Notes for an Address by
Mel Cappe
Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet
to the
Crossing Boundaries National Conference
Ottawa, Ontario
March 30, 2001
Check Against Delivery
Introduction
- After all, most of you are in this room because you understand the profound importance of technology and the transformation of government that is taking place because of technology.
- You have a sense of what E-Government means and its potential benefits for Canada and Canadians. You’re also deeply aware of the issues we have to navigate on the way to E-Government — issues like privacy and security, where the margin of error is very narrow. Any transformation as significant as this is going to be challenging, and we need to be able to face those challenges and solve those problems.
- If anything, we need some guru – and I’m not it — to reach out to all Canadians and explain why E-Government is important to them.
- As for me, I’ve been asked to focus on government structures and how they should change to meet the demands of E-Government.
- But I disagree. It is a false dichotomy to say that you either have departments or networks. It is not a choice – we need both. The claim that we have watertight departmental boxes doesn’t mesh with reality, and it hasn’t for years.
- That didn’t mean he was confined to it, but it meant he lived with it. And he worked to transform himself to get beyond it. And that’s what I think we need to do in facing this challenge of living with a departmental model, for which there are many good reasons, and yet networking and using the network to get out and change the way we function. It’s the way we function that is so important.
- But the departmental model is not sufficient. We need to challenge the status quo and look at ways to bring network functionality into the departmental model.
- First, the real challenge of E-Government is that we just don’t know what is possible. We don’t know where this transformation is leading. But we need to plan for this dramatic change. Afterall, the reason we plan is because we know we’re going to end up somewhere else.
- It also means we need flexible structures that can enable adaptation, no matter what direction E-Government takes us.
- Second, the departmental model has that adaptive capacity. It meets our need to respect key governance principles such as clear accountability to Parliament and Canadians. And it has accommodated major growth in horizontal and collaborative action.
- Third, E-Government is less about structures than it is about people. And if I have to emphasize one message, it is the profound significance and importance of people – the way we prepare them, the way we hire them, the way we train them, the way we as managers are trained and train ourselves, and the way we lead.
- For me, the "E" in E-Government stands for E-nabled government, a modern institution that delivers different and better programs and services to Canadians.
Aiming Beyond the Horizon — The Challenge of Defining E-Government
- This was a challenge to the department to get out ahead of the way. To recognize that what the public wanted from government was more than simply brochures, that there was a demand for putting scientific, technical and other information on-line – for putting helpful, useful information like weather services on-line.
- And so we experimented, and we got a Webmaster and put many of our services on-line. We created a portal that allowed people from all different parts of the department to interact with their clientele. And this was in the early part of the ‘90s.
- The Green Lane has evolved into a trailblazer on how to put government information on-line. It has grown as our understanding of what we can do on-line has evolved.
- By then, we knew that Canadians wanted to get services over the Internet but we also learned not to trust simplistic assumptions.
- For example, we learned that Canadians of all ages, including a lot of seniors, want those Web services — people like my own mother, who we call E-Grandma because of her use of e-mail.
- We also learned that electronic options complement other channels of service delivery like phone or in-person. They don’t replace them and they don’t replace the costs of providing them — at least not if your service delivery is really responsive to citizens’ preferences.
- That means we need to be flexible and focus on the kinds of outcomes that we want to achieve, while being open to adjusting direction quickly to take advantage of new ways of achieving those outcomes.
- In fact, most of our services have high information content attached to them. They are about complex information, not relatively simple services.
- The challenge is to take the information-complex programs and services and put them on-line in a way that is going to improve public confidence and not undermine it.
- For example, I have a cell phone account and a home telephone account, and the telephone company can’t give me a single bill. The company is working on it. They’re trying to do it, and eventually they will. But don’t tell me that government is the only one that lives in a silo.
- Last summer, I moved. I went to my local bank to change my address for my bank account but I could not change my Visa address at the bank, even though they’re the ones who gave me the Visa card.
- While the woman at the bank was very nice, she was limited by the technology. And she was limited by the technology for a reason. Because the technology required accountabilities within the different corporate silos in order to meet corporate objectives, and to have accountability. Just as in government, the departmental model exists to maintain accountability.
- So we can learn from the private sector about what it does well. And we can learn from the private sector about what not to do.
The Resilience of the Departmental Model
- Canadians expect the Public Service to be clearly accountable to Parliament through ministers. Canadians expect those ministers and the Prime Minister to be accountable to them as citizens. This is a cornerstone of our Westminster parliamentary democracy.
- But as government becomes better at connecting to citizens, we run the risk of disintermediating members of Parliament. Members of Parliament need to find innovative ways to help bring government to the people and to help bring people to government in order to solve problems.
- The departmental model cannot live in an inflexible and watertight compartment world. We must find ways of doing things in a horizontal and collaborative fashion and work beyond departmental boundaries. We’re trying, we’re learning, we’ve still got a long way to go.
- We underlined the importance of cultural change and leadership for making interdepartmental co-operation and teamwork standard ways of working, and we underlined the importance of strengthening horizontal policy development capacities.
- And it’s happening. Today, all federal departments, other levels of government and other partners in our society and our economy are working together more than ever.
- You’ve already heard about our Government On-Line work. So let me just remind everyone that the redesigned Canada.gc.ca portal, which was launched by the Prime Minister and Grade six students this past January, was the result of a team effort that involved cross-departmental committees and working groups.
- In many of these cases, this means more than collaboration within the Government of Canada.
- It means collaboration with other levels of governments and the private sector, with the voluntary sector, and with individual Canadians — as part of strengthening a social fabric that we all have an interest in.
- It also means a new level of accountability.
- One is a commitment to accountability to Canadians using clear and comparable measures of achievement.
- The other is the agreement to work closely together through intergovernmental vehicles and to work with outside organizations on specific issues.
- There are still silos that we must work to break down. Technology can help us in this regard. However, security remains a key concern when it comes to using technology to share information.
- Privacy is also a critical impediment to the wholesale use of horizontal approaches. And the challenge is not just that government agencies are held to an extraordinarily high standard by the public — that’s understandable — but that we haven’t fully determined how to best meet that standard yet.
- As Minister Robillard explained, we are working to address both privacy and security issues as part of our Government On-Line initiative.
- Mr. Martin spoke about the death of distance. I want to leave you with a thought about "multi-directionality" – where information and ideas move in all directions and an almost infinite number of people are connected to each other instantaneously.
- I don’t want to throw more jargon into this debate, but I do want to say that I think it is critical that we think about using networks to get information out and to break down the barriers of departments, but not to avoid them.
- Also, if we find ourselves with fewer hierarchical networks and a lot of individual input in the policy-making mix, then how do we sift for quality and how do we ensure that we involve a wide and balanced cross section of Canadians?
- Go a step further. How do we ensure that members of Parliament are not disintermediated as the representatives of their constituents? And how do we meet the continuing need for accountability, given the reality of the Westminster parliamentary system?
People are Central to Building E-Government
- By that I mean people who can work effectively across departmental, program or other borders; who see issues in a broader, horizontal context; and who understand that information has value when it is shared and that teamwork and collaboration are key to innovation and productivity.
- I mean people who can grasp the potential of E-Government and turn that potential into a reality that is consistent with our public sector values.
- We are focussing on recruitment, retention and learning, with emphasis on increasing the diversity of the Public Service and attracting bright, motivated young women and men.
- We want young people to join the Public Service to get valuable experience, and we hope that many of them will want to stay for a career.
- As Minister Robillard noted, ensuring we have the knowledge workers we need and ensuring that they have the tools, learning and infrastructure to deliver in an electronic world is key.
- We are positioning the Government of Canada as a place where people can make a difference on the key issues that affect this country and our world — and here is where the human resources priorities and the E-Government agenda mesh particularly well.
- We want to attract, keep and foster the kind of people who can work with the transformation of E-Government in Canada. They will be the ones who help us tap the power of new ideas, new partnerships and new technologies to link people, ideas and options.
- We operate in a world of resource limits. We ask hard questions. We want to hear about how we can get better results and how we can reinforce the values that are our enduring strength.
Conclusion
- First, the E-Government world is more complex than just automating basic service transactions, as important as that process is. We are aiming for better outcomes in a climate of constant change but with some very real challenges when it comes to issues such as privacy and security.
- As Reg Alcock, the Member of Parliament for Winnipeg South, has said, "Government has to innovate, not just automate." This truly captures the challenge that we face. The automation part is relatively simple, the innovation part is hard.
- Second, the departmental model promises to be with us for some time to come because it meets the expectations of Canadians and parliamentarians on needs such as accountability. More than that, it has proven that it has the flexibility to accommodate more horizontal and collaborative approaches to address public policy questions.
- Third, while there is more to do to move us in the direction of the more networked strategies, we are certain that, by strengthening and modernizing the Public Service, we will do a lot to create the climate we need for innovation.
- We will have to do more to encourage collaboration within government and with other sectors of society.
- We will have to be continually alert to opportunities and encourage innovation.
- And we will have to focus on people, the people of the Public Service, to get us there.