A new report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says the federal public service could shed almost 60,000 jobs over the next four years as Ottawa looks to cut costs.
Tech could be an answer, but you have to also pause and think about the impact here. When FB or twitter screws up we shrug and move on, when people get improperly audited it could be literally life and death situation, or approval of drug grants for those with “exotic” illnesses. Modernisation of work has to happen however “just throwing tech” at it won’t work. Instead of laying off 60k people they should be trained and equipped with better tools to do their jobs faster and better. So tech would be part if that, tech alone is a sure recipe for disaster. Now if we add government tech procurement standards - I see no hope in tech at all as surely winner of any contract will deliver past due date, over budget and with missing features.
One way to flip it would be mandating procurement OSS products only, produced in the open from day 1. This may help expose deficiencies early on and call BS o over-billed hours if all commits are accounted for. Still you need people with domain knowledge to steer those processes and to be able to actually scope future solutions.
The reason I think every department needs an internal tech team is precisely because “just throwing tech” doesn’t work. We need bespoke tailored solutions to the specific problems that workers are dealing with.
Now if we add government tech procurement standards - I see no hope in tech at all as surely winner of any contract will deliver past due date, over budget and with missing features.
This is exactly the problem having internal teams building internal tools solves. You’re not stuck waiting to go from 0 to 100% on an expensive project with long runway and out of date standards until finally the consultants to toss a solutoin over the fence and leave because they want to get the minimum done and move on to their next paycheque.
You can only do tech really well by understanding the domain and problem, and the people working on it.
I definitely think we should be going big on both OSS and Canadian owned tech. I don’t expect the government to build Office, they should be using (and ideally contributing to) OSS. On the other hand, Statistics Canada has a ton of open sourced code that might as well be closed source, and would probably help them move quicker.
Tech could be an answer, but you have to also pause and think about the impact here. When FB or twitter screws up we shrug and move on, when people get improperly audited it could be literally life and death situation, or approval of drug grants for those with “exotic” illnesses. Modernisation of work has to happen however “just throwing tech” at it won’t work. Instead of laying off 60k people they should be trained and equipped with better tools to do their jobs faster and better. So tech would be part if that, tech alone is a sure recipe for disaster. Now if we add government tech procurement standards - I see no hope in tech at all as surely winner of any contract will deliver past due date, over budget and with missing features.
One way to flip it would be mandating procurement OSS products only, produced in the open from day 1. This may help expose deficiencies early on and call BS o over-billed hours if all commits are accounted for. Still you need people with domain knowledge to steer those processes and to be able to actually scope future solutions.
The reason I think every department needs an internal tech team is precisely because “just throwing tech” doesn’t work. We need bespoke tailored solutions to the specific problems that workers are dealing with.
This is exactly the problem having internal teams building internal tools solves. You’re not stuck waiting to go from 0 to 100% on an expensive project with long runway and out of date standards until finally the consultants to toss a solutoin over the fence and leave because they want to get the minimum done and move on to their next paycheque.
You can only do tech really well by understanding the domain and problem, and the people working on it.
I definitely think we should be going big on both OSS and Canadian owned tech. I don’t expect the government to build Office, they should be using (and ideally contributing to) OSS. On the other hand, Statistics Canada has a ton of open sourced code that might as well be closed source, and would probably help them move quicker.