The 10th Lac Carling Congress may have been a watershed event.It marked the emergence of municipalities as the project directorswho are taking citizen-centred service delivery beyond theconceptual stage - to a work in progress.
Answers have begun to emerge at the municipal level to questionsthat have plagued participants at Lac Carling for years: How can wedemonstrate a compelling case for interjurisdictional servicealignment? How can we get politicians and the public to payattention?
How can we develop structures on which to build servicetransformation? A groundswell of activity is beginning to build atthe municipal level.
Not all of it has been initiated by the municipalitiesthemselves, but the results are visible there at points of servicedelivery.
A program here, an initiative there - not enough momentum yet tobe broadly noticeable, but perhaps enough to show that a new era iscoming.
Among the signs:
A couple of projects are beginning to provide models for howinterjurisdictional service delivery can work.
Some of the technological foundations necessary for servicetransformation are being addressed collaboratively.
New service delivery structures are being created that aresaving money and attracting political support.
It was appropriate that these trends surfaced at Lac Carling X,where the theme was "Applying What We Have Learned" and where the35 municipal delegates represented fully one-quarter of the totalgovernment contingent.
Since municipalities began sending significant numbers ofrepresentatives to Lac Carling three years ago, they have let it beknown that they were eager for action.
Both formal sessions and informal conversations showed howmunicipalities are discovering their role in creating the edificeof citizen-centred service - not necessarily as planners orarchitects, but as the developers, construction crews and interiordesigners who turn concepts into concrete.
Lessons From Projects
Municipalities have been involved with all three of thebest-known interjurisdictional projects of recent years - BizPaL,the Seniors Partnership and eContact.
eContact has stalled for lack of funds and leadership, but theothers appear to be providing models that could be applied tofuture projects - and, significantly, are attracting long-awaitedpolitical attention.
BizPaL (www.bizpal.ca) is apermit and licence identification system.
Integrated into municipal Web sites or portals, it givesbusiness owners and entrepreneurs a single point of contact so theycan find out what permits and licences their businesses will needfrom municipal, provincial/territorial and federal governments.
BizPaL has become the standard-bearer for interjurisdictionalprojects in recent months. No fewer than seven sets of co-ordinatednews releases have been issued since December 2005 about BizPaL,led by its creator and champion, Industry Canada.
Most of the releases have announced new partners in theinitiative.
BizPal is now offered by:
Whitehorse and seven other municipalities in the Yukon;Kamloops, BC; Saskatoon and the Province of Saskatchewan, which hasplans to expand the service to Regina and Moose Jaw; The Region ofHalton, Ontario, and two of its towns, Halton Hills and Milton,with the nearby City of Burlington soon to join them; The Cityof Ottawa; Natural Resources Canada, which recently created BizPaLPlus, a pilot project to help natural resource businesses engagedin wind power development and mineral exploration in BritishColumbia, and mineral exploration in the Yukon, by providinginformation on government approvals and other requirements.
BizPaL won a Public Service Award of Excellence announced aspart of the National Public Service Week activities in June.
Industry Canada's BizPaL Secretariat and its partners fromacross Canada won in the category of Excellence in Citizen-focusedService Delivery.
"It's really energizing to be involved with a project likethis," says Jane Kralick, senior project officer with the BizPaLSecretariat in Ottawa. "It's breaking new ground."
The model works partly because it delivers services and benefitsat the municipal level, where they are most visible, withoutdemanding municipal investment to sustain it.
Participants such as Ralph Blauel, technology director for theRegion of Halton, and Frank Mayhood, manager of IT for the City ofKamloops, report that BizPal has produced genuine improvements inservice delivery. Mayhood told a Lac Carling X plenary session:
"The process mapping that we went through exposed all kinds ofinteresting ways to redress redundancies in our organizations.
We've already made some changes in our business processes toreduce the burden on businesses.
There are opportunities for that across all of thejurisdictions.
BizPaL also works because it standardizes back-end processes andtaxonomy while providing flexibility to partner organizations toadapt the service to meet local needs.
"The key part of the BizPaL project in my mind is that we'vemanaged with this technology to separate branding from delivery,"Mayhood said.
"We can maintain our own identities and still participate in ashared delivery process."
More growth is targeted.
The 2006 federal budget allocated $6 million over two years tothe expansion of BizPaL, and provincial partners are alsocontributing to its cost.
There is no uncertainty over the commitment to BizPaL.
Seniors Portal Using a similarly successful model - top-downfunding, bottom-up service delivery - the federal and Ontariogovernments have revived the Collaborative Seniors PortalNetwork.
They have established a pilot project involving 20municipalities, which they hope will be a model for delivery ofinformation about services for senior citizens across thecountry.
"I think this might be the critical mass that we're lookingfor," Joanne Harrington, director of the Seniors Cluster atVeterans Affairs Canada (on secondment to Treasury BoardSecretariat CIO Branch) said in an interview at Lac Carling X.
The 20 small, rural Ontario municipalities will each beallocated their own pages within www.seniorsinfo.ca.
Aside from finding people to manage the content of their pages,the municipalities are not paying to participate in thisproject.
Funds come mostly from the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship andImmigration, with some help from Veterans Affairs Canada.
"With this pilot project, families and caregivers in thosecommunities are going to have access to standardized informationacross federal, provincial and local community programs andservices," Harrington said.
As with BizPaL, the driving force behind the CollaborativeSeniors Portal Network is a federal department with spending cloutand a vision for collaborative service delivery.
The initiative had been largely invisible since 2003, when aseniors' portal was established in Brockville, Ont., but VeteransAffairs spent most of 2005 developing a new business andtechnological architecture for the portal.
Ontario followed suit, and by November last year had developed afive-year plan and a framework that they were ready to offer tosmall municipalities.
"Any other province should be able to pick this up and replicateit because it was done in a generic way," said Walter Bilyk,director of technology and business solutions for the CommunityServices I&IT Cluster, which supports the seniors portfolio inthe Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.
The ministry has developed a five-year plan to expand theportal, and the project has at least some degree of politicalsupport - a letter from Citizenship and Immigration Minister MikeColle helped recruit the 20 municipalities - but the future of theCollaborative Seniors Portal Network will largely depend onVeterans Affairs.
The federal department has a 12-month budget in place for theportal network and is working on its long-term strategy, Bilycksaid, adding, "There is a renewed interest by the federalgovernment to move this across the country."
The Way to Authentication
It is often said that casual conversations at Lac Carling are asimportant as the formal sessions.
At Lac Carling X, delegates from the municipal and federallevels of government started to talk seriously for the first timeabout finding a mutually workable way for citizens to beidentified, authenticated and authorized to obtain governmentservices and carry out transactions.
"You've got to admit that, from the taxpayers' point of view, ifthey know they can buy their dog licences with the same certificatethat they use to file their income taxes, that's a good use oftheir money," Gerry Matte, information technology manager with theMunicipality of Sannich, B.C., and president of the MunicipalInformation Systems Association of British Columbia (MISA BC),remarked at lunch on Monday to Maureen Tapp, director general ofthe Assessment and Benefit Services Branch of the Canada RevenueAgency.
Tapp did, indeed, agree, and so did other federal officials whoattended an ad hoc meeting with MISA representatives later thatafternoon.
Ottawa has wanted to have such dialogue for a long time,according to one of the participants in that meeting, NancyDesormeau, director general, enterprise partnership management,Publi
Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC).
Desormeau is directing the transition of Secure Channel and itsauthentication system, ePass, to a utility model in whichgovernment departments will pay the private sector to facilitatetransactions on their network.
She told a Lac Carling session on the day of the meeting withmunicipalities, "I can remember back in 1999-2000 when a group ofus were putting the early plans together for the federalgovernment's online initiative, we talked about some of thesethings.
"We looked at all the pieces of information you might use toprove the identity of a citizen in an online environment, andquickly came to the realization that the federal government doesn'town very many of those things. It is another level of governmentthat issues birth certificates and drivers' licences and so on. Sohow could we link with other levels of government to provideidentity for some of the programs we need federally?"
Until recently there was no municipal organization to whichOttawa could address that question.
Now there is: The opening of Lac Carling X witnessed theannouncement that the first directors' meeting of MISA/ASIM Canadahad taken place the day before, on Saturday, May 13.
This is one of two new municipal organizations formed to advancethe citizen-centred agenda.
Since the Lac Carling discussions, MISA/ASIM Canada has beguntalking with the federal government about how to implement mutuallycompatible and affordable authentication systems.
In British Columbia, Gerry Matte is spearheading the developmentof a MISA/ASIM Canada authentication project within the umbrella ofthe Public Sector CIO Council.
On the opposite coast, Daya Pillay, manager of e-Commerce &Web services for Halifax Regional Municipality, treasurer of MISAAtlantic and a board member of MISA/ASIM Canada, is involved with apotential authentication project under discussion between PWGSC andthe Nova Scotia government.
Municipal Reference Model
MISA/ASIM Canada is also organizing a project to revive theMunicipal Reference Model
This is a standard to define and categorize municipal programsand services, and could be an enabler for more interjurisctionalprojects such as BizPaL.
The reference model has a long and complex history.
It was initially developed in the early 1990s by a group ofOntario municipalities under the auspices of MISA Ontario, withassistance from consulting firm Chartwell Inc.
Chartwell later worked with the Ontario and federal governments todevelop versions of the model for them.
The federal version, called the Governments of Canada ReferenceModel, was one of the standards behind Industry Canada'sdevelopment of its Business Transformation Enablement Program, themethodology that guides the services-mapping process used forBizPaL.
One of the first decisions of the new MISA/ASIM Canada Board ofDirectors was to authorize a project, under the organizationalleadership of MISA Ontario, to bring the old Municipal ReferenceModel up to date and make it available to any municipality to helpalign services and overcome redundancies with other levels ofgovernment.
Roy Wiseman, CIO of Peel Region in Ontario, and municipalco-hair of the 2006 Congress, and others who are leading thisproject hope that it can be accomplished in about a year.
Shared Services Municipalities in several provinces areparticipating in shared service initiatives that could cachet tothe collaboration brand.
One of them was described at Lac Carling by Holly Fancy,director of strategic initiatives with Nova Scotia's Office ofEconomic Development, and Bob McNeil, director of technology &communications with Cape Breton Regional Municipality.
Under a public sctor licensing agreement initiated in 2000, NovaScotia has purchased 86,000 user licences for a SAPenterprise-resource-planning system.
It is providing licences at nominal charge to public sectororganizations throughout the province. Municipalities representingabout half the province's population, including Halifax RegionalMunicipality and Cape Breton Regional Municipality, have signedon.
Fancy said the agreement has reduced the total cost of softwareownership by millions of dollars for the province's public sector.McNeil said it has brought "amazing" changes to business processes- such as a reduction in accounts payable staff at the regionalmunicipality to one person from 12 - and has given the municipalityaccess to world-class software that otherwise would have beenunobtainable.
"We really believe in one taxpayer," McNeil said. "We alwayslook for the winner to be the taxpayer. In this case, the taxpayerwon a lot."
Similar agreements are being implemented in Alberta andManitoba.
Political Support
The growth of 3-1-1 systems, another form of advancement ininfrastructure, is helping to make citizen-centred service deliverytangible.
Calgary, Gatineau, Quebec, and Windsor, Ontario, haveimplemented such systems, which rely on a single telephone numberfor public access to non-emergency municipal services, backed byCRM technology that encourages the alignment of services and trackstheir delivery to citizens.
The broader significance of 3-1-1 is that it has set a newstandard for municipal service delivery that has caught thepublic's attention and is beginning to be championed at thepolitical level.
An example can be seen in the City of Toronto, which is tolaunch a 3-1-1 system late in 2007 that will include the conversionof the Metro Hall Council Chambers into a call centre - withpolitical support.
"We have had six of the most visibly conservative councillorsworking with staff for the past 18 months building a movement,really, for 3-1-1," Sue Corke, deputy city manager for Toronto,told the Congress.
The 3-1-1 implementation calls for the collaboration of 14service delivery divisions and, since Toronto is Canada'sfourth-largest government, mirrors the experience ofservice-delivery integration across provincial ministries, Corkenoted.
John Davies, executive director of information technology forToronto, cited the 3-1-1 project as an example of how serviceissues tend to rise to the political level faster inmunicipalities.
"Since councillors are involved with project and policydecisions that affect the services we provide, there is moreawareness of electronic service delivery in the municipal sectorthan there might be at the higher levels of government," Daviesobserved.
Municipal Determination
The accumulated trends and initiatives visible at Lac Carling Xhave given municipal delegates confidence that their hands-onapproach is helping to lay the foundation for citizen-centredservice.
MISA/ASIM Canada President Kevin Peacock of Saskatoon said:"Municipalities are playing a leadership role, rather than beingthe guys at the end of the queue.
We need to be the ones to move the agenda forward, because it isat the municipal level where the citizen feels that he touchesgovernment first and foremost." Gerry Matte of MISA BC commented:"The municipal governments are now raising issues to the moresenior governments.
The difference I see between now and five years ago is that,then, they would have had to be persuaded that we need to talk.
They don't need that persuasion any more. In fact, their eyeslight up.
The newly self-confident municipal view was expressed mostsuccinctly by Georganne Dupont, manager of information systems forthe Town of Airdrie, Alta., and president of MISA Prairies.
Asked what role municipalities have assumed in governmenttransformation, she said simply, "We're the doers."
Lawrence Moule (lmoule@sympatico.ca) isco-editor of Municipal Interface, the national professional journalof the Municipal Information Systems Association.