Canadian Government Executive February 2012

GENERAL WALT NATYNCZYK Leading through transition p.14

STEPHEN M.R. COVEY Behaviours that build trust p.18

February 2012 VOLUME 18 NUMBER 2

THE MAGAZINE FOR PUBLIC SEC TOR DECISION MAKERS

SAVING SERVICE Peter Wallace

Secretary of the Cabinet, Head of the Ontario Public Service

www.canadiangovernmentexecutive.ca

it PMG y : d wh by K L IA an red C E ty o SP ocie pons S S ig ou.

B y e Th s to r tte

61399 70471 0

Display until March 10

9

02

$5.00

Publication Mail Registration Number: 41132537

ma

GET HIGH-PERFORMANCE TOOLS TO COMPLEMENT YOUR DEPARTMENT.

THINKCENTRE M91P Premium performance and manageability for large enterprises powered by 2ⁿ generation Intel® Core™ i5 processor with vPro™ technology.

E60EJ-07000M/005/EJ

CDW.ca/federal | 800.493.7632 Intel, the Intel Logo, Intel Inside, Intel Core, and Core Inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. For more information about the Intel processor feature rating, please refer to www.intel.com/go/rating ©2011 CDW LLC. CDW®, and PEOPLE WHO GET IT™ are trademarks of CDW LLC. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the sole property of their respective owners.

+

contents

February 2012 – VOLUME 18 – NUMBER 2

COVER 6

Saving service An interview with Ontario’s Peter Wallace

BY TOBY FYFE

8

Space reservation Saskatchewan’s customer-centered parks service

BY TIFFANY STEPHENSON

10

Labour swing Alberta delivers new market strategies

BY BRIAR MCGINNIS

11

From source to tap Delivering safe water

BY JOHN STAGER

FEATURES 12

Bear proofing B.C. partners to recycle

BY SYDNEY MARTIN

DEPARTMENTS 24

New professionals

BY STEVE RIDOUT

14

26

Procurement

BY TOBY FYFE AND CHRIS THATCHER

18

29

The Leader’s Bookshelf

BY PAUL CROOKALL

20

30 Online Extras

Governing digitally

BY VIC PAKALNIS

21

Outsourcing inspiration Connecting employees to clients key to motivation

Opinion

BY CRAIG DOWDEN

Deficient data fails program evaluation

BY DAVID ZUSSMAN

Networking A skill worth honing

New mechanisms for the e-health quagmire

BY JEFFREY ROY

Trust behaviours An interview with author Stephen M.R. Covey

Words to live by

BY HARVEY SCHACHTER

Leading through transition An interview with General Walt Natynczyk

Better proposals mean better choice

BY MICHAEL ASNER AND SHARON SHEPPARD

Systems management Stratford adopts single framework solution

Unleashing cubicle creativity

BY JEAN-PHILIPPE VEILLEUX

25

13

22

The new urbanism Trading lawns and sedans for flexibility

BY DENNIS WALSH

Online Extras

Missed an issue? Misplaced an article?

Visit www.netgov.ca for a full archive of past CGE issues, as well as online extras from our many contributors.

23

Smart computing Helping government do more with less

BY RALPH CHAPMAN

February 2012 // Canadian Government Executive / 3

Editor’s note Our mission is to contribute to excellence in public service management

Editorial

Toby Fyfe

Editor-in-Chief editor@netgov.ca

Editor-in-Chief: Toby Fyfe

editor@netgov.ca

Associate Editor: Chris Thatcher

assoceditor@netgov.ca

Editor Emeritus: Paul Crookall

paul@netgov.ca

Contributors: Tiffany Stephenson, Briar McGinnis, John Stager, Sydney Martin, Steve Ridout, Vic Pakalnis, Craig Dowden, Dennis Walsh, Ralph Chapman, Jean-Philippe Veilleux, Sharon Sheppard, Michael Asner, Jeffrey Roy, Harvey Schachter, David Zussman Editorial Advisory Board

Vic Pakalnis, Queen’s University; Shirley Howe, Alberta Public Service; Denise Amyot, Canada Science and Technology Museum Corporation; Carol Layton, OPS; Ian D. Clark, University of Toronto; Andrew Graham, Queen’s University; Jodi Leblanc sales National Account Manager: Patricia Bush

The Big Society: a Canadian perspective

905-727-4091 x336 trishb@netgov.ca

Vice President, Sales: Terri Pavelic

905-727-4091 x225 terrip@netgov.ca

Events Events manager: Sandra Service

sandras@netgov.ca

art & production Art Director: Elena Pankova

artwork@netgov.ca

Subscriptions and Address Changes Circulation Director: Denys Cruz

circulation@netgov.ca

General Inquiries

Aurora Office 24-4 Vata Court, Aurora, ON, L4G 4B6 Phone 905-727 4091 Fax 905-727-4428 Editorial

Ottawa Office 30 Lyttleton Gardens, Ottawa, K1L 5A6 Phone 613-858-6619 http://cge.itincanada.ca/ corporate Group Publisher: John Jones

publisher@netgov.ca

Publisher’s Mail Agreement: 41132537 ISSN 1203-7893 Canadian Government Executive magazine is published 10 times per year

by Navatar Press. All opinions expressed herein are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or any person or organization associated with the magazine. Letters, submissions, comments and suggested topics are welcome, and should be sent to editor@netgov.ca Reprint Information:

Reproduction or photocopying is prohibited without the publisher’s prior written consent. High quality reprints of articles and additional copies of the magazine are available through circulation@netgov.ca Privacy Policy:

We do not sell our mailing list or share any confidential information on our subscribers.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) for our publishing activities.

In this edition, we have partnered with KPMG to prepare a supplement that explores the U.K. Big Society change initiative. The special focuses on the public sector reforms that are an integral part of the program.

The idea for this project arose from the belief that the changes that are happening to the public service in Britain should be of interest to public sector leaders in Canada. Prime Minister David Cameron’s reforms are aimed not only at changing the civil service as an institution, but also at revisiting the relationship that British citizens have with their government. On this latter point, Cameron and his followers argue that the postwar state’s emphasis on building cohesion through the development and delivery of uniform social programs is inefficient and builds an unhealthy dependency on the state.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that politicians on this side of the Atlantic are sympathetic to some of these notions.

There is a significant view both here and in the United States that government has become too big and therefore inefficient at achieving social outcomes, and that public servants themselves are a fat class with leisure hours and unaffordable pension plans.

In essence, Cameron and others are asking: What is the role of government in society? What is the appropriate role for

other sectors in delivering services to citizens? And what is affordable?

Our supplement explores the Big Society experiment from the lens of the public sector reader. We examine its underpinnings, analyze its progress, compare it to the Canadian experience, and investigate what its changes will mean for service to citizens. I thank KPMG and all the contributors for their support in making this special edition possible.

As we go to press, the government of Ontario is waiting for Don Drummond’s much-hyped report that will recommend how it can save money in the wake of the increasingly large provincial debt. He is expected to propose significant budget cuts to departments and new ways of delivering services.

In this context, our cover story with Peter Wallace is both timely and significant. He is the provincial government’s new Secretary of the Cabinet, Head of the Ontario Public Service and Clerk of the Executive Council.

Wallace’s task will be to implement the recommendations of the Drummond report while maintaining the morale and integrity of the Ontario Public Service.

His messages regarding the importance of the OPS as an institution and the need to change how services are delivered to Ontarians need to be said.

SAVE THE DATE

Canadian Government Executive Magazine Presents

Smart Trust with Stephen Covey Join us as we look at how to create Prosperity Energy and Joy in a Low-Trust World KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

Stephen M.R. Covey Co-founder and CEO of CoveyLink Worldwide

April 2012 Ottawa, ON

He is the author of The SPEED of Trust, a ground-breaking and paradigm-shifting book that challenges our age-old assumption that trust is merely a soft, social virtue and instead demonstrates that trust is a hard-edged, economic driver — a learnable and measurable skill that makes organizations more effective, people more promotable, and relationships more energizing.

REGISTER NOW! For more information please contact Sandra Service at sandras@netgov.ca or 905-727-4091 Ext. 228

Brought to you by:

Cover Service delivery

Saving service

Responding to fiscal pressures Peter Wallace has a tough task. As the new Secretary of the Cabinet, Head of the Ontario Public Service (OPS) and Clerk of the Executive Council, he took over in December as the province received a fiscal knuckle rapping and now faces a report recommending radical transformation to achieve cost savings. He spoke with editor-in-chief Toby Fyfe.

What do you see as core challenges facing you and the OPS today?

What can it do to ensure results and maintain public confidence?

The core challenge is that of delivering high-quality public services in an environment of sustained fiscal constraint. Ontario is an advanced jurisdiction with very significant strengths in terms of a diversified economy, an educated workforce and a high quality of life. We invest significantly in our public services, which are in turn hugely valued by Ontarians.

However, we also live in a world of increasing economic competition and volatility. We need to understand that both the global economic crisis and slower growth in our economy have significant implications for government revenues and service affordability. These challenges are longterm and demand a serious response.

As a result, the OPS and our partners in the broader public service will need to focus on ensuring that public services are delivered efficiently and maintained on a fiscally sound and sustainable basis.

We’re not alone in this – federal, other provincial, local and other jurisdictions around the world are facing these same challenges.

I’m not going to answer the question defensively. Public services aren’t an abstract concept, delivered by nameless, faceless bureaucracies. We’re talking about the investment in people and capital to deliver services that really matter to Ontarians – education through teachers, public safety through police and emergency workers and healthcare through doctors, nurses and other frontline providers.

We can take some initial comfort from the fact that Ontario’s public services are already relatively efficient – we spend less per capita than all but one other provincial jurisdiction in Canada. But we know that is still not good enough. Our own experience in the OPS tells us that there are pockets of inefficiency in every organization. And citizens have every right to be concerned about these and skeptical about our capacity to deliver.

This isn’t easy stuff to address. Driving productivity in any sector – public or private – is rarely straightforward. The status quo will always be a place of relative comfort.

But in an environment of sustained fiscal constraint, clinging to current ways of doing business will necessarily reduce the effectiveness of public services and marginalize the

Some see the public sector as inefficient and unable to achieve results.

6 / Canadian Government Executive // February 2012

roles of those who deliver them. The private sector provides many models for more effective investment and delivery. Other governments in Canada and internationally are also pointing to ways of holding or reducing costs while maintaining strong outcomes. So Ontario’s public servants will continue to do what’s right – providing our best advice to government and ensuring effective delivery.

Will the OPS have to go through a culture change to get to where it needs to be?

Of course. I accept that culture change is important for every organization, private or public, that needs to improve efficiency and outcomes. I am proud of the ability of public servants to embrace the drive for real change. The reality is that the OPS of today is vastly different than that of 15 or 20 years ago. As always, however, there are still huge opportunities to reduce barriers, communicate better and ensure that services are client-centred and deliver real value for money.

Service delivery Cover Is the private sector a model for a future OPS? The OPS must be open to drawing the best we can from other models, including those from the private sector. Many of our strongest partnerships and most successful change initiatives have been based on interactions with private sector leaders. We will also continue to gain knowledge from the efforts of our colleagues in other provinces, at the federal level and the municipal level. We can also benefit from looking at what’s worked well in our own experience – Service Ontario comes to mind – and exploring how to draw additional value from those approaches.

The OPS is known as one of Canada’s best employers. How will you reassure its people and maintain its quality over the next few years?

Let’s remember that we’re not the only organization that has gone through change, and we have a history of adjusting to change. I’ll be quite frank here: we have a strong management team of dedicated

leaders and a strong tradition of adaptation. We know what drives this. If we refuse to change, refuse to acknowledge new realities, we will be justifiably left behind.

By adopting change, by embracing it, we will minimize disruption and preserve the services that we care about.

It is self-defeating to get up every morning only to do the same thing every day.

What we do get up in the morning to do is deliver services that matter and to create and implement the policies that are important to achieve results.

What’s your management style?

I think it is inclusive. I’m used to drawing from the strength and diversity of the people around me. I think it’s incredibly important to reflect on the experiences of the management team and to take those into the decision-making process. Along with inclusiveness, I believe we need to develop an atmosphere of trust and collegiality. We fundamentally need to pursue teamwork, focused on outcomes. All those things are incredibly important to me.

February 2012 // Canadian Government Executive / 7

Feature Service delivery

Tiffany Stephenson is the manager of marketing and communications for the Saskatchewan Ministry of Tourism, Parks, Culture and Sport.

Saskatchewan improves customer-centered

reservation service

Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Tourism, Parks, Culture and Sport is poised to launch a new, online real-time reservation service for its provincial park system. The change is in response to customer demand and will move the Government of Saskatchewan into modern vacation planning.

The ministry is responsible for the operation of Saskatchewan’s provincial park system, a system that celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2011. Now the park system includes 1.4 million hectares of land, 34 provincial parks, 8 historic sites, 24 protected areas, 129 recreation sites, and more than 6,000 campsites.

Saskatchewan parks are the largest tourist attraction in the province, with visitation growing by more than 11 percent in the last four years, and reaching a record level of 3.37 million visits this past summer. This growth has led to unprecedented pressure on parks services and infrastructure, with the most strain being put on the provincial reservation system, which in 2011 had more than 30,000 requests for reservations.

“Twenty years ago when we launched our reservation service, it was a fairly new concept to reserve a spot in a campground – most places still operated on a first-come, first served basis – so our manual system worked,” said Mary-Anne Wihak, manager of visitor experiences. “However, with the surge of the Internet and the increase in popularity of camping as a vacation experience, we were soon challenged to keep pace. With limited Internet connectivity we were no longer keeping up with our visitor’s expectations. It wasn’t unusual for a person to have to wait up to two months to find out if they had a camping spot reserved for their summer vacation.”

In recent history, Saskatchewan parks 8 / Canadian Government Executive // February 2012

reservations became a problem January 1, 2010 when the reservation system crashed. As a result, most of the reservations in the system were lost and the system couldn’t be brought up for more than 12 hours.

“We hit a low point for customer service at that moment,” Wihak recalled.

“Because of the limitations of our system, everything being manual, and with few staff available on the statutory holiday, it was a challenge to rectify the situation.

However, once we overcame that hurdle, which we did through the help of social media and continued communication with our customers, it became clear that we had to find a more permanent solution. Implementing Lean would lead us to the solution.”

The ministry’s goal was to offer campers the best summer vacation, while allowing as many people as possible to enjoy a camping experience in a Saskatchewan provincial park. That meant redesigning the camping program and working within citizencentred and Lean principles to identify the data and tools necessary to make the process better. This first Lean step resulted in reducing the turnaround time and set the stage for automation. The ministry also did a scan of other jurisdictions and identified best practices and similar projects, and talked to past customers through surveys and focus groups. The results were clear: park visitors preferred to book in advance and wanted instant confirmation.

The new Integrated Campground Management System (ICMS) is similar to a lot of other reservation systems that already exist online, such as hotel booking websites and most other provincial park jurisdictions in Canada. It will replace not only the old manual reservation system, but also the in-park registration system, making it easier for customers to reserve their site and check-in at the park. The other Lean aspect of the new system is that Saskatchewan did not build it, but rather contracted an industry leader to provide the reservation service.

Taking a Lean approach as a first step paved the way for a simpler, more efficient reservation system.

“The system has all the features that our park visitors had been asking for, such as pictures of all the campsites, a real-time search function that allows users to search the entire inventory in the park system.

As well, it lets the user pick their own campsite, all in a matter of minutes,” Minister of Tourism, Parks, Culture and Sport Bill Hutchinson said. “This new system will transform how we interact and do business with our customers. Now it is all about them and meeting their needs, instead of doing workarounds with an out-dated system.”

The new system will officially launch on March 12, 2012, moving Saskatchewan provincial parks into a Leaner, more customerfocused model of service delivery.

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

HP Pr

E60EJ-

CMY

K

ProBoo diagon webca Proces you ge

• 4GB ( (1333 • 320-G • 56K V • Integr Conne • Windo

93

Whe depe man easil your

800

¹ NMSO and

CDW CANADA & HP GET IT.

NMSO & IPMG AUTHORIZED

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

HP ProBook 6460b

HP Z400 Workstation

E60EJ-07000M/003/EJ

Designed with the environment in mind.

E60EJ-07000M/003/EJ

B/W laser printer, fax, copier, scanner.

EZ107-100002/001/VAN

With its revolutionary new architecture and bold new industrial design, the HP Z400 Workstation helps you accomplish more with every minute of your time and every dollar of your investment. Run more tasks, processes, and applications simultaneously with a workstation that brings together and optimizes the latest processors, memory, graphics, and storage technologies.

Achieve versatile, powerful MFP performance for a more productive printing environment. Print and copy at high speeds, use image preview to process jobs from the HP Easy Select pivoting colour control panel and get robust paper handling up to 2100 sheets.

CMY

K

ProBook 6460b Notebook PC includes a 14 inch diagonal LED screen with an integrated 720p webcam. Complete with an Intel® Core™ i5-2520M Processor and Intel Turbo Boost Technology to help you get the job done.

• 4GB (1333-MHz) DDR3 SDRAM upgradable to 16GB (1333-MHz) DDR3 SDRAM (1 x 4GB DIMM installed) • 320-GB (7200 rpm) SMART SATA II Hard Drive • 56K V.92 modem • Integrated Intel 82579V Gigabit* Network Connection (10/100/1000 NIC) • Windows® 7 Professional 32

934

¹

• Intel® Xeon® Six-Core W3690 (3.46 GHZ, 12 MB cache, 1333 MHz memory • 24 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 Unbuffered SDRAM • Convertible Minitower • Windows® 7 Professional 32

2850

¹

When you purchase your technology through CDW Canada you can depend on our knowledgeable, dedicated federal government account managers and technology specialists. Our federal team can help you easily navigate through the various purchasing tools and they can get your order processed and delivered fast and flawlessly.

800.493.7632 | CDW.ca/federal | nmso@cdw.ca ¹ NMSO and IPMG special pricing is only available to federal government departments.

HP LaserJet Enterprise M4555 MFP

• 600 x 600 dpi • Monthly duty cycle of 250,000 pages • High-speed host USB port • Advanced security features to protect sensitive data • ENERGY STAR qualified

3045

+

¹

Feature Service delivery

Responding to a changing labour market “Help wanted” has again become a common sight in windowsills and online job boards across Alberta, reversing employment woes for thousands. In 2011, the province, through it’s Alberta Works Program, delivered hundreds of work programs to help cash-strapped employers connect to skilled workers.

“Employers are coming to us asking for help to fill dozens, even hundreds, of open positions,” says Brenda Wadey, a business and industry liaison officer with the Alberta government. “We have moved our career services into the online world this year with two province-wide virtual job fairs, one of which attracted 12 employers and more than 1,300 job seekers.”

Joy Cooney, district manager for Canadian retailer Bentley, regularly partners

Donna Bernreuther and Brenda Wadey help connect job seekers with employers.

10 / Canadian Government Executive // February 2012

with the province to fill an influx of new positions. Cooney says the province understands the company’s unique hiring needs and has connected her with a pool of skilled talent.

“Alberta Human Services has really stepped up to help us with our hiring needs,” she says. “The labour market is getting tighter and tighter and the more avenues we have to fill our positions, the better. The hiring experience has been phenomenal.”

Wadey says requests like this are a far cry from the labour market needs of 2009. At the height of the recession, Business and Industry Liaisons (BIL) – initially tasked with helping employers meet labour force shortages and support hiring needs – had to turn its attention to businesses facing downsizing brought on by economic pressures.

Responding to 500 job cuts at a southern Alberta company, BIL manager Cheryl Olenick had to mobilize within a week to provide workforce adjustment sessions and a hiring event for the affected workers.

“Overnight, the coin flipped. All of a sudden, we were in an employment shortage position and no longer a worker shortage position,” says Olenick. “It required extreme adaptability, but at the end of the day we were providing the right service at the right time.”

Steve MacDonald, deputy minister of Alberta Human Services, agrees that adaptability and responsiveness are the hallmarks of excellent service delivery. “To be effective and provide meaningful services to Albertans, we need to be responsive and continuously evaluating what our clients need, and deliver accordingly.”

Over the past year, Alberta has led the country in employment growth, adding nearly 100,000 jobs, more than four times the national rate of 1.1 percent. It has now regained all of the jobs it lost during the recession and is again facing

Briar McGinnis is a regional

communications manager with Alberta Human Services in Calgary.

the possibility of labour shortages. Alberta Human Services projects the province will be short 114,000 workers within a decade and is taking action to reduce the impact of anticipated labour shortages.

In addition to ramping up hiring support for employers, the department is developing a Youth Workforce Strategy to engage younger workers and help them take advantage of exciting new career opportunities.

The Youth Workforce Strategy is part of the department’s 10-year labour force strategy, Building and Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce, which aims to attract more workers to Alberta and train Albertans for the careers that will be in demand in the future. A core element of the strategy is tapping into traditionally under-utilized pools of labour, including Aboriginals, immigrants, persons with disabilities, mature workers and youth. The department has already released a Mature Worker Action Plan and is currently developing strategies for Aboriginals and youth.

Alberta Human Services is also attracting more Albertans into high-demand occupations by publishing short-term and long-term labour market outlooks. The department recently released the Short Term Employment Forecast 2011-2013, spotlighting 64 occupations that will be in demand over the next two years, to attract more Albertans into these careers.

The Alberta government is also responding to increasing recruitment needs by hosting career discovery events that profile careers in expanding sectors like trades and technology, supply chain and logistics, hospitality, health care and more.

Albertans can also now use Facebook and Twitter to find job opportunities and job fairs, watch videos on resumé and job-interview tips, post free job ads, and interact with Alberta government staff for a personalized service delivery experience.

“As our client’s needs change, so will we,” says MacDonald. “Our response will include trying new and innovative approaches to fit the need.”

Links to Alberta Works social media sites are available at http://employment.alberta.ca.

John Stager is an assistant deputy

Service delivery Feature

minister at the Ministry of the Environment and Ontario’s chief drinking water inspector.

Delivering safe water The tragedy of the E. coli outbreak in Walkerton in 2000 signalled the need for change in Ontario’s approach to drinking water safety. Since then, the government has transformed the way we care for and think about our drinking water.

To ensure residents receive safe, high-quality tap water, the Ministry of the Environment moved from a model of strict regulatory command and control to an innovative drinking water safety net model – a multifaceted approach that focuses on source-to-tap protection. Shared responsibility with our partners for drinking water delivery has been a key factor in the success of the safety net.

Fundamentally, the provision of safe drinking water is our shared goal and is considered at every stage of policymaking and implementation. The safety net model has redefined approaches to maximize effective service delivery. We have set high standards for operators and provided the necessary training and learning through the Walkerton Clean Water Centre (WCWC) to ensure they are among the best trained in the world.

The government has also redefined oversight of municipal drinking water systems, moving to a holistic municipal licensing program that is the first of its kind in North America, incorporating quality management and continuous improvement as the premise for effective oversight.

We have also worked with municipalities every step of the way in making the licensing program a success.

Clear water rules Strong legislation provides the foundation for effective provision of safe drinking water. The Safe Drinking Water Act came into effect in 2002 and the Clean Water Act in 2006. The legislation protects drinking water sources, regulates drinking water systems and sets out science-based standards for the quality of drinking water.

Furthermore, partnerships with stakeholders were vital to developing our safety net and continue to play an essential role to-

Innovative approaches

day. As a result, throughout the course of our transformation, compliance at regulated facilities and inspection results for municipal residential drinking water systems have steadily improved.

The source protection program is an important part of Ontario’s service delivery method, focusing on the protection of source water prior to treatment and distribution within the community. Through the Clean Water Act, communities are able to safeguard their drinking water supplies through prevention by developing collaborative, local plans that identify and address threats to drinking water. Ministry staff provide ongoing technical, policy and program support to these communities. In addition, the province has provided financial support to source protection planning, investing over $206 million since 2004.

The Ontario Drinking Water Stewardship program enables farmers, property owners, municipalities and businesses across Ontario to take action to protect local drinking water sources. To date, more than 2,000 projects, such as upgrading septic systems and wells, have been implemented.

With the implementation of our integrated approach to safe drinking water delivery, Ontario’s drinking water has become among the best protected and highest quality in the world. Our expertise in fostering innovative approaches to drinking water protection allows us to share our knowledge with jurisdictions internationally. In our common goal for safe drinking water we have hosted numerous international delegations and entered into cooperative agreements with China and the Netherlands.

Today, the drinking water safety net system continues to achieve significant results.

Each year the ministry issues the Minister’s Annual Report on Drinking Water and the Chief Drinking Water Inspector’s Annual Report on drinking water quality and inspection results for drinking water systems.

In 2009-10, 99.88 percent of water quality tests from municipal water systems met Ontario’s rigorous standards. Recently, Ontario was the only province across Canada to receive an “A” rating in drinking water protection by Ecojustice, a national environmental organization. As well, our safety net model was honoured with the Institute of Public Administration of Canada Silver Award for Innovative Management in 2009. During 2010-11, the WCWC trained more than 8,980 water professionals. Since October 2004, more than 31,000 course participants received training delivered by the Centre.

By working together with our stakeholders we successfully redefined the service delivery of Ontario’s drinking water. We will continue to leverage our innovative safety net system and remain vigilant in our duty to provide safe drinking water to Ontario residents.

For more about Ontario’s drinking water, see the latest Chief Drinking Water Inspector Annual Report at www.ontario.ca/drinkingwater.

February 2012 // Canadian Government Executive / 11

FEaturE Partnerships

Sydney Martin is manager of sponsorship and partnership with BC Parks, Ministry of Environment.

British Columbia partners to outsmart bears

Encorp Pacific and BC Parks are working together to keep beverage containers out of landfills, out of parks, and away from bears.

Since 2008, 121 bear-proof recycle bins have been placed in eight of B.C.’s most popular provincial parks at a cost of more than $180,000.

The parTnership began with a pilot project three years ago. Encorp sponsored 61 bear-resistant bins called Hid-ABags (pronounced hide-a-bags) to collect recycling in four provincial parks. The pilot has since morphed into a multi-year sponsorship, announced last June by Environment Minister Terry Lake and Encorp CEO Neil Hastie.

Almost 20 million people visit B.C.’s nearly 1,000 provincial parks and protected areas each year. With more than 250 campgrounds and over 300 day-use areas across British Columbia, the amount of recyclable beverage containers left behind is substantial.

It is known from experience in Bear Smart communities that proper attractant management of garbage and recyclables significantly reduces human-bear conflict.

As the old saying in B.C. goes, a “fed bear is a dead bear.” These specially designed metal bins allow park users to recycle their used beverage containers and safely keep bears out.

As many provincial parks are far from “Return It” depots, containers are usually stockpiled in service yards until the park operator can make a trip into town. Depending on how the recyclables are stored, this can be another concern for wildlife habituation. Even if wildlife issues are man12 / Canadian Government Executive // February 2012

ageable, sometimes the recycling process is not economical for the park operator.

Over the past 10 years, BC Parks has been working toward replacing all garbage and recycling containers in provincial parks with bear-resistant Hid-A-Bag bins. These bins are widely used for commercial garbage and recycling collection across North America. However, each bin (for garbage or recycling) costs approximately $1,200 plus shipping and installation so they have been, and continue to be, installed in stages.

BC Parks’ priority for installing bins has been for garbage collection because it leads to more wildlife problems than recycling. However, BC Parks is committed to offering a recycling option to park visitors and now that most parks have Hid-ABag garbage bins, the primary focus has moved to recycling.

Encorp Pacific is a federally incorporated, not-for-profit, product stewardship corporation with beverage container management as its core business. Its mandate is to recover used packaging and end-oflife products from consumers and to ensure they are properly recycled and not land-filled or incinerated.

One of Encorp’s strategies is to partner with agencies to increase the recovery rate of beverage containers in public spaces, so

a partnership involving sponsorship of bearresistant recycling bins made perfect sense.

As part of the partnership, Encorp provides the bins and pays for their delivery to the park’s service yard. BC Parks, in conjunction with the park facility operator, installs the bins and reports the number of containers recycled to Encorp on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. Moving forward, Encorp and BC Parks will jointly select a handful of parks to receive these recycling bins each year.

Not only does Encorp divert a billion recyclable beverage containers from landfills every year, the stewardship corporation also allowed BC Parks to divert valuable maintenance funding to other aspects of park management. It’s a win-win partnership where Encorp receives increased public visibility and reports on the number of containers recycled and BC Parks visitors have an opportunity to recycle their cans and bottles without impacting the park’s wildlife.

Encorp Pacific’s partnership with BC Parks was recently recognized at the 2011 Zero Waste Conference in Whistler. Encorp was presented with a framed photo of Alice Lake Provincial Park where 11 of its recycling bins have been installed along with a new park bench with a plaque of Encorp’s logo honouring its contribution to BC Parks.

Steve Ridout is Kaseya’s country manager for Canada, responsible for new business generation, services and operations.

ICT Feature

Stratford’s solution to

IT systems management The economic downturn and subsequent loss of tax revenues are forcing municipalities around the world to make some hard choices. In Ontario, the City of Stratford expects IT to contribute its share of efficiencies even as its responsibilities are expanding and its budgets are shrinking.

For Ron Roy, manager of Information Technology Services for the city, that means finding ways to streamline the management of distributed systems. As with any local government, Stratford’s 230 workstations and 25 servers are spread across the city and are accessed by hundreds of full-time and part-time users. Remote access and remote control are critical to proactively monitoring, updating and securing these systems. The thinking is that preventative maintenance ensures performance and availability at a much better price point than running around putting out fires.

However, an efficient IT management strategy is only as successful as the tools administrators and technicians use to maintain systems. Stratford deployed six best-of-breed management solutions that provided adequate remote capabilities and created IT efficiencies. Unfortunately, management functions were spread across multiple tools, meaning that operations were not centralized or integrated. According to Roy, technicians often had to log in and out of several management tools to resolve a single help desk request, adding complexity to the IT environment and slowing remediation times.

“Juggling back and forth between man-

agement tools is not an efficient service delivery model,” Roy said. “We were getting the job done, but it was taking us too long and we weren’t assured of consistency between the solutions. The pressure to reduce costs was mounting, so we had to get more efficient.”

Single management framework Recognizing that the city’s ad hoc management tools were not creating the efficiencies the department needed, Roy deployed a remote and automated IT systems management solution from Kaseya that consolidated all management functions in a single Web-based platform. Now, Stratford’s administrators are able to remotely monitor, maintain, backup and secure the city’s more than 250 systems on a single pane of glass regardless of the physical location, type or platform of the managed machine. The new technology allows administrators to view, take control of and make changes to any system logged into the network, even machines behind departmental firewalls.

Roy said, “IT operations are much more efficient and integrated, allowing us to accomplish more over the course of the day. I feel confident that we can support any business system that the municipality

throws at us without affecting our budget or existing capabilities.”

Once the solution was operational, Roy was able to see how automation, built directly into the IT automation framework, made systems management more efficient. Regular maintenance such as issuing a patch, defragging a hard drive or running a security scan can be applied to groups of machines at the push of a button, eliminating much of the repetition normally associated with managing large groups of machines.

More efficient and less expensive The efficiencies provided by the new solution enable Stratford to continue providing high-quality IT services to distributed users without affecting the budget. Systems continue to be managed in the same manner as before, but operations are more efficient, enabling the IT department to “do more with less.”

Before consolidating management functions, Roy would have had to make a choice in the face of growing workloads: ask his staff to work longer hours, hire an additional network technician at a $52,000 salary level or drop service levels. He now has the option of choosing none of the above by streamlining regular maintenance through powerful remote capabilities, a central knowledge base and automation.

Operational expenses were not the only savings. According to Roy, the ability to replace the city’s previous six management tools saves the city $6,500 per year in licensing, support and maintenance. Most important, however, the savings come at no expense to service levels, something that politicians, users and taxpayers all appreciate.

February 2012 // Canadian Government Executive / 13

Feature Leadership

Leading through transition

kind of mobilization, but also all the work in terms of procurement, repairs, capital management and so on.

The Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence are grappling with the requirements of Strategic Review and the Deficit Reduction Action Plan, as well as a larger transformation initiative and a possible refresh of the Canada First Defence Strategy. General Walt Natynczyk, Chief of the Defence Staff, spoke with editors Toby Fyfe and Chris Thatcher.

Without unpacking the recommendations of each of these reports, this seems a lot to take an organization through. How will you maintain the effectiveness you need?

The focus for the Canadian Forces (CF) and DND is on operational excellence. We have about 13,000 men and women deployed on operations, and we move forward with all of these transformational agendas cognizant of the fact that we have people in harm’s way.

As we go through the various exercises we have to ensure that we enable their success.

And that provides us a focus unlike any other organization, be it government or civilian.

In each exercise – Transformation, Strategic Review or the DRAP – we have to find the efficiencies but at the same time we have to maintain that effectiveness.

Are you starting to see some common themes emerging from these reports that suggest areas that need to be addressed, either from a CF or a DND perspective?

What we are finding is that the institution has been under a lot of pressure because of the operational tempo over the past five years. In 2006, when our forces moved from Kabul to Kandahar, I don’t think anyone anticipated the level of the insurgency or the fact that we were going to be in heavy combat. Even though we had short of 3,000 people deployed, 14 / Canadian Government Executive // February 2012

when you consider the people who were training or recovering, you had about 9,000 people in the mix. On top of that, through this period we were working up to support the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with the Olympics, so another 4,500 people committed for a long period in terms of the training and build up, and then in the middle of that we had Haiti and then Libya. So you had the entire organization that was set up for this

How does the recently adopted CF global engagement strategy help set your priorities?

The global engagement strategy was developed by our policy folks and Foreign Affairs and allows the minister, deputy minister and leaders of the CF to build upon our relationships with our international partners.

Part of it comes from our operational success over the last while: our partners want more of Canada. Given that we have the Americas strategy, traditional relationships with NATO allies, a focus on the Arctic, and given that Canada is a major Pacific nation, we need to engage with all of our partners. The global engagement strategy has been very effective in focusing us with regard to those countries that wish to have a stronger relationship with Canada.

Leadership Feature Does greater engagement require new skills and competencies?

Do you feel you now have a better handle on that?

We train for general-purpose combat capability. And when you train to that level of intensity, you ensure all of the leaders have the skill sets, the discipline, the training to do anything across the spectrum of conflict. As we proved in Afghanistan, we can prosecute combat operations and at the same time, with a more gentle touch, conduct training.

From my perspective, we have it about right.

I think it is always more challenging at a national strategic level because the further you are from the sound of the guns the less everyone understands. When you are close up to the sound of the guns you need to change, you need to adapt, you need to be agile because it is life or death. As you move back from the tactical theatre to the operational and then the strategic, there is always inertia that grows. And yet you do need to change and transform to enable success at the front.

Things change for one of two reasons: evolution and crisis. Evolutionary change is really hard because you are trying to get everyone into the same space and understanding of the problem. In a crisis it’s easy – everyone understands the same problem. What you’ve described is the result of that evolutionary change. At the same time, you need to exercise and demonstrate strong leadership to change the path. It goes right back to the original purpose and focus of the CF, which is to enable operational success.

I take your point, but on knowledge transfer are there management issues around demographics and the changing of people?

I’m pretty pleased with what we call the lessons learned process, which is highly honed as a result of our experience in Afghanistan and Libya. Ensuring that lessons learned are applied saves lives. Key was how quickly you go from observing a change, assessing it, determining a solution, and then apply it. It is now part of our culture to apply those lessons learned and change behaviour.

At the tactical level, that lessons learned process has changed significantly and appears to work well, but you’ve struggled at the strategic level.

You’ve mentioned a couple of times relationships with other departments: is this a “newer” direction for the military?

Right from peacekeeping operations 30-40 years ago, we’ve always been closely linked with Foreign Affairs and central agencies.

But since 9/11, I think we are talking a lot more about relationships with Public Safety and the RCMP. Operations in Afghanistan and the experience with the Olympics have given it more focus. The reality of these complex domestic and international operations is that they are all about relationships and trust and confidence.

The armed forces invest a lot in leadership. This seems such a priority not just for you but also for the organization as a whole.

We have a term: the strategic corporal. Well, now it is the strategic private. Whether on a patrol somewhere in Kandahar or now on the training mission in Kabul, onboard the ship HMCS Vancouver or in an aircraft, we rely upon these men and women to do the right thing. The cost of an error is catastrophic, at a tactical level, at an operational

level and at a strategic level. So we invest more in terms of training and professional development than any other institution because we expect so much of our people and because this is a life or death proposition.

Outside your door I saw the quote from Sun Tzu: “Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys. Look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death.” What does it mean to you?

We have a tremendous profession of arms, but with our principles of duty, integrity, loyalty and courage, we ask tremendous things of our men and women. Having served with other nations’ militaries, I think we have the best force in the world.

But we have to ensure they are always set up for mission success. They go into operations with the confidence that they have the very best probability of achieving their mission and doing so while mitigating the risks so they can come home safely. So it is about respecting them and always keeping in mind who they are as human beings.

How would you describe your leadership style?

I would say personable in trying to get the best of all of those leaders who work for me. As I learned from a gray beard when I took command of my unit, the first thing you need to do is train your organization for war – that is, ensure that those men and women who are working for you have the skills, the equipment and the training to be successful in operations; the second is to select your successor – you have to get to know your people and understand who they are; and the third is really tough: you have to prepare them for succession, give them the opportunity while you are there to take risks, delegate authority, give them the responsibility, and then allow them to learn on their own. That’s the kind of approach I’ve had, to enable all of those men and women to show their stuff. We’re a tremendous force today, but we’ll be a better force tomorrow because it is those corporals, lieutenants and captains who have had the experience of Afghanistan or Libya or Haiti – they are the future chief warrant officers and generals of the force.

February 2012 // Canadian Government Executive / 15

S:15.5”

FS:7.5”

S:15.5”

GE BUILDS A STRONGER

FS:7.5”

T:10.875”

At GE Capital we’re not just bankers, we’re also builders. It’s financing coupled with the goal to actually create something. Like jobs, for instance. One way we’ve kept Canadians working is by partnering with our customers at Ledcor. It’s a 15-year relationship that has injected over $100 million into building roads and critical infrastructure all across Canada.

It’s just one more way GE is working to build a stronger Canada.

S:10”

CANADA.

Feature Leadership

Behaviours that build trust Best-selling author stephen m.r. Covey’s latest book, Smart Trust, was published in January. He spoke with editor emeritus Paul Crookall.

sense common practice. Your responsibility is to control yourself and create a trustable person, while creating the conditions in your workplace for others to trust you, Both are increasingly being asked to do and each other. more with less, they need to team, partner and collaborate. Trust isn’t a fuzzy so can we stop the tension of doing soft social virtue, but a hard-edged eco- more with less, and build trust that nomic driver. If leaders can increase trust, focuses on productivity? the speed increases and the cost decreases.

Trust accelerates performance.

We need to constantly get better. Good leaders provide a vision of that goal. They How do you get there? build a team that can model trust behaviour, which can be productive and innovaIt’s not enough to say, “go build trust.” At tive. They clarify expectations and achieve one level, people get it. We all know people the organization’s goals while creating enwe can trust and those we can’t. But we ergy and joy.

In the end, if someone is a trust destroydon’t all know the actions to get there.

Trustworthiness is credibility, a combina- er, and not able to change their behaviour, tion of character and competence. It re- they may be in the wrong seat on the bus, quires self-reflection. How credible am I? or even need to get off the bus. If you get Do I trust myself? Do I give others a per- it right, the culture becomes the enforcer, son they can trust? First, focus on our val- rather than the rules, and people hold each ues. Second, focus on our behaviours. As- other accountable. When you try to make sess – do I behave in ways that build trust? changes like this, you get lots of push back.

What behaviours in others cause me to “What if we get it wrong?” “You don’t untrust them? Do I show those behaviours? derstand our world.” “How do you build Ask your team: “What more can I do to trust in a rules-based organization?” build trust?” Tell your team: “Here’s what more you can do to build trust with me.” How can leaders contribute We identified 13 high leverage behav- to building trust? iours that build trust. They make common sense and if they become common prac- Five steps: it begins with recognition that tice, the organization builds a high trust if we build trust we can better serve the culture. We’re just trying to make common public, and have more joy in the public why does the concept of trust resonate so well in both the public and private sectors?

18 / Canadian Government executive // February 2012

trust-BuILDING BeHavIours 1.

Talk straight

2.

Demonstrate respect

3.

Create transparency

4.

Right wrongs

5.

Show loyalty

6.

Deliver results

7.

Get better

8.

Confront reality

9.

Clarify expectations

10.

Practice accountability

11.

Listen first

12.

Keep commitments

13.

Extend trust

Leadership Feature

service workplace, so we choose trust; 2) start with yourself; 3) declare your intent to build trust; 4) do what you said you were going to do; and 5) have the courage to go first and extend trust. Don’t extend it naively, nor as an absolute. But don’t let trust abusers, poor performers or unethical behaviour define the culture.

Behave your way into trust – doing what you say you will do is the simplest, most important technique. The biggest trustkiller is declaring you will do something, and not following through.

Isabel Blanco took over the State of Georgia’s Child Protective Services in 2004. The state had a backlog of 3,711 investigations over 90 days old. Caseworkers were disengaged. Policies had been developed to cover every possible mistake. A 32-step process ensured that human judgement could not be blamed if things went wrong. To play it safe, everything was by the book.

The intent was positive – to protect children. But it was also to protect management. The result was more children at risk because caseworkers did investigations – 60 percent of which found no need for intervention – rather than doing interventions.

Blanco began by visiting each of the 159 counties, extending trust to case-

shared services are increasing: how can we build a win-win strategy for collaboration and performance across departments and between the public and private sectors?

workers to use their judgment and to reduce fear. She built trust with her

This is hugely important. With shared services there is less direct control, more partnering and teamwork. You can coordinate these functions without trust, but for collaboration you need trust as a foundation. Trust is like clean air; if the “air” in your organization is polluted, essentially everything else doesn’t work as well. The command and control paradigm and its tools are not suited to this – it’s like using a golf club to play tennis. The tool is not suited to the reality. The reality is shared services require trust and collaboration.

percent, staff are engaged and are part of the solution.

some organizations are high fear, and this drives out innovation and lowers productivity.

boss. “We didn’t blindly trust our staff, we installed processes that supported our goals in a responsible way and monitored every decision, evaluating our percentage in getting the decision right.” With no additional staff, the backlog is gone, investigations are down 70 percent, child safety is up 45

The data is compelling that many factors drive innovation and productivity, but at the core is trust. In poor performing organizations people are afraid to make a mistake, quick to blame others, suspicious, afraid to be open, quick to take credit, and have risk avoidance.

In high performance organizations, making mistakes is accepted and even prized – if you’re smart about it, learning and getting better.

I’m not advocating a Pollyanna view here, with no expectations of perfor-

mance and no consequences for not doing your job. The opposite of trust is suspicion, which is manifest in fear, which is the enemy of innovation. We are beginning to see this culture change in several public service organizations. In British Columbia, for example, they have articulated that “our goal is not to minimize the risk but to maximize all that can go right.” Their approach is to hire winners, be flexible, and trust them. Georgia also has a good example (see box). You can create this change in your organization.

Play to win, rather than play to not lose.

Alternative Dispute Resolution Workshop Negotiation and Mediation Skills

Toronto March 20-23, April 24-27 Ottawa March 20-23, July 17-20 Thunder Bay April 10-13 St. John’s Oct 15-18

Earn a Certificate from

1.800.318.9741 | www.adr.ca | contact@adr.ca February 2012 // Canadian Government executive / 19

Feature Leadership

Vic Pakalnis, P.Eng, is president of the Ontario Public Service Quarter Century Club and a member of CGE’s editorial advisory board.

Networking for success The TRIC model of leadership is enshrined in the Ontario Public Service’s core competencies for managers and executives. The T is for Transform, manage change; R is for delivering Results; I is for Inspire (rather than command and control); and C is for Connects: connecting across boundaries, working horizontally, networking with colleagues in the private sector, other levels of government and other ministries or departments.

As recognized by the TRIC model, networking is a critical component of good public sector leadership. There are a number of key reasons to hone this skill: • Expand you influence, to market yourself and your organization; • Increase your knowledge base, your knowledge network; • Mmeet your immediate or long-term career goals; • Gather intelligence and best practices from colleagues in different walks of life; • Develop sustainable partnerships, alliances and friends; and • Because it’s fun!

A network map Lay out your network, not the important many contacts you have but the vital few that are important to you at any one time.

A network map is personal and changes with time. You’ll notice that networks that were important at one stage of your life evolve to others that are more prominent.

A network map will identify gaps in networks that you need to develop.

Tools of the trade Business cards: it’s basic to networking so always have a dozen handy. Keep three in your wallet, and the rest in your binder or 20 / Canadian Government Executive // February 2012

briefcase. If you’re caught short on a trip away from your office, photocopy the last one at a hotel business center or photocopy outlet. Never be without.

Business card binders: keep your cards organized under type of contact, federal, provincial, municipal, suppliers, universities and colleges, professional organizations, various countries. Plastic business card holders are available at any business supply outlet. Write a short note on each card before filing such as: has wolfhound, Queen’s grad, drinks scotch. This tweaks your memory when you have to re-connect. Electronic business card software exists as do address files in email programs but I’ve never found them particularly useful. Then again, I prefer a paper copybook to an electronic book any day.

Useful networks A few organizations stand out as important for young or new public sector professionals. One is IPAC, the Institute for Public Administration in Canada (www. ipac.ca). A special rate for new professionals or students helps ease you in. IPAC is the premier organization for federal, provincial and municipal public servants.

Membership in IPAC always looks good on a resume. Local IPAC regional groups

in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Toronto, National Capital Region, Montreal, Quebec, Fredericton, Halifax and Charlottetown exist to provide networking opportunities at a local level. The annual national conference is the event to be at.

The other organization that MPA students and young professionals should join is the Canadian Public Sector Quality Association (www.CPSQA.ca). Their annual event is in Ottawa in February.

Each provincial government has organizations that provide additional networking opportunities. In Ontario, the Provincial Interministerial Council and their regional and local community councils are great networks. TOPS, or Tomorrows OPS, is for new professionals and the Quarter Century Club is for public servants with 25 years of service and provides services, discounts, recognition events and opportunities for its 86,000 active and retired public servants.

The federal government has federal councils in Ontario, Quebec, Eastern and Western Canada. APEX, the Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada, the National Managers Community and the Federal Superannuates National Association provide networking opportunities for federal government public servants. And of course, on a personal level social clubs, golf course memberships, scotch clubs and a variety of not-for-profits and volunteer organizations provide for expanded networks depending on your interests.

Whether you are an introvert or extrovert, whether you like socializing or not, networking is a necessary competency for public sector executives and the higher up you go the more critical it becomes. If you have trouble starting to develop your network, find one or two “super-connectors.” They are those people that network effortlessly, that will share their networks gladly and will introduce you to people you need to build your inventory; and in return, you’ll help the next new public sector professional develop their networks. Pay it forward.

Craig Dowden (Ph.D.) is the managing director of the Ottawa branch of André Filion & Associates, an industrial psychology and career management firm.

He was recognized as one of Ottawa’s Forty Under 40 business leaders in 2009.

Human resources Feature

Purposeful work key to employee motivation A widely held notion, humorously illustrated in the film Jerry Maguire through the phrase “Show me the money!” is that financial incentives motivate our behaviour. However, both social science and behavioural economic research consistently refute this idea.

In his latest book, Drive, bestselling author Dan Pink reviews over fifty years of research to show that “carrots and sticks” are ineffective motivational tools.

And the futility of incentive-based systems has been documented throughout the world. Closer to home a recent study sponsored by Workopolis found that financial rewards were at the bottom of the list of primary job motivators for Canadians.

If money and tangible benefits are not the key, an important next step is to determine how engagement can be cultivated.

Organizational psychologist Wayne Cascio has reported that for the past three decades meaningful work has been identified as the single most important feature employees look for in a position.

Adam Grant of the Wharton School of Business noted in a recent article in Harvard Business Review that “many people describe helping others and contributing to society as their driving purpose at work.”

This concept was illustrated in one of his studies that explored the enhancement of

meaning within a call centre environment responsible for soliciting donations from alumni to support a university scholarship program for incoming students.

Turnover within this call centre was over 400 percent and performance was lagging. Dr. Grant was brought in to investigate ways to increase employee engagement and retention. He randomly assigned employees to one of three intervention groups: Personal Benefit, Task Significance, and Control. The Personal Benefit group received a letter describing the positive impacts the job brought to their own lives (e.g., salary, benefits, etc.).

The Task Significance group received a letter written by one of the scholarship recipients. The letter writer outlined the immeasurable positive impacts that receiving the scholarship had on his life. The Control Group did not receive anything.

Grant then compared the performance of the different groups both before and after the commencement of the intervention. His results were nothing less than striking. While employees in the Personal Benefit and Control groups showed no differences, the people in the Task Significance Group experienced a 250 percent improvement in performance. By simply highlighting how their work benefitted others, employee motivation and performance were significantly enhanced.

This research could have important implications for the federal public service from a strategic HR perspective. Working for the government is about servicing the needs of Canadians as well as contributing to the country’s success in social, economic and international affairs. This provides the government with unique and abundant opportunities to directly connect its employees to its overarching mission.

In his article, Grant outlined one of the most powerful ways to build purposeful

work. By connecting employees with the end users of their service, what he termed “outsourcing inspiration,” workers have an opportunity to see how their jobs truly matter.

Imagine if HR executives worked with executives and managers to get all levels of their organizations thinking about collecting and sharing “success stories” to motivate everyone in their departments. Even more exciting, Grant’s research has shown that having face-to-face meetings with clients (internal or external) has yielded performance improvements of up to 500 percent.

Obviously, this kind of action is not applicable for every situation. For those employees who are engaged in low-impact work, Grant proposes that opportunities could be created to allow them to provide input into how the services of the organization are currently offered. This taps into the fundamental human need to “make a difference” and allows these individuals to take another perspective on their work.

Human resources are the foundation of the federal public service. In the midst of change and uncertainty, HR executives can develop strategic plans for maintaining and nurturing a highly competent and stable workforce by taking advantage of a growing scientific database of effective employee engagement practices. Evidence-based strategies, such as those listed above, are a strong starting point for HR executives and management as they work to further develop and foster their strategic HR services and help to ensure that the public service upholds its mandate to those it serves.

Answering the question, “how can I stimulate a sense of meaning and purpose within my work environment?” may indeed be the critical contributor to the future success of the public service.

February 2012 // Canadian Government Executive / 21

Feature Policy

Dennis Walsh is a writer, researcher and consultant (www. walshfuturist.com or walsh. wired@gmail.com).

Courting the new urbanism The need for local government innovation is now greater than ever.

The uncontrolled urban development we have witnessed in the past 100 years cannot continue.

Dynamic and effective cities, built on the ideas of sustainability, can have an effect reaching far out to the surrounding rural areas, strengthening and increasing the public’s quality of life. So, sustainability has to become the prerequisite for urban planning.

As cities continue to densify, uses begin to overlap and intertwine to mutual advantage, and new relationships emerge. Even in better times, it was challenging to use taxpayer dollars. Today, the challenge to innovation is that public dollars are scarce and it is hard enough to fund existing basic needs, let alone new initiatives. Still, some cities continue empowering leaders to drive innovation, reducing the barriers they face, and supporting those who challenge the status quo.

In the wake of the Great Recession, several powerful trends are converging: the world is undergoing the largest wave of migration back to cities in history; markets are listening to the needs and wants of Generation Y (20-somethings); and major cities are poised to become epicenters of ideas and creative energy. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, and the highest rate of metabolism.

For the first time in three decades, Gallup shows that fewer than half of North Americans believe the next generation will have a better life. According to a Gen22 / Canadian Government Executive // February 2012

eration Opportunity poll, nearly three quarters of 20-somethings plan to delay a major life change because of economic factors. They are already prone to delaying careers and marriage. The recession has affected them profoundly. Many are reconsidering educational plans and resigning themselves to a life with less.

Critics say the age of sub-urbanization and growing homeownership is over, and the coming decades will be a time of great re-urbanization. Gen Y seems to prefer walking instead of driving. They are beginning to see houses as economic traps that hinder and even prevent people from new opportunities. They are moving into smaller spaces to be able to afford an urban lifestyle, replacing front lawns and sedans with apartments and trains – preferring greater flexibility and mobility.

Perhaps it is that “connectivity” remains key in young people’s lives. More than any generation before, they use bikes, public transit and their feet to be free from the expense and responsibility of a car. For them, losing the car is a ticket to living in the city, freeing up space, budget and time. This new way of life is less stressful.

It is, happily, more sustainable.

Living in a modern city has a significant impact on the environment. The most demanding and challenging issues of future generations will be those dealing with the environment, climate and food resources. A few decades ago, this gave birth to

an urban design movement promoting walkable neighborhoods with a range of housing and job types. Global warming is becoming ever more apparent and the extreme consumption of our energy resources is largely at fault.

A movement called New Urbanism began to support regional planning for open space, context-appropriate architecture and planning. Their strategy: to reduce traffic congestion, increase the supply of affordable housing, and rein in suburban sprawl. Their intention: to influence significant changes in the standard engineering approach to road and street design, shifting emphasis away from increasing automobile-oriented mobility and toward pedestrian mobility.

Strong Towns recently released a new report arguing the case for a new urban development approach if we wish to end the current economic crisis. Their emphasis was on obtaining a higher rate of financial return from existing infrastructure investments by focusing on traditional neighborhoods where large public investments in infrastructure are underutilized. They claim that being blind to the financial productivity of our cities has led to inefficient use of public infrastructure investments and allowed local governments to assume overwhelming, long-term financial obligations for maintaining infrastructure.

If public dollars are indeed scarce, it is hard to justify infrastructure projects that expand long-term maintenance obligations.

ICT Feature

Ralph Chapman is the

vice president, Public Sector, for IBM Canada.

How smart computing can helpAchieving government do more with less Combining the digital age with the current climate of financial austerity is a challenge for government leaders who want to drive continuous transformation.

Like many organizations, IBM has been aggressively transforming its business model, structure, technology and culture for the unyielding dynamism of the 21st century global economy.

We’ve made our share of mistakes, but this journey has unveiled a few proven principles that are core to the success of any modern transformation effort. These commercial best practices have helped reduce our costs and improve performance, resulting in annual savings between $3 and $5 billion.

Share services In the private sector, back-office costs have been reduced to as little as one percent of annual expenditures, simply by eliminating duplicate operations and converting them to a single, global model across departments.

Governments are taking similar paths. The U.S. government consolidated 26 payroll systems to four, saving the Department of Health and Human Services $11 million per year and helping the Environmental Protection Agency reduce its payroll costs from $270 to $90 per employee.

Likewise, streamlining procurement and supply chain management to a single enterprise-wide model helps generate operating cost savings driven by process improvement, standardization and simplification. Procurement teams can shift from transaction processing to higher value activities such as market intelligence, strategic sourcing and supplier management. Creating a more flexible cost structure increases operating leverage and cash management efficiencies. This model can respond more quickly to shifts in economic conditions and government priorities.

IBM eliminated $25 billion in costs and significantly improved supplier performance through this approach.

Move to mobile Smarter, sustainable and cost-effective workplaces in the 21st century go beyond “bricks and mortar” frameworks to leverage opportunities stemming from mobility and virtual collaboration tools. A mobile workplace promotes growth within an existing real estate footprint by permitting employees to work from any location. The associated compression and reduction of work spaces helps generate significant real estate savings.

New technologies such as locationindependent voice and network services save millions of dollars annually for private sector organizations. Advanced office automation and collaboration tools such as Web meetings, instant messaging and social analytics software, combined with application support for mobile devices including laptops, tablets and smart phones help make this transition more seamless for managers and employees. Achieving and measuring the outputs (results) of work instead of tracking the inputs (hours spent sitting at a desk) is the goal.

Collaborate New private sector approaches to application and development management can help government departments develop and maintain complex application portfolios.

Collaboration and social media techniques can effectively extend the working day by leveraging multiple resources located across time zones. This community-based collaboration environment lets larger numbers of professionals exchange ideas and solve problems more quickly when supported by open-source frameworks that place a premium on intellectual capital, expertise, trust, efficiency and results to help increase productivity and capacity.

Consolidate IT Consolidating data centres, networks and email systems across departments is a best practice that can provide more than a 30

percent reduction to operations budgets, or in our case, nearly $1 billion annually.

It also results in significant energy savings and reduced floor space.

New service delivery models such as cloud computing can be adopted to help build internal expertise and increase efficiencies by providing more self-service access to IT resources, standardized technology and improved system performance.

For example, an analytics cloud can integrate disparate systems and present relevant information that matters across hundreds of thousands of people. Clouds quickly capture Internet-scale data by the petabyte – equal to 300 billion ATM transactions – and make it directly available to employees. Big data analysis that used to take weeks or months is now conducted in hours or minutes.

Analyze for efficiency Studies show that data-driven organizations outperform their competitors. Many government departments worldwide are using analytic techniques to identify potential fraud and error, streamline key business processes and provide more efficient service delivery.

The Alameda County, CA, Social Services Agency optimized its IT system by creating a single view of its citizen clients and applying analytics to its benefits payment operations. It now saves almost $25 million annually by reducing benefit overpayments.

Leading this kind of change is hard. To succeed during times of financial austerity, governments will require creativity, analytical prowess and a radical simplification of processes. Optimized systems can be easily tuned to specific tasks and provide quick and easy access to Internet-scale data across departments. Our experiences prove that smart approaches to 21st century transformation are well within government’s grasp so they can continue to work in concert with each other on a global scale to meet the growing demands of those they serve.

February 2012 // Canadian Government Executive / 23

New Professionals

Jean-Philippe Veilleux is an aspiring author who has

written two novels and numerous short stories, yet to be published. To pay the bills, he joined the federal public service in 2008 and now works as a foresight and policy analyst at Policy Horizons Canada.

Unleashing creativity in the cubicle When someone I meet for the first time asks me the usual question: “So, what do you do?” I like to answer that I have two full-time jobs. Then, my question to them is: “Which one would you like to know about? The one that pays me a more than decent salary, allows me to have stability, benefits and a comfortable pension? Or the one that is nothing but challenge after challenge and actually costs me a few thousand dollars every year?”

Most people will pick the second one.

And I don’t even need to add: “Oh, against all odds, the latter one fuels my soul and enables me to thrive.”

I am not sure exactly why. Is it due to sheer curiosity or because they guess that the second job is, in fact, my real passion?

Some of you might have deduced that I am employed by the federal public service.

My second “job” is to develop my craft as a fiction writer. Why am I losing money because of writing? Last year, I decided I needed to find a purpose, feel engaged in something, and asked for a 20 percent cut in my salary to benefit from a day off. I basically bought time.

My economically irrational behavior did not surprise most of my friends and colleagues. Their reply often was: “You’re so lucky!” I kept wondering on the bus back home what was wrong with the system.

Why was it that, as Gallup noted, in 2002 70 percent of U.S. employees were not engaged or actively unengaged at work? Why couldn’t their job motivate them?

The answer to my questions came when I read literature on public service renewal. I started putting down a list of what characterized my alternative job to understand what motivated me, with the hope of transposing it into work. All in all, the questions boiled down to one: why am I 24 / Canadian Government Executive // February 2012

putting a ridiculous number of hours into something that doesn’t bring me any external rewards, in other words, no money or fame?

It didn’t take long to figure out that what I get from writing are intrinsic rewards, or more accurately, intrinsic motivation.

I love playing with words, designing epic plot lines, and giving life to characters. I enjoy the act of writing fiction in itself; it enables me to reach the state of flow more often than anything else. I am on the way to mastering a craft with the knowledge that I may never reach mastery, and it doesn’t matter.

There is more to it, though. I discovered that the feeling of freedom is also a great motivator. One day, a good friend of mine asked to be part of my creation process. At first, ideas started pouring, but when I decided to hand him the role of “Motivator” and “Keeper of Discipline,” everything went wrong. I started writing with the unpleasant feeling that he was breathing down my neck, pressuring me to perform. I had just gained a supervi-

sor and the autonomy that walks alongside intrinsic motivation was lost.

How does it all relate to changing the work environment? How could we apply at work what keeps our fire burning elsewhere? In a knowledge economy where creativity must be used to solve complex problems, disengaged employees will accomplish the job but will rarely exceed expectations. How does one make public servants, any employees for that matter, feel more passionate and motivated? Including elements that feed our passions could be a start. Autonomy over how we do our work and over what we work on, inside the organization’s objectives, would enable us to find out what motivates us and in what areas we wish to pursue mastery.

My uncle once told me, after hearing my complaints “You know son, when I was your age, I was glad just to have a job.”

And I am grateful I do. But when I imagine all we could accomplish, as a society, if work didn’t feel so much like a chore, I am tempted to tell my uncle: “Shouldn’t we aim higher?”

Procurement

Michael Asner is an independent consultant

specializing in public procurement (michael@ rfpmentor.com). Sharon Sheppard is a freelance writer and editor (sharons1963@me.com).

Better proposals mean better choice Once upon a time, the King was looking for a really cool systems solution to improve the kingdom’s energy efficiency. He wanted to make sure that whatever solution was chosen was the best fit. So he held a ball and invited all the possible applicants he could think of to bring their proposals. The RFP invitation explained what the kingdom was looking for, what the rules were and a bit of extra information about the kingdom’s current systems.

Unfortunately, the invitation did not provide enough information and parts of it were written in the formal and ancient legal language of the kingdom. As such, many potential applicants decided not to even try and when the date of the ball finally came, the King was presented with only a handful of applicants: rusty old knights who themselves only sort of understood the ancient language and only kind of hit the target.

We all know how the story ended. The King was stuck with only three proposals which all scored between 50 to 60 out of 100 points. Barely adequate, mediocre and not what he was looking for at all. However, because the kingdom was bound by the formal rules of the invitation, he had to choose one. As a result, he spent many subsequent years trying to “fix” the offering with numerous change orders which, in the end, cost the kingdom dearly and did not really improve energy efficiency that much.

The moral of the story: it is important to look at improving vendor communication in the RFP so that you get more applicants

and better proposals rather than awarding a contract that you augment later with extra money you don’t have. Better proposals equal better choice and better value for your stakeholders.

Barriers to the ball North American vendors have a common set of concerns: they don’t understand and are often intimidated by the procurement process, they wonder whether the process is truly open, and they believe that governments hide critical information or at least make it difficult to obtain.

There is a barrier to getting a reasonable number of excellent proposals from qualified vendors: the RFP. RFPs are supposed to satisfy four distinct objectives: • Define a problem that requires vendor expertise to develop an appropriate solution; • Establish legally proper rules for a competition, as defined by the Supreme Court; • Provide information such that a qualified vendor, based only on the information contained in the RFP, is capable of generating a winning proposal; and • Encourage suitably qualified vendors to submit proposals capable of solving the problem.

It is difficult to satisfy all four of these objectives. Most RFPs do a decent job of defining the problem and the RFP rules.

They do an adequate, but not outstanding

job with objective three, transmitting information, and they do a poor job on the last one related to helping vendors. In addition, it is almost impossible to deal with these four objectives and still have a friendly, easy to read, easy to understand RFP. The biggest problem with vendor communication involves trust. Because RFPs are often badly organized and wrought with as much formal language as possible, many vendors don’t believe that the process will be fair or that they have a chance of succeeding.

First, review your RFP documents and identify ways to make them better organized, clearer and easy to read. Second, build trust with vendors by being upfront and forthright about their common concerns.

Getting to happily ever after Getting better proposals is critical no matter whether you’re trying to run a kingdom or a government. Vendors want to come to the ball but need your help. Yes, we are busy and there are many reasons why we don’t take the time to make our RFP documents and processes easier for vendors.

Yes, some vendors are easier to deal with than others because they sort of “get” your process and it’s easier ignoring those who don’t “get it.” That’s only true, however, if you take the short view. The longer view is that our kingdoms will suffer if we don’t improve our communication with vendors.

February 2012 // Canadian Government Executive / 25

tHe LeaDer’s BooKsHeLF

Harvey Schachter writes The Globe and Mail’s Managing Books and Monday Morning Manager columns.

He is a freelance writer specializing in management issues.

Words to live by

One Piece Of Paper Mike Figliuolo Jossey-Bass, 238 pages, $33.95 Do you know what you’re about? Could you describe your leadership approach to someone who works with you? To yourself?

That would be challenging for most of us. We wouldn’t quite know where to start, since leadership covers such vast terrain. Leadership also involves contradictions, and others – let alone ourselves – may not fully understand what drives us. Moreover, even if we have a good handle on our leadership ethos, we may have trouble expressing it to others because we have learned when discussing such matters to talk in high-flying platitudes or buzzwords.

Mike Figliuolo can help. The former U.S. combat officer and senior executive, now a consultant, believes it’s possible to put down what makes us tick as a leader in clearly understood words on one sheet of paper. He calls it a leadership maxims approach, because it involves, through a process of introspection, summoning

26 / Canadian Government executive // February 2012

up 15 to 20 emotionally powerful statements or reminders of personal events that tend to guide our behaviours on a daily basis.

Take, “He’s under the tank, sir.” That will seem obscure to you, but it’s highly meaningful to Figliuolo and the people who served under him in the military the day an officer approached an 18-year-old private who was leaning against a tank he drove, smoking a cigarette on a break.

The private quickly put out the cigarette, and saluted. “Where’s Lieutenant Figliuolo?” the officer briskly asked.

The driver pointed toward the tank, where a pair of boots was sticking out from underneath the vehicle. “Maybe you didn’t understand my question, private. Where is Lieutenant Figliuolo?”

“He’s under the tank, sir.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said he’s under the tank, sir.”

And indeed, he was. When asked why by the astonished officer, Figliuolo replied he was fixing the track. “Why?” the officer asked, eyes widened.

“Because it’s broken, and I’m already done with all my other responsibilities, sir.”

To that officer, using wrenches was for privates, not lieutenants. It made no sense that Figliuolo was performing maintenance on the vehicle. But the driver was exhausted, and Figliuolo had offered to take over while he had a break.

Word quickly spread, and Figliuolo became a minor celebrity to the troops, a “soldier’s officer.” More importantly, the incident – and those words on his one piece of paper – remind him to appreci-

ate his team’s reality and that he is not above any work that needs to be performed for them to be successful.

But the maxims may not encapsulate incidents. They may be words of advice from treasured mentors and colleagues, perhaps remembered pungently because they came after a screw-up. Or they may be phrases that capture what makes you tick – or what makes people you emulate tick. They may be song lyrics or motivational phrases that inspire you, or images that stand for something that you find deeply important.

“The most important attribute of maxims are that they are clear, pithy, and personally meaningful. By being short and direct, the maxim is easy to remember and access. By being personally meaningful, the maxim elicits a powerful emotional response that leads to behaviour change. By being from your own experience, the maxim serves as a vehicle to share your stories with your team and strengthen the bonds of understanding and trust you have with them,” he declares in One Piece Of Paper.

He divides up leadership into four categories, to help you clarify your approach: • Leading yourself: What motivates you and what are your rules of personal conduct? What do you want to look like and stand for in the future?

• Leading the thinking: Where are you taking the organization and how will you innovate to drive change? What are your standards of performance for how you will safely get to your destination?

• Leading your people: How can you

tHe LeaDer’s BooKsHeLF lead them as individuals rather than treating them like faceless cogs in the machine?

• Leading a balanced life: How do you define and achieve balance, avoiding burning out?

Let’s explore those more deeply, starting with leading yourself. “Nobody is going to follow you if you do not know where you are going. You need to have a clear set of goals and standards for yourself, because it enables you to focus on what’s important and it gives your team something to identify with and support,” he observes.

To understand this aspect of leadership better, he offers five questions that you must answer. Why did you get out of bed today? How will you shape your future?

What guidelines do you live by? When you fall down, how do you pick yourself back up? How do you hold yourself accountable?

For each, you should come up with a maxim or two that is deeply relevant to you. “He never stopped learning, teaching and coaching” sums up his own developmental philosophy. “It’s hard to shave if you can’t look yourself in the mirror” is a reminder of ethics, as is, “What would Nana say?”

It’s also vital that you lead the thinking in your team. You must be alert to new ideas, trends, opportunities and risks.

“The higher you rise in your organization, the less doing and the more thinking you are expected to do,” he reminds us.

SUBSCRIBE

NOW!

The maxims should help you look at the world from new and different perspectives, breaking out of the stagnant thinking that might grip your organization.

Here the questions you need to answer with maxims are: What standard do you hold your team to? Where are you taking your people? How will you foresee the future? After all that thinking is done how will you drive action?

For him, a starting point is the maxim, “In God we trust. All others bring data.”

He pushes past the inertia in organizations by questioning practices, asking, successively about an issue: “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” By repeating the question to probe beyond any answer he unearths, eventually he digs deeply enough to find an insight or opportunity to improve something. And then, to move toward action, he asks: “So what?

So what? So what? So what? So what?”

In terms of decision making, he applies the maxim: “If you choose not to decide you have still made a choice.” And from his military days, he falls back on, “In case of doubt, attack!”

When it comes to leading your people, the thought-starter questions he offers are: What is your natural style? How will you remember to treat your team members as individuals? How will you stay connected to your team’s reality?

How will you commit to your people’s growth? He stresses that while management is task-focused, leadership is people-focused, and you must make sure you can inspire subordinates while being

true to your own personality and style.

“Kick up. Kiss down,” is one of his guiding maxims, as is, “Don’t bring me problems. Bring me solutions.” He remembers to listen with the maxim, “You have two ears and one mouth for a reason.” And, of course, “He’s under the tank, sir” offers powerful guidance.

Finally, you must lead a balanced life to be effective. Here your maxims will flow from considering three questions: How will you define your boundaries?

How will you keep things in perspective?

What are you passionate about?

When he was moaning one day to his superior about the latest organizational travails, the boss pointedly observed, “Burger King is hiring.” That keeps things in perspective for him, as well as when he is stressed out the phrase, “It’s only ____,” to remind him that people aren’t dying over what he is fussing about. “A bad day fishing is better than a good day at work” reminds him to take vacations.

When you have answered his questions and developed your maxims, share them with others. “Sharing your maxims provides those around you with a window into who you are as a person and as a leader,” he says. He also suggests looking at the maxims at the start of the day, to keep you on track, and to refresh them periodically, perhaps every time your performance is reviewed.

It’s a neat, practical approach to getting a grip on who we are and helping to keep us – and others – focused on our true north.

One Year Subscription (10 Issues) Canada $40 + HST ($42.50) Foreign $60 + Shipping and Handling Fax: 905-727-4428 Mail: 24-4 Vata Court, Aurora, ON, L4G 4B6 Online: http://cge.itincanada.ca/

NAME:

TITLE:

ORGANIZATION: ADDRESS: CITY:

PROVINCE:

PHONE:

POSTAL CODE: PAYMENT:

E-MAIL ADDRESS: CHEQUE ENCLOSED

VISA

MASTERCARD

NAME: CARD #:

EXP. DATE

February 2012 // Canadian Government executive / 27

media:scape™

furniture and technology merged to help teams access and share information www.steelcase.com/cometogether

expect more

Contact us to learn more

·media:scape™ creates a collaborative destination ·Everyone can share their digital information instantly ·Information is visible by all participants

POI Business Interiors has more than 50 years of experience in providing knowledge, products and services that help people work more effectively.

We understand the issues facing organizations today.

T 888 296 9967, F 905 479 6941 www.poi.ca info@poi.ca

Jeffrey Roy is Associate Professor in the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University (roy@dal.ca).

Governing Digitally

New mechanisms for the e-health quagmire When President Barack Obama campaigns during the coming months for re-election, odds are he will not be reviving one of his 2008 health reform pledges, namely that savings from e-health would help pay for universal coverage of all Americans. One of those extensions of the truth so often deemed necessary during a campaign, technological investments may be necessary and justified on many grounds, but short-term cost savings from such a massive shift are little more than wishful thinking.

In this country, the federal government recently earned accolades from many quarters for diffusing what was expected to be highly contentious and drawn-out discussions over funding transfers to provincial counterparts. Fixed annual increases, at a certain point tied to economic growth, arguably provide the certainty that provinces need to both plan and reform while dealing with the daunting realities of aging populations and limited finances. This approach is consistent with a classic approach to political federalism: jurisdictionally respectful within the contours of the Canada Health Act. Short of outright privatization, the underlying message is that experimentation is welcome with as much freedom from federal intrusion as legally and politically feasible.

As the world goes digital, however, a quagmire emerges. The logics of interoperability and efficiency lead many to wonder whether more national systems are not, at some point, necessary. There are also complementary risks of smaller and less wealthy provinces affording less in the way of technological refurbishment, thereby exasperating service quality and access divides between various parts of the country.

It bears noting that the Conservatives

faced a similar dilemma prior to taking office in 2006, with their support while in Opposition for the creation of a national ID card.

During the aftermath of 9/11, most countries pursued variants of national ID systems, including Anglo-Saxon cousins the United Kingdom and Australia. The abandonment of such schemes in these aforementioned jurisdictions, partly due to contentious politics but more so due to administrative cost and complexity, would reframe Stephen Harper’s thinking once in power.

Despite recognition that centralization has its limits both politically and operationally, the fact remains that much like the U.S., a great many studies have demonstrated that Canada is an e-health laggard. It seems intuitive that a federal government would not be indifferent to the long-term repercussions of such a worrisome standing, but the question remains what can be done.

One response could be to bolster the resources of the Canada Health Infoway to spur greater investment in e-health adoption (for obvious reasons, the preferred course of this body itself). Nonetheless, while the Infoway has done much good in fostering the initial layers of infrastructure over e-health’s inaugural decade, it is without governance responsibilities for design and delivery. In an era where e-health is advancing rapidly around the world, the Infoway’s role as a research arm and observatory is important but also insufficient.

Canada should look closely at Australia. Differing constitutional and partisan arrangements notwithstanding, the federal and state governments have worked closely in recent years, leading to a 2010 national e-health partnership. Subsequently, to quote the federal government,

“as part of the 2010/11 federal budget, the Government announced a $466.7 million (Australian) investment over two years for a national Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system for all Australians who choose to register online, from 2012-13.” The PCEHR is notably underpinned by a strategy enjoining federal and state health ministers in a common purpose and within a collaborative governance strategy of the sort that is glaringly absent at present in Canada.

In keeping with Canada’s constitution, the perils of excessive centralization (especially in all matters involving IT), and the present stance of the Harper government, it is reasonable to also look to provinces for innovative suggestions to resolving this quagmire and moving forward in a more concerted, national effort. Looking to the Council of the Federation, for example, as more than a lobbying arm for more dollars, would be a start.

In addition, the crucial local dimensions to delivery and decision making cannot be overlooked. And while municipalities are for the most part outside of direct health care delivery mechanisms, they too are central players in many aspects of fostering healthy lifestyles and communities.

Any truly national e-health architecture must therefore encompass these many layers and their growing interdependence. In short, with matters of macro funding seemingly settled, it is time for the real work to begin – and time for new political mechanisms to traverse old boundaries.

February 2012 // Canadian Government Executive / 29

Opinion

David Zussman holds the Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa (dzussman@uOttawa.ca).

Deficient data fails program evaluation

In a few weeks, the Minister of Finance will deliver the most anticipated federal budget since 1995 when the Chrétien government tabled its Program Review budget. The 2012 budget has two related objectives: to eliminate the federal deficit by 2014 and, second, to cut back on federal programs and activities that are deemed to no longer be part of the government’s future agenda.

This will be a defining budget for Stephen Harper. It will chart the financial course of the federal government for years to come. The current worldwide financial crisis will depress global economic activity and as a result will limit Canada’s export sales and simultaneously increase support payments to unemployed Canadians.

Given Canada’s great success with Program Review more than 15 years ago, it is expected that Treasury Board ministers will make good use of lessons learned from the earlier exercise by drawing on the numerous studies and evaluations that have been produced by the government over the past decade as it considers the Deficit Reduction Action Plan (DRAP).

This is the magic moment for policy analysts inside and outside of government to play a significant role in the review process by providing robust and unassailable evidence of program effectiveness to the DRAP committee.

Under the best of circumstances program evaluation is difficult to do. Reliable measurement is a challenge and determining 30 / Canadian Government Executive // February 2012

long-term effectiveness depends on appropriate time frames, well-designed studies and clearly defined objectives. As a result, it is impossible to generate valid studies without years of planning and foresight.

Interestingly, the Treasury Board made evaluation a priority in 2001 when it revised its policy framework for program evaluation and did so again in 2009 about the same time as the Auditor General was preparing a chapter on evaluation in one of her last annual reports. At that time, the new policy transferred the responsibilities for program evaluation to the deputy ministers and the program manager community in an effort to allocate responsibility for evaluation to the most appropriate level in the hierarchy. In addition, the Treasury Board also required that every federal program including grants and contributions be subject to an evaluation every five years. Stated another way, the 2009 policy requires that 20 percent of all federal government programs be subjected to a summative evaluation, each year, to determine whether the programs are providing value for money.

Unfortunately, it appears that the government’s evaluation policy is not having its desired effect. Recent Treasury Board analysis suggests that, despite the existence of an evaluation policy since 2001, the government carried out only about 170 evaluations per year representing between five and 13 percent of all federal program spending that took place between 2004 and 2008, instead of 100 percent as was envisaged with the policy.

In fact, the shortcomings might be more

serious than limited coverage. In her 2009 report to Parliament, the Auditor General noted many evaluations were plagued with serious measurement problems. She also concluded that many were late, provided inconclusive results, used rudimentary methodology, and contained findings that were often unreliable.

Evaluation serves many important functions in addition to providing input into resource allocation exercises that happen once every 15 years. It is a useful tool to hold government to account, to improve the performance of ongoing programs, to free up funds for new efforts, and to provide lessons to other comparable programs.

High quality evaluation work used to be a strength of the Canadian federal public service. In the 1970s, policy analysts were internationally recognized for their policy training programs, for the expertise of effectiveness and efficiency divisions in the Treasury Board Secretariat, and for the analytical strength of the evaluation units in many federal government departments.

At this juncture when the government needs to make serious spending cuts to meet its fiscal targets, it appears the data are not there to address the key question regarding the value of the programs being reviewed. Not only is this unfortunate, it also represents a management system failure.

Nothing is more fundamental to good government than knowing how well tax money is being spent on behalf of citizens. If the role of Parliament is to hold government to account, then it is imperative that the appropriate House of Commons and Senate Committees demand valid and up-to-date evaluations. It is simply not sufficient to have rules and policies without a demand from legislators for their appropriate use.

We don’t go home happy until you do.

Maurice

Downtown Ottawa 377 O’Connor St. 800.465.7275 victoriapark.com

and the snow storm

Maurice, our Front Desk Agent, isn’t exactly a huge fan of the snow.

And driving in the stuff? He dislikes that even more. But one cold, grey December evening, our intrepid Maurice ventured out into one of the biggest storms of the season.

What could have driven him to drive into this tempest? His sense of duty.

You see, one of our guests had left an important item behind.

Knowing that a cab wouldn’t make it to the airport in time to reunite our guest with his property, Maurice took matters, as well as a frigid steering wheel, into his own hands. Arriving at the airport with mere minutes to spare, Maurice personally handed the item to our surprised, and extremely relieved, traveller. Proof once again that, even after you’ve left our hotel, you’re still a VIP.

Really,

ReallyBig Hotel Suites.

The moment.You know it.

It happens any time you stay at a new hotel, right after you swipe your room key. The moment before you open the door. Will the room be big, or small? Light, or dark?

Nice, or not?

and feature real bedrooms, real kitchens and real living rooms. And they don’t cost any more than those of our competitors. Really, why would you stay any place else?

Here’s what you’ll find the moment you open your door at Albert at Bay—space, and lots of it. Our suites are the biggest in Ottawa

DOWNTOWN OTTAWA

435 ALBERT STREET

613.238.8858

RESERVATIONS 800.267.6644 ALBERTATBAY.COM

Freedom From the limitations oF PaPer! Transcend the limitations of paper with Fujitsu document scanners; and experience the unbounded potential to search, organize, edit and share paper-based documents electronically. The feeling is liberating!

Fujitsu offers a family of high quality imaging products that covers the whole range of scanning applications from desktop and departmental installations to enterprise-wide production environments.

For more information call 1-800-263-8716 ext. 3405. www.fujitsu.ca/documentimaging

Fujitsu is the world’s leading manuFacturer oF document scanners.

Production

up to 135 ppm

dePartmental

up to 60 ppm worKgrouP

up to 40 ppm

networK

up to 25 ppm

scansnaP for Windows and Mac