The 10th Lac Carling Congress may have been a watershed event.
It marked the emergence of municipalities as the project directors
who are taking citizen-centred service delivery beyond the
conceptual stage - to a work in progress.
Answers have begun to emerge at the municipal level to questions
that have plagued participants at Lac Carling for years: How can we
demonstrate a compelling case for interjurisdictional service
alignment? How can we get politicians and the public to pay
attention?
How can we develop structures on which to build service
transformation? A groundswell of activity is beginning to build at
the municipal level.
Not all of it has been initiated by the municipalities
themselves, but the results are visible there at points of service
delivery.
A program here, an initiative there - not enough momentum yet to
be broadly noticeable, but perhaps enough to show that a new era is
coming.
Among the signs:
A couple of projects are beginning to provide models for how
interjurisdictional service delivery can work.
Some of the technological foundations necessary for service
transformation are being addressed collaboratively.
New service delivery structures are being created that are
saving money and attracting political support.
It was appropriate that these trends surfaced at Lac Carling X,
where the theme was "Applying What We Have Learned" and where the
35 municipal delegates represented fully one-quarter of the total
government contingent.
Since municipalities began sending significant numbers of
representatives to Lac Carling three years ago, they have let it be
known that they were eager for action.
Both formal sessions and informal conversations showed how
municipalities are discovering their role in creating the edifice
of citizen-centred service - not necessarily as planners or
architects, but as the developers, construction crews and interior
designers who turn concepts into concrete.
Lessons From Projects
Municipalities have been involved with all three of the
best-known interjurisdictional projects of recent years - BizPaL,
the Seniors Partnership and eContact.
eContact has stalled for lack of funds and leadership, but the
others appear to be providing models that could be applied to
future projects - and, significantly, are attracting long-awaited
political attention.
BizPaL (www.bizpal.ca) is a
permit and licence identification system.
Integrated into municipal Web sites or portals, it gives
business owners and entrepreneurs a single point of contact so they
can find out what permits and licences their businesses will need
from municipal, provincial/territorial and federal governments.
BizPaL has become the standard-bearer for interjurisdictional
projects in recent months. No fewer than seven sets of co-ordinated
news releases have been issued since December 2005 about BizPaL,
led by its creator and champion, Industry Canada.
Most of the releases have announced new partners in the
initiative.
BizPal is now offered by:
Whitehorse and seven other municipalities in the Yukon;
Kamloops, BC; Saskatoon and the Province of Saskatchewan, which has
plans to expand the service to Regina and Moose Jaw; The Region of
Halton, Ontario, and two of its towns, Halton Hills and Milton,
with the nearby City of Burlington soon to join them;B The City
of Ottawa; Natural Resources Canada, which recently created BizPaL
Plus, a pilot project to help natural resource businesses engaged
in wind power development and mineral exploration in British
Columbia, and mineral exploration in the Yukon, by providing
information on government approvals and other requirements.
BizPaL won a Public Service Award of Excellence announced as
part of the National Public Service Week activities in June.
Industry Canada's BizPaL Secretariat and its partners from
across Canada won in the category of Excellence in Citizen-focused
Service Delivery.
"It's really energizing to be involved with a project like
this," says Jane Kralick, senior project officer with the BizPaL
Secretariat in Ottawa. "It's breaking new ground."
The model works partly because it delivers services and benefits
at the municipal level, where they are most visible, without
demanding municipal investment to sustain it.
Participants such as Ralph Blauel, technology director for the
Region of Halton, and Frank Mayhood, manager of IT for the City of
Kamloops, report that BizPal has produced genuine improvements in
service delivery. Mayhood told a Lac Carling X plenary session:
"The process mapping that we went through exposed all kinds of
interesting ways to redress redundancies in our organizations.
We've already made some changes in our business processes to
reduce the burden on businesses.
There are opportunities for that across all of the
jurisdictions.
BizPaL also works because it standardizes back-end processes and
taxonomy while providing flexibility to partner organizations to
adapt the service to meet local needs.
"The key part of the BizPaL project in my mind is that we've
managed with this technology to separate branding from delivery,"
Mayhood said.
"We can maintain our own identities and still participate in a
shared delivery process."
More growth is targeted.
The 2006 federal budget allocated $6 million over two years to
the expansion of BizPaL, and provincial partners are also
contributing to its cost.
There is no uncertainty over the commitment to BizPaL.
Seniors Portal Using a similarly successful model - top-down
funding, bottom-up service delivery - the federal and Ontario
governments have revived the Collaborative Seniors Portal
Network.
They have established a pilot project involving 20
municipalities, which they hope will be a model for delivery of
information about services for senior citizens across the
country.
"I think this might be the critical mass that we're looking
for," Joanne Harrington, director of the Seniors Cluster at
Veterans Affairs Canada (on secondment to Treasury Board
Secretariat CIO Branch) said in an interview at Lac Carling X.
The 20 small, rural Ontario municipalities will each be
allocated their own pages within www.seniorsinfo.ca.
Aside from finding people to manage the content of their pages,
the municipalities are not paying to participate in this
project.
Funds come mostly from the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and
Immigration, with some help from Veterans Affairs Canada.
"With this pilot project, families and caregivers in those
communities are going to have access to standardized information
across federal, provincial and local community programs and
services," Harrington said.
As with BizPaL, the driving force behind the Collaborative
Seniors Portal Network is a federal department with spending clout
and a vision for collaborative service delivery.
The initiative had been largely invisible since 2003, when a
seniors' portal was established in Brockville, Ont., but Veterans
Affairs spent most of 2005 developing a new business and
technological architecture for the portal.
Ontario followed suit, and by November last year had developed a
five-year plan and a framework that they were ready to offer to
small municipalities.
"Any other province should be able to pick this up and replicate
it because it was done in a generic way," said Walter Bilyk,
director of technology and business solutions for the Community
Services I&IT Cluster, which supports the seniors portfolio in
the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.
The ministry has developed a five-year plan to expand the
portal, and the project has at least some degree of political
support - a letter from Citizenship and Immigration Minister Mike
Colle helped recruit the 20 municipalities - but the future of the
Collaborative Seniors Portal Network will largely depend on
Veterans Affairs.
The federal department has a 12-month budget in place for the
portal network and is working on its long-term strategy, Bilyck
said, adding, "There is a renewed interest by the federal
government to move this across the country."
The Way to Authentication
It is often said that casual conversations at Lac Carling are as
important as the formal sessions.
At Lac Carling X, delegates from the municipal and federal
levels of government started to talk seriously for the first time
about finding a mutually workable way for citizens to be
identified, authenticated and authorized to obtain government
services and carry out transactions.
"You've got to admit that, from the taxpayers' point of view, if
they know they can buy their dog licences with the same certificate
that they use to file their income taxes, that's a good use of
their money," Gerry Matte, information technology manager with the
Municipality of Sannich, B.C., and president of the Municipal
Information Systems Association of British Columbia (MISA BC),
remarked at lunch on Monday to Maureen Tapp, director general of
the Assessment and Benefit Services Branch of the Canada Revenue
Agency.
Tapp did, indeed, agree, and so did other federal officials who
attended an ad hoc meeting with MISA representatives later that
afternoon.
Ottawa has wanted to have such dialogue for a long time,
according to one of the participants in that meeting, Nancy
Desormeau, director general, enterprise partnership management,
Publi
Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC).
Desormeau is directing the transition of Secure Channel and its
authentication system, ePass, to a utility model in which
government departments will pay the private sector to facilitate
transactions on their network.
She told a Lac Carling session on the day of the meeting with
municipalities, "I can remember back in 1999-2000 when a group of
us were putting the early plans together for the federal
government's online initiative, we talked about some of these
things.
"We looked at all the pieces of information you might use to
prove the identity of a citizen in an online environment, and
quickly came to the realization that the federal government doesn't
own very many of those things. It is another level of government
that issues birth certificates and drivers' licences and so on. So
how could we link with other levels of government to provide
identity for some of the programs we need federally?"
Until recently there was no municipal organization to which
Ottawa could address that question.
Now there is: The opening of Lac Carling X witnessed the
announcement that the first directors' meeting of MISA/ASIM Canada
had taken place the day before, on Saturday, May 13.
This is one of two new municipal organizations formed to advance
the citizen-centred agenda.
Since the Lac Carling discussions, MISA/ASIM Canada has begun
talking with the federal government about how to implement mutually
compatible and affordable authentication systems.
In British Columbia, Gerry Matte is spearheading the development
of a MISA/ASIM Canada authentication project within the umbrella of
the Public Sector CIO Council.
On the opposite coast, Daya Pillay, manager of e-Commerce &
Web services for Halifax Regional Municipality, treasurer of MISA
Atlantic and a board member of MISA/ASIM Canada, is involved with a
potential authentication project under discussion between PWGSC and
the Nova Scotia government.
Municipal Reference Model
MISA/ASIM Canada is also organizing a project to revive the
Municipal Reference Model
This is a standard to define and categorize municipal programs
and services, and could be an enabler for more interjurisctional
projects such as BizPaL.
The reference model has a long and complex history.
It was initially developed in the early 1990s by a group of
Ontario municipalities under the auspices of MISA Ontario, with
assistance from consulting firm Chartwell Inc.
Chartwell later worked with the Ontario and federal governments to
develop versions of the model for them.
The federal version, called the Governments of Canada Reference
Model, was one of the standards behind Industry Canada's
development of its Business Transformation Enablement Program, the
methodology that guides the services-mapping process used for
BizPaL.
One of the first decisions of the new MISA/ASIM Canada Board of
Directors was to authorize a project, under the organizational
leadership of MISA Ontario, to bring the old Municipal Reference
Model up to date and make it available to any municipality to help
align services and overcome redundancies with other levels of
government.
Roy Wiseman, CIO of Peel Region in Ontario, and municipal
co-hair of the 2006 Congress, and others who are leading this
project hope that it can be accomplished in about a year.
Shared Services Municipalities in several provinces are
participating in shared service initiatives that could cachet to
the collaboration brand.
One of them was described at Lac Carling by Holly Fancy,
director of strategic initiatives with Nova Scotia's Office of
Economic Development, and Bob McNeil, director of technology &
communications with Cape Breton Regional Municipality.
Under a public sctor licensing agreement initiated in 2000, Nova
Scotia has purchased 86,000 user licences for a SAP
enterprise-resource-planning system.
It is providing licences at nominal charge to public sector
organizations throughout the province. Municipalities representing
about half the province's population, including Halifax Regional
Municipality and Cape Breton Regional Municipality, have signed
on.
Fancy said the agreement has reduced the total cost of software
ownership by millions of dollars for the province's public sector.
McNeil said it has brought "amazing" changes to business processes
- such as a reduction in accounts payable staff at the regional
municipality to one person from 12 - and has given the municipality
access to world-class software that otherwise would have been
unobtainable.
"We really believe in one taxpayer," McNeil said. "We always
look for the winner to be the taxpayer. In this case, the taxpayer
won a lot."
Similar agreements are being implemented in Alberta and
Manitoba.
Political Support
The growth of 3-1-1 systems, another form of advancement in
infrastructure, is helping to make citizen-centred service delivery
tangible.
Calgary, Gatineau, Quebec, and Windsor, Ontario, have
implemented such systems, which rely on a single telephone number
for public access to non-emergency municipal services, backed by
CRM technology that encourages the alignment of services and tracks
their delivery to citizens.
The broader significance of 3-1-1 is that it has set a new
standard for municipal service delivery that has caught the
public's attention and is beginning to be championed at the
political level.
An example can be seen in the City of Toronto, which is to
launch a 3-1-1 system late in 2007 that will include the conversion
of the Metro Hall Council Chambers into a call centre - with
political support.
"We have had six of the most visibly conservative councillors
working with staff for the past 18 months building a movement,
really, for 3-1-1," Sue Corke, deputy city manager for Toronto,
told the Congress.
The 3-1-1 implementation calls for the collaboration of 14
service delivery divisions and, since Toronto is Canada's
fourth-largest government, mirrors the experience of
service-delivery integration across provincial ministries, Corke
noted.
John Davies, executive director of information technology for
Toronto, cited the 3-1-1 project as an example of how service
issues tend to rise to the political level faster in
municipalities.
"Since councillors are involved with project and policy
decisions that affect the services we provide, there is more
awareness of electronic service delivery in the municipal sector
than there might be at the higher levels of government," Davies
observed.
Municipal Determination
The accumulated trends and initiatives visible at Lac Carling X
have given municipal delegates confidence that their hands-on
approach is helping to lay the foundation for citizen-centred
service.
MISA/ASIM Canada President Kevin Peacock of Saskatoon said:
"Municipalities are playing a leadership role, rather than being
the guys at the end of the queue.
We need to be the ones to move the agenda forward, because it is
at the municipal level where the citizen feels that he touches
government first and foremost." Gerry Matte of MISA BC commented:
"The municipal governments are now raising issues to the more
senior governments.
The difference I see between now and five years ago is that,
then, they would have had to be persuaded that we need to talk.
They don't need that persuasion any more. In fact, their eyes
light up.
The newly self-confident municipal view was expressed most
succinctly by Georganne Dupont, manager of information systems for
the Town of Airdrie, Alta., and president of MISA Prairies.
Asked what role municipalities have assumed in government
transformation, she said simply, "We're the doers."
Lawrence Moule (lmoule@sympatico.ca) is
co-editor of Municipal Interface, the national professional journal
of the Municipal Information Systems Association.
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