OTTAWA -- A
busy day one at the Canada's Government Technology Event (GTEC) is in
the books. I filed a piece on what shared services and procurement
reform could mean for the channel and colleague Dave Webb reported on
timeline and potential savings, but here's a look at some
of the other news and notes that caught my eye on Tuesday in the
halls of the Ottawa Convention Centre.
Shared services
buzz: For the channel partners, the technology vendors, and
certainly the government technology workers attending GTEC 2011, the
buzz is around the government's move to a shared services model for
IT service delivery and procurement, and all stakeholders were
listening carefully to keynotes from Treasury Board president Tony
Clement and federal CIO Corinne Charette for more hints on where the
government is going here. There's a general feeling that more
specific details on the direction are needed, but the partners I've
spoken to are generally positive on the direction. They're taxpayers
too, after all, and the government isn't talking about anything that
hasn't been the norm in the private sector for years. But it's not
surprising that the partners attending GTEC are bullish: they're the
ones that are engaged, and have made that transition up the
value-stack from box-pusher to trusted adviser. It's those that
aren't at the conference that are probably concerned, and with
reason: change is coming and it's not going to wait for them to catch
up.
Where the feds are
still spending on IT: Just because the government is
looking to cut costs across the board, including in IT, doesn't mean
they're not still investing in strategic areas of technology, and
there were hints on where the channel should focus on day one at
GTEC. Video got a shout-out from Clement, signalling the government
will be looking to "high-definition immersive video" or
video-conferencing to help cut travel budgets and support. He's as
interested in modernizing government as cutting costs, also pointing
to social media as a tool for citizen engagement. And fCharette
pointed to cloud computing as an area the government is exploring,
and will be looking to vendors and the channel for best-practice
advice on.
An iPad cabinet:
Clement also has a pet technology project of his own in mind that, if
adopted widely, will provide major channel opportunity around both
hardware as well as document management software and services: he
wants to take cabinet paperless. The minister, who like many
ministers and MPs has a Parliament of Canada-issued Apple iPad, is
drawing inspiration from the Dutch government's recent move to take
its cabinet paperless. He'd like to do the same in Canada, replacing
the "reams of paper" to cabinet ministers and their staff
for every cabinet meeting with electronic documents they can access
on their tablets. He plans to start by taking the Treasury Board
committee, which he chairs, completely paperless, and if that pilot
proves successful work to roll it out across the rest of the cabinet.
Three critical
leadership lessons for times of change: History shows that
you can have the best idea in the world but, if you don't manage your
team through the change by bringing them on board, it can easily go
off the rails. As the federal public service embarks on a major
change exercise around shared services, Carol Stephenson, dean of the
Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario
and a former IT executive that managed through a lot of change,
shared three critical lessons she has learned managing in times of
change. The first is to not just talk, but listen, and engage your
team in making decisions around implementing the changes. The second
is to build a clear set of values amongst your team, and live those
values. And the third is to understand the big picture and what it
means for your group, but also what it means for others. The goal,
she said, is to foster a environment where people buy into the change
and contribute to making that change happen.
GTEC is back:
I attended my first GTEC back at the height of the technology bubble
around 2000 and it was a massive conference, taking over the Westin
Hotel, the Ottawa Congress Centre and the movie theatres in the
Rideau Centre Mall. Over the intervening years the show shrunk, and
seemed to have a questionable future. This year may mark a turnaround
for the event though, with organizers expecting over 7000 people for
the week's conference sessions and trade show. Many of the day one
break-outs were packed, with some turning people away as the rooms
had reached their fire marshal-mandated capacity. And part of the
momentum is around the location, in Ottawa's beautiful newly-opened
Convention Centre, with it's glass wall and panoramic vista of the
Rideau Canal and Parliament. The new venue also allows all the
sessions to be under one roof, after construction forced them to
disperse last year. We'll see if the momentum can continue to next
year, but it bodes well for public sector IT in Canada.
And so is Cisco:
After an absence of several years at GTEC, Cisco Systems is back. And
with a bang, as the lead sponsor of the event. Cisco Canada's
vice-president of public sector, Kim Devooght, told me Cisco is
looking to send a message with its heavy presence at GTEC: the
networking vendor is making a large, renewed push for public sector
business in Canada. With its heavy push around the network-centric
data centre, no doubt Cisco is eyeing shared services and the
government's planned data centre consolidation initiative and sees
big opportunity for the vendor and its channel partners.