines up with a consistent observation: public servants are frequently unable to provide fearless advice to the more senior public servants above them, let alone to political leaders and ministers several steps further removed. That has important consequences for the effectiveness of our public service w...| sboots.ca
It’s April, so like most Canadians, I spent a lot of time logging in to the Canada Revenue Agency and other government websites. The CRA’s login system is better than most of the 60 or so separate login systems used by federal government departments, but it’s still not very user-friendly. Fortunately, there’s a commitment to improve this – “a common and secure approach for a trusted digital identity platform” – in the most recent mandate letter for the President of the Treasu...| 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
Last week I was invited to be a panelist for the Canada School of Public Service’s Spring 2022 Digital Accelerator Demo Day. It was a really fascinating and inspiring event! Each of the teams that were part of the Digital Accelerator program had spent the previous 10 weeks working on a digital initiative; across the teams they represented a really interesting range of topic areas, from public facing services to data aggregation and visualization to potential career development programs.| 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
In a society and world where misinformation is a large-scale problem, public service habits that default to secrecy are not great. Generally speaking, public service work is only valuable based on the degree to which it interacts with the public and world at large. Fighting secrecy culture – and working as much in the open as possible – is a really important part of making the public service relevant and effective.| 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
Lee Berthiaume from the Canadian Press wrote a fascinating article last week, based on an internal Department of National Defence report on IT support. The report describes DND’s IT processes and systems as “out-of-date and poorly supported”, and blamed “onerous levels of oversight”. This is a persistent problem across federal government departments.| sboots.ca
It’s often hard to have conversations about public policy and technology where people on both sides of the discussion understand each other. Computer software – the programming code that makes software programs and systems work – can seem impossibly complicated and intimidating to people outside the tech industry. This post gives an introduction to ideas like interfaces, data, and math. These categories can help make computer software simpler and easier to understand, and as a result, h...| sboots.ca
As a public servant trying to get something approved up the hierarchy, the simplest definition of blockers versus enablers might be a “no” or “yes” at each level. In practice, however, the time it takes to receive these – and the quantity of approvals required – are bigger structural factors, regardless of how positive or supportive individual approvals are. This post dives into organizational blockers as a concept, with some potential strategies to mitigate them.| 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
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
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
One of the most persistent myths in Canadian government IT is that storing your data in Canada protects it against eavesdropping or interception by foreign governments. If someone on your government team has asked to use a new online tool and your reaction is, “no, you can’t, because it’s hosted in the United States,” this article is for you.| 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
“Working in the open” – blogging and talking about your work on social media – has become a lot more common in the past few years. As a federal public servant, though, it’s still sometimes hard to know what you are or aren’t allowed to talk about.| sboots.ca
If you’re creating documents, one of the most important things you can do is to use real headings. They’re easy to use and easy to customize, and they make a huge difference – both to people using accessibility tools and to anyone converting your document into a webpage or other format. Here’s a detailed guide on how to get started.| sboots.ca
One of the terms that comes up often in digital government work is “shipping”, or getting things out the door. Let’s take a look at why shipping is important, why it’s so hard, and ways to make it easier.| 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
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