The slow, stately march to transform government services could soon become a bit disorderly. In some eyes, the transformation parade revealed a few weaknesses as it passed the reviewing stand at this year’s Lac Carling Congress. There is no identifiable parade marshal, after all. At every fork in the road, the parade slows or halts while negotiations take place among the leading marchers. But in the ranks behind, the most recent recruits to the parade are intent on marching briskly forward, protocol be damned.
The new marchers are municipalities. They have someplace they want to go. They might not be willing to march in line. And they are, by and large, an impatient and outspoken lot....every time we start talking about a project, its scope grows...So we end up in analysis paralysis, and never get on with it.
Per Kristensen> “Just do it!” was the exhortation from one municipal delegate during the opening plenary session, when delegates were discussing issues to be raised and organizations to be consulted before recommendations could be made to a committee to consider a study of a potential initiative.
The interjector was Per Kristensen, chief technology officer of the City of Nanaimo, B.C., and one of the founders of an emerging municipal IT association called MISA/ASIM Canada.
Kristensen spoke afterward of the frustration felt by municipal IT delegates with the pace of service delivery advancements as discussed at Lac Carling.
“At this conference, every time we start talking about a project, its scope grows. You get scope creep. People say, ‘We should do this, but we also need to consider this and this and this and this.’ So we end up in analysis paralysis, and never get on with it.”
This is a new drumbeat for Lac Carling. It comes from a group that, until last year, had hardly been heard from at all. It was only at the 2004 conference, under the influence of co-chair Peter Bennett of Winnipeg and growing municipal involvement in pilot projects, that delegates voted to make “engaging municipalities” one of the highest-priority recommendations to the Public Sector CIO Council and the Public Sector Service Delivery Council.
This year, it was clear that delegates now generally accept the view expressed during the Political Leaders Panel by Ann MacLean, mayor of New Glasgow, N.S., and president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities: “Governments must work together,” MacLean said. “We cannot work in silos. Cities and communities must be involved. They must be essential partners, because it is at our cities and communities where the federal, provincial and territorial policies are implemented. They are the front line of government.”
Newly included, municipal delegates this year quickly moved to a new position, but with a measure of contradiction: They want to be recognized and consulted by other levels of government in planning the transformation of service delivery – but they don’t want to wait while the consultations proceed.
Kevin Peacock, branch manager of corporate information services with the City of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, expressed the commonly held municipal view: “In all the Lac Carling conferences I’ve been coming to in the past few years, there has been a lot of talk from the senior levels of government and very little action.
“I think they’ve got some great strategies, some great ideas, but they have shown very little ability to implement them. The municipal governments are smaller, more nimble and with less bureaucracy, and I think we are in a position to start pushing from the bottom up.
“Now that we have a voice and are forming a national association, we should start focusing on becoming the group that makes things happen.”
MISA/ASIM Canada
The growing municipal presence was reflected in the formal establishment of MISA/ASIM Canada (Municipal Information Systems Association/Association des systèmes d’information municipale Canada). Formation of the new group actually began at Lac Carling 2004, when municipal delegates appointed a development committee. That became the interim executive of MISA/ASIM Canada).
On the evening before the opening of this year’s Lac Carling Congress, 10 municipal delegates signed a memorandum of agreement to promote a national association to serve as their common voice.
There were two signatories from each of five municipal IT organizations: MISA chapters in British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario and Atlantic Canada, as well as the Réseau de l’Informatique Municipale du Québec, known as RIMQ. The signatories agreed to ask the executives of their organizations to formally agree to join MISA/ASIM Canada by Oct. 1.
Membership would be based on a draft By-laws and Operations Manual created through a series of teleconferences since October 2004 by the MISA/ASIM Canada interim executive chaired by Kevin Peacock.
As the culmination of months of work, the signing of the MOU at Lac Carling might have been a celebration, but the atmosphere was somber because of the sudden death of Peter Bennett two days before. Much liked and respected as a municipal IT pioneer, Bennett had been president of MISA Prairie and a founding member of the interim executive. One of the first decisions after signing the MOU was to create an award in Bennett’s name, to be presented annually to a person who has made outstanding contributions to the development of municipal e-government. Bennett himself will be the first recipient.
The first formal meeting of MISA/ASIM Canada, and election of the first members of its permanent executive, is planned for next year’s Lac Carling Congress. Leaders from other levels of government were enthusiastic about this new body.
Broader Perspective Needed
Despite the enthusiasm for it, MISA/ASIM Canada cannot be expected to provide all of the municipal perspective needed at Lac Carling or other inter-jurisdictional meetings. People who participate in MISA chapters and in RIMQ on behalf of their member municipalities are almost all information technology managers and professionals. They are not senior managers, nor do they manage service-delivery channels or business units.
Nor is MISA/ASIM Canada represented on PSSDC, for example; municipalities are represented on the service-delivery council solely by Philip Clark, director of client service and public information for the City of Ottawa. The 32 municipal delegates at Lac Carling recognized the need either to bring more service delivery representation into MISA/ASIM Canada or to work more closely with other municipal organizations, such as FCM.
For its part, FCM intends to participate more actively in addressing national service delivery issues, Ann MacLean told delegates.
MISA/ASIM Canada, in contrast, does not see itself as working at the 30,000-foot level. It represents municipal delegates who have their feet on the ground and want to move them.
Kristensen sees the municipal role as achieving some-thing concrete that points the way forward for the other levels of government, who can then figure out all the angles.
“We deal with the user interface, the client interface, and that’s the place to start,” he said. “Let’s just identify a problem and find a solution that solves 80 per cent of it, and recognize that the other 20 per cent perhaps needs to be handled in some special way. But don’t try to consider all the factors and analyze it to death. Get on with it!”
National Contributions Municipalities can already point to two initiatives in which the cause of e-government has been advanced by municipalities who just got on with it: The Municipal Reference Model and 3-1-1.
The concept of services mapping was pioneered in the early 1990s by municipalities
