Nelson Lah has always had an interest in technology and that curiously led him from his native Singapore to study and work in the IT field in Western Canada. His diligence has paid off and he now holds the position of CIO, Ministry of Forests and Range, in British Columbia. In conversation with senior writer Lisa Williams, Lah discusses his award-winning initiative for electronic forest management, the often elusive work-life balance, and the importance of collaboration and staff engagement.
Q. The role of CIO is clearly changing and is about more than just managing information. From your perspective, how has your role evolved?
A. I think the CIO started out as just managing technology, and then it evolved to managing information. In the five years I've been here, information is still important, but now my role is mostly about leading people and transforming business.
I created a forum of government CIOs with all the forest industry CIOs. The forum tries to strategically look at what we need to do in order to go forward, transform and improve.
Leading people is really totally outside the technology arena. It's all about trying to make sure that staff are engaged, that they understand how they contribute to the mission of the organization, creating a workspace that promotes staff health and wellness and that we recognize their accomplishments, as well as getting them to move beyond their comfort zones so they stretch their capabilities.
Q. What motivated you to become involved in this line of work?
A. I've always been attracted to tech work. I was born and raised in Singapore. When I was in Primary 6 (Grade 6), I had my own typewriter and a Pitman typing instruction booklet. This was a big deal back then, so I guess that must have started my IT career.
I headed to Canada to do my degree in IT, where I studied at the University of Calgary for my four-year double honours degree in computer science and applied math.
I spent four years programming on a supercomputer, doing seismic modeling and writing math built-in routines. I am talking about squeezing out every single instruction and checking every bit of the results with a Taylor Series. I had enough of that and moved out to Victoria. I love the West Coast and have been with Forests for the past 18 years.
Q. Could you discuss the work you do at the Ministry of Forests and Range?
A. I play three roles really. I'm the director, the CIO and also chair B.C.'s Advisory Council of Information Management, a peer committee of about 12 Ministry CIOs. As director, I manage the IMIT operations and as CIO, I leverage the strategic use of IMIT in business transformation.
In my roles at the Ministry I think I have the common mandate around information management and information technology. It may be slightly different from others in that I also have accountabilities related to freedom of information, protection of privacy, litigation and records management.
The part I enjoy most is helping not only to transform our Ministry, but also the forests industry in the use of IMIT. This links to my third role in helping the IMIT community inside core government to leverage the use of technologies as a corporate resource. It is most rewarding to see the positive changes rippling through various ministries, industry and our clients as a whole.
Q. You've won CIPA and GTEC awards for e-FM, the electronic forest management system that you lead. What really motivated this initiative?
A. The motivation started at the tail-end of the Y2K project. We documented 6.5 million lines of code from over 50 applications that we had to manage.
At that time, they were running on an IBM VM, which was a legacy system; so we wanted to move it into a thin client Web front-end. We took about three years figuring out what we would rewrite and what we would transform in terms of new processes and products. It was a "divide and conquer" strategy that we used to achieve that.
That's really what e-FM was all about. We were the first in B.C. to negotiate directly with an offshore company in India to convert many millions of lines of code in order to help us get to that goal.
We also looked to the forest industry and worked with their information systems providers and forest companies in order to implement electronic submissions. We asked them to send in not just the information for tree-cutting permit approval, but also raised the bar by asking them to provide us spatial boundaries on where they wanted to harvest, and where they would be replanting the trees.
Continued:Five days in five seconds
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