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Successful eGovernment in Canada

For the fifth year in a row, Accenture, the international consulting firm, has ranked Canada as first in eGovernment implementation. Tom Riley explains the Canadian Government's citizen-centric approach to eGovernment.

There are many factors at play that have led to Canada being a world leader in e-service delivery.

One of the most successful factors was the top political and public service leadership and support. From 1997 onwards, the former Prime Minister made speeches on the importance of eGovernment, as did Ministers. The current Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Paul Martin, has continued this commitment. This initiative has been on the political agenda from an early stage. It was followed up with sufficient funding over the years with the programme being made a government wide priority in the speech from the throne at the October 1999 opening of Parliament. Within the public service a Committee of Deputy Ministers, (TIMS - The Telecommunications and Informatics Management Subcommittee), were assigned the responsibility of ensuring the government’s promise on eGovernment was kept.

This leadership from the top echelons of the political system and the public administration set the climate for the eventual evolution of a multitude of projects and eventual success. An important factor in the Canadian government leadership is that it allowed for proper funding for eGovernment programmes to evolve to implementation. There were many other important steps taken and followed to bring the Canadian eGovernment initiatives to the top ranking in the world.

The officials responsible for eGovernment, and what became the Government Online (GOL) initiative, looked at the delivery of services by taking an all-government approach to e-service delivery. What this means is that services were organised by category and not delivered on a department-by-department basis.

The Canadian government's focus has been on what citizens actually want in the way of e-services - not what the Government thinks they want. This has been accomplished by a combination of professional polling of the public and the results of focus groups conducted across the country. The Government did not make assumptions on what services were needed by the public and spent considerable resources getting to know what the public wanted. It also formed a GOL Advisory Committee of prominent citizens, business people and academics to advise Ministers on implementing the Government Online initiative.

Michael Turner, Assistant Deputy Minister of the Information Technology Services Branch, Public Works and Government Services Canada, says that the government followed up this approach "with the regular use of a unique Canadian outcomes analysis approach called 'Citizens First' in the case of individuals and families, and 'Taking Care of Business' in the case of companies", which used further surveys against the Common Measurement Tool that the government officials responsible for GOL have developed. With this tool the government has been able to measure client expectations, priorities and actual percentage satisfaction with government services at all levels of government, and track how that is changing.

A target of 2005 was set for the delivery of online government services with all Chief Information Officers (CIO) in individual departments required to submit plans to bring the services of their particular departments online by this deadline. Departments laid out their plans and how targets would be met and submitted their plans to Treasury Board Secretariat. The departments were then held accountable for meeting their targets on their announced plans and these were then publicly posted on their websites. Cross cutting multi-department committees were set up to coordinate various aspects of the programme with a Committee of Deputy Ministers, approving major investments for the programs submitted and tracking progress.

A factor of going online was that departments were encouraged to re-engineer their business processes. This is an affirmation of the basic tenet that the advent of information and communication technologies have changed the way we operate as individuals and organisations, whether it be government, large corporations, academic institutions, ngos, small business operations, entrepreneurs or individuals. The Canadian government had a good grasp on the changing culture and acted accordingly in developing new and modern “best practices” to ensure success of their programs.

One of the most important factors in their success in the development of Government Online (GOL) was that new money was invested in four areas:

1. Development of policy, technical standards (e.g. "Common Look and Feel"), legislation, and privacy requirements
2. Development of measurement tools and a communications/promotion program
3. Development of departmental staff to enable them to work in the new online services environments and interfaces with clients
4. Development of common technology infrastructure such as Digital certificates and common networks.

The Government of Canada avoided failures in eGovernment implementation in many other countries through strong leadership from the top, working cooperatively across government through committees, setting the right priorities, determining public needs and public wants and ensuring their were sufficient personnel and funds to get the job done. Failures were recognized early on and corrections made.

The next evolution from eGovernment is going to be to 'Service Transformation' which will involve not just programme re-engineering but taking into account all the new technologies evolving into society and also the realities of the needs of people in the offline world. The government is also working towards the development of 'Service Canada' sites where, says Michael Turner, "a broad range of citizen services can be obtained from knowledgeable front line service workers, supported by the cross channel systems." Business is also in the loop and a series of integrated federal/provincial Canada Business Centres in each province is now moving into more provision of integrated, cross channel services.

The Government Online Initiative (mandated by legislation) had been given a target date of 2005 to develop and implement many of the government initiatives. Most of these are achieved and an assessment of progress to date and a Report, both to go to Parliament, are to be made. The Canadian government is quite aware that the process of eGovernment, no matter what name it is given, is an evolution in progress. Their evolution has been far reaching and the 52 per cent of the 76 per cent of Canadians online, who go to the Canadian sites for services, and the multitude of people who receive better services because of the attention to eGovernment initiatives, are the beneficiaries.

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