Audience Participation - HTML Transcript

DATE: January 27, 2006

LOCATION: Congress Centre, Ottawa, Ontario

Audience Participation

Chris Molinski: Great. Thank you very much and it's certainly a pleasure to be here. When Treasury Board first called me to be involved in this and they talked about an audience participation, I said, "Wow," because I originally thought this was MGI Fun Day, not MGI Fund Day, and I said there's a whole bunch of things we could do around fun with MGI. It really is an oxymoron. 

But you know, it's late in the afternoon. I know people are tired. It's hard to sit. But if you'll bear with me, I think we can have some good discussions today because if there's one thing I value, it's input from the IM practitioners. I spend a lot of time dealing with the CIOs and departments and with leadership people in the IM world, but I think sometimes we're a little bit out of touch with reality and what are some of the pragmatic aspects we need to move forward on. 

And I would like to start by saying that us in the IM world, we have jobs for life. All those IT workers that have been front and centre over the last 15 to 20 years, it's time to come to the dark side. It's kind of interesting. I started my career in 1978 working International Defence in the data centres at DA Pro . Does anybody know what that classification is? DA Pro? That was a data processor and that's a [inaudible] to I guess what a LAN administrator does, but there's a big difference. Back in '78, we were processing data. Now we're managing infrastructure, and it's wrong. Information technology is very important, don't get me wrong, but it's an enabler for the products that we have to deliver and that's extremely important.

So most of my career I've spent in Information Technology and I've been in the government for about 27 years now. So I've pretty well seen it all, from mainframe to client server to distributed computing to distributed networks, you name it, I've seen it. And if there's one thing we've lost the focus on, which we never should have, was the information aspects of our product and service delivery. 

When I became CIO with Transport Canada I said um, you know, "How hard can this IM stuff be? You know, IT stuff is pretty hard, so this can't be any harder." But I remember going to a committee back then, it was called ACIOM, the Advisory Committee of Information Management. Really was a predecessor to the CIO Council, and do you know what was very interesting? For two years, I never heard the words "information management" discussed once. It was all about what's next, operating system coming out from Microsoft or what kind of network protocol... and it was just... you know, looking back, everybody was engaged in that and there were some tough issues that needed to be done but they shouldn't have been done without taking the IM context into place. 

And what we did is, we really allowed our clients or we really let our clients down. And that's not just some of the reasons that they took control of some of the things that we needed to do in the IM and the IT space. Not a bad thing on IM because it's everybody's responsibility. From an IT perspective, if you couldn't share information and didn't have interoperability, it was very, very difficult.

There was another epiphany in my career. The first management committee meeting I had as CIO with Transport Canada, we had a departmental informatic steering committee that was comprised of six ADMs in Ottawa and all our regional director generals. So there were about 12 senior managers in a room and I put up 10 principles of information management. And the first one was that information should be shared to those people that are authorized and have the right security clearances to see it. And I said how difficult can that be? Three hours they argued about it. Three hours of... we didn't get through the other nine. That was one. And I went back to my office and I'm on the 20th floor of Tower C, and I said, "Maybe I'm just going to unscrew that window and jump out, what am I getting into?"

But you know what it really indicated to me? That we had not demonstrated the value of information management. Managers and program deliverers are under a mound of stress in what they have to deliver. There's a million priorities out there. Unless we show them the value and demonstrate what really needs to be done, it's very difficult to get their engagement. 

Another opportunity I… you know, I'm a big Dilbert fan. And there was one Dilbert cartoon and I wish I would have kept it but it showed Dilbert working in a records office and he had "records office" above the door and he was with a colleague, and it showed a client coming in the first strip and passing this big file over to Dilbert's colleague in the record office, then the client leaving. The next strip showed Dilbert's colleague just throwing the file on a big mountain of paper and Dilbert looks up and says "I didn't realize working in a record office was so easy." Because, in effect, that's what we've done. The client gives it to us. As IM practitioners, they expect us to manage it. We haven't delivered the tools in all cases nor developed the processes to deal with a lot of this. And that's really the challenges that we had to move forward.

It was interesting-I was talking to Bob Provic from LAT earlier today and he's been in government since '78. It was interesting-we had an IMC planning day this week, and that's where I'm anxious to hear your input today because we wouldn't want to come out with something that was practical, pragmatic to move forward. And to be honest with you, I was extremely disappointed with that day on Tuesday because one of the principles, one of the first things that came out as a priority, was to define IM, and I was talking to Bob about this and Bob said, "You know, Chris, I've been in IM since '78. We've been trying to define it since then." IM is everything to everybody than what it needs to be. We get so hung up on the definitions and on the scope that sometimes we don't start the journey of where we need to go.

Do we have all the answers? No. Do we have all the resources to do everything? Absolutely not. But can we move forward? Can we work with our clients? Can we work across government to do some of the right things starting with putting the right tools and processes and guidelines in and start demonstrating the value? IM awareness, we heard about a lot of sessions today about training, both on the certification side for practitioners and awareness on the program managers' side. That's an important step because what we have to get people to realize is that IM is everybody's business. We all have a role to play into it. And it's important we set that expectation and we don't set it too high.

Sitting there and doing another policy development, with all due respect to Jim, and writing definitions on what IM means, a lot of people's eyes glaze over. You know, as somebody said on Tuesday, it's time we stopped planning to do stuff and we got on doing something. Right? I'm not saying that you don't plan, that you don't have vision, that you don't have that. You need to have a framework to work within, but if we don't move forward, if we don't look at low-hanging fruit, if we don't have action plans to actually engage our clients and do it, we're going to be in the same situation next year, the year after, and the year after and it's like pushing a boulder up a mountain. Guess what? It's pretty difficult to do it by ourselves, but if we work together and do it as a team we can start that journey up. 

Will we get there, to everything of a panacea ? Absolutely not. But will we make good progress? We will. Just look at the projects today as part of the MGI funding. There are some excellent projects that are done today. There's a lot of passionate people about IM who believes in what they're doing. Look at the synergies, if we can integrate that. The whole IM capacity check exercise was a very valuable one. But perhaps we should have done it at the Government of Canada level, and instead of having them inject policy that has 100 things we need to do, we pick the top five and then we looked at it uniquely from departments if we need to do things on top of that. Fund it, resource it, and move it forward instead of all working individually on what we think is important and what's not. That's not a bad thing, it's great to have that ingenuity, but we need a Government of Canada context as we move to operate as one and that's very important. 

MGI Policy obviously is a framework to move forward. That becomes something that's very good practices, that we have to have clients do. But just as important and perhaps even more important is the value to our clients. Can't force people to follow policy. You have to engage them, you have to show them the results and you have to demonstrate and sustain it as part of the culture. You heard some of the projects today that work so well and some didn't work so well. And I'm a firm believer-you probably learn more from failure, from projects that don't work as well as projects that do because at the end of the day there's got to be a value in it to move it forward. Just because there's a bale of money to spend on something, one person thinks it's a good idea, we need to engage our clients, we need to get buy-in, and we need to show value short term.

And how many times have we talked about enterprise data models? I mean, my God, we'll all be dust by the time any enterprise data... it's just too large. So how about specific program models as we're doing transformation of services, that we can build and then start moving forward on? Again, the just do-it philosophy. If there's one thing that client service computing taught us, get out and do it and make it better rather than three years to develop a mainframe aps and that's why people moved off. There's a mix and a balance that we need to do. We can't be perfect. But guess what? It's a lot better than what we do today in some cases.

So anyway, from an input perspective, and you know, this is an audience participation so I'm not going to make you all stand up and do the macarena, I can't sing. I thought we might have some wrestling matches between the central agencies and the line departments. Right? But there would be no contest, the line departments would win, right? But you know, from a central agency perspective, the central agencies are doing wonderful things for us compared to what it was five or 10 years ago. They are really trying to move this in the first directions. Look at the IM days [inaudible] fund, today today for networking and sharing, so I've got to give a lot of credit to Treasury Board and LAC and all those entities that have been trying to move this forward.

What we need to do is assure it's a consultative type of process that we set and manage the expectations. I always get a kick out of, you know, how some things work in IM policy... For you people, anybody here know about the MITS, the Managing Information Technology Standard? There was a letter sent from Wayne Wilders over at PCO to every deputy to do an analysis to sign off it, and send it back showing within 18 to 24 months what would be implemented and how it would be done. The MGI Policy comes out, 18 months to 24 months... where is that in realm of the priority of myths where we had to have sign-offs and action plans and compliancy that things will happen if you don't agree? Or the other... you know, the math priorities. There's a lot of things out there and everybody's says, "Well, put it in the DM's account, [inaudible] will get done." My God, the DM's account [inaudible] will be 400 pages long with all the things that are out there today.

You know, a couple of messages I do want to send, we have come a long way. Since that meeting I had at Transport Canada about IM and the sharing of information to ACE and never mentioning it , it is front and centre. It is identified specifically in the math under stewardship. We have CIOs in the Government of Canada who are pushing the envelope to try to do the right thing. We have senior managers who are starting to understand the value of information, not from a compliancy perspective but how it can help them get their job done. And that's in large part thanks to the people in this room and the IM practitioners who go about it every day doing what they think is right, in fact in spite of some departmental policies and cultures in doing that type of thing. How many MGI departmental [inaudible] in this room? Could you raise your hands?

Unidentified: What?

Chris Molinski: MGI... sorry, MGI departmental leads for implementation. Every department has to have... has to implement... has to have a senior executive that's responsible. What does that indicate about the leadership that we have in the IM environment? That doesn't need to be a negative. What it means to you people in this room working together is to use that as a catalyst to get that value. Because that's ultimately what it comes down to. If you're identified to do something that you don't believe in, you won't do it. So 40 departmental leads, talk to them, get their buy-in, get them to understand the value and if they're not the right person, hopefully somebody can have enough sway to get that person changed so we can get people that are passionate about moving it forward. It's very important.

So anyway, three questions today. And what I'll do is, I'll read the three questions and then perhaps we can break off into tables and deal with the first one and then we'll come back and talk about it, and then the second one. And these are pretty simple, but I do want to ground them because I do want your input and there are a lot of people here that are listening as part of this IMC information management plan. And the first one: What are we proud about that we do in IM today? 

The second one: What are the main challenges and obstructions we are facing? And I know everybody is going to talk about resources being the first. Yes, we all realize resources are an issue but guess what? Where there's a will there's a way. There's a pragmatic approach that could be moved forward. Anyway, I won't preach about that one yet. And number three: What are some concrete steps that you people as practitioners and the leaders of IM in your departments can put in place collectively to help us move this whole agenda forward?

Hélène Valin: All right, that's the challenge, and you've got the chance in this dialogue to tell Chris what you want him to hear to carry back to the leaders of the community. So let's go back into conversation at your tables. Let's say tackle all three questions because your brains may tackle one more than another. So what's working? What are challenges? But in particular, given what's working and the challenges, what do you want to see done to move things forward? And take five, seven, eight minutes and then I'd like to see at each microphone at least six people if not more. So get there and we want to hear you call out through the mics what your observation is, what's the challenges, what the idea is.

Chris Molinski: And if you don't, you're going to have to do the macarena.

Hélène Valin: That's it. 

Chris Molinski: And I can't dance.

Hélène Valin: Okay. So over to you for a little bit of kind of brainstorming and then we'll hear.

BREAK

Hélène Valin: Okay. Now's the time. We want to hear, Chris wants to hear, you want to hear what are the messages you want carried forward from here. So Chris has got something else to throw out and then I want to see you getting up to the mic. You don't have to have a perfect thing to say, it doesn't have to be all figured out, but this is an important chance to do some of that collaborating across boundaries and say what are we thinking about, what do we need, what ideas, what concerns have we got? Chris.

Chris Molinski: Great. Just two other thoughts, the first one being I understand that there's a lunch that's as a first prize with Jim Alexander. So the results of our discussion will set up a briefing note for whoever enough is lucky enough to win that lunch. Okay. And the second thing. I understand that... unfortunately, I wasn't here for the lunch but I understand that my colleague, Nick Florakas, said very, very nice things about me, Nick, so thank you very much for that. I really appreciate it. 

Hélène Valin: Great. Okay. We're not kidding. This has been a long day. Get up, get off your seats, go and stand by those mics. We want to hear. What's coming to mind for you that you feel has been done well in the community, or what's an issue or a challenge to be addressed, or what do you see being important to move things ahead? Great. Let's start at number two.

Question: Okay. We actually get got beyond question number one, which was what are we most proud of. And so the comments were one department has a really good governance structure with roles and responsibilities laid out. Someone else was feeling very proud about... they have a function-based plan, that they're using it, and they're also... another thing they're proud of is they're implementing e-records next year without an RDIMS tool because they want to make do and have something in place before RDIMS rolls out. Something else. I like this one. Violent disagreement of how to proceed. In other words, people are engaged and they're thinking, and it means that things are being pulled along rather than the string being pushed.

Somewhere else, directors are contacting the IM people because they don't have IM support and they're asking for it. They want... the directors are coming to the IM people saying, "We want your support, direct support." Someone else was proud of another person's department for having great literature in place and having a really good approach to that. That department also has something on e lessons learned. That's a new database. And the last item that was a point of pride was on one particular initiative in a department head of a federated model, the branch IM people are begging the corporate people to take on this project rather than the corporate people having to impose things on the branch. They're actually starting to think about corporate needs rather than merely what they need in our special little environment.

APPLAUSE

Hélène Valin: There's a lot of school for thought about you learn from mistakes you do, but what's really interesting is research on leadership shows that the most successful leaders get highly attuned to their strengths and build on them. Now if they have huge, huge undermining gaps you've got to do about it, but it's to build on the strengths. Great. Comments? 

Chris Molinski: Let's hear other people, what they're proud of.

Hélène Valin: Or concerned or want to move forward. Microphone three.

Question: So can I have another turn? Sabina again. That was a tremendous synopsis, I think, of the day's events and the progress to date. I'm proud to say that I'm just finishing three years with the public service. I've learned to sort of slow down in my expectations. However, during this three years I actually have to say today that I have been able to be a witness to the progress that has been made and I think with IM there has been a tremendous amount of progress. 

So with that, I'd like to jump to number two and that was about challenges and opportunities. And being from the West, in headquarters, I tend to try and be very vocal when I come to the centre to try and remind folks here about the risks that exist with the disparity of both geographic regional disparity and also the considerations for the different departmental profiles that should be made when developing all this wonderful stuff that we can use. A lot of us that are in the line department need to move quickly, we need to be agile, we need to be flexible to respond to the programs that we're delivering. 

And as support groups, you know, we need to put the pedal to the metal kind of thing and move forward, and it tends to get very frustrating, waiting for all of this good stuff that's happening and the risks that a smaller department may have in wanting to move forward, taking the risk, doing something, and then uh–oh, we have to change something later on down the path in order to demonstrate alignment to the overall GFC goals, you know, and the processes and the methods and everything that's being encouraged and preferred to do. So there's additional cost that would then be incurred later on down the road. 

So there's the balance between what has to get done. We still have to keep working, we have to consider what's happening in the [inaudible] of the departments, the smaller agencies, and really small ones from 25 people to 400 people, you know, then to the megagroups that are here. And then also recognize the regional distribution. I'm privileged to lead the Alberta Federal Council IMT community, so these are primarily the CS practitioners in the province, right, and most of the provinces have an organization of this. And it's like, it's a community of practice, if I can start using the new term.

And being a headquarters person, I'm very sensitive when I speak with these people as to what have their headquarters people told them already, because a lot of them feel out of the loop with the activities that are happening with their headquarters groups, right? So it's really important I'd like to impress upon the communication and the collaboration, not just across partners but even within your own distribution within an organization. So I'd like to leave those thoughts with you. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Chris Molinski: Thank you very much for that, but I guess as of the 23rd of January, I guess we're the region now and you're the centre. So thank you very much for raising those points. But, you know, the whole regional aspect of federated departments, and we all operate obviously with regional arms, is an extremely important one because we need to be consistent in our approaches, and one thing that I've found by consultation and by getting people involved early enough, because the regions sometimes are close to some of the clients that we service than the headquarters people are, and you look at from the client's view of what we can help them do and then we sort of position it that way. 

I tend to use the expression "tactical visioning," "tactical planning," which means a short-term gain. So you think big but start small and move down that road. And will we make mistakes? Absolutely. But guess what? We're doing something and a big mistake isn't to do anything.

Hélène Valin: We'll come over to number four and then we'll come over to number two. 

Question: Hi. We never got past number one, question number one, and several of us around the table have been in the IM business for quite a few years and it's very easy for us to become cynical, and let me tell you offline we are very cynical, and yet we were very able to come up with quite a few things that we're very proud of, and we don't all know each other, either, but we were able to come up with an interesting list. One person kept stressing, you know, she's proud of the fact there's a small engaged IM community, very engaged, a little bit overworked and perhaps tired, maybe that sort of runs into cynical occasionally, but there is that community that still has a lot of energy and is willing to continue working towards those practices that we need to continue with.

Second, there was mention of Treasury Board funding to support these innovative projects, these MGI projects. I think that is great because it allows us to experiment and take those risks. Third, I mentioned the GOL initiative and especially the gateways and clusters activities that took place over the last five, six years which really moved forward the horizontal integration of information and the breaking down of silos between departments, even within departments, between departments and government. So that was really, I think, an important thing that was accomplished and of which I personally am very proud.

And lastly, someone mentioned Parks Canada. Their executive actually supports their IM initiative and they are engaged. So here we have an example of a department that is knowledgeable, that is working with the IM staff to move things forward. So that's as far as we got but thank you very much for the opportunity to express.

APPLAUSE

Chris Molinski: You raised some excellent points and I think when you talk about the IM community, let's start to emphasize the importance of that network. I know one of the things that I was very involved in last year was the information management leadership initiative where departments actually identified people and we brought them together to network and give them competencies to be leaders back in their organizations. But the message we sent to these people, that leadership doesn't just start at the top, starts at every level of the organization, so by working together with departments and sharing practices, best practices, sharing failures, it's very important that we do that and move forward on that agenda. 

So I was very pleased to see that and sometimes because we work in the field we sort of... you indicated we get cynical about what we've accomplished. But, you know, we have accomplished a lot and we have started that journey and that journey will continue on. So that's good. Thank you very much.

Question (Interpreter): For this we are proud of, first there is cooperation and also the interest there is generally in the industry, a lot of interest. People want to know what's going on, what the developments will be, and then there is recognition of the impact of information management. Everyone recognizes that IM is important and we all want to see the impact and we want to see IM continue. Now for challenges. Not enough accountability and the means are not sufficient, either. If we don't have resources, we can have policies but we won't be able to reach our objectives.

The other obstacle is looking for perfection. When we arrive with a solution or a tool, often people have too many expectations. We can take a solution and make it better but we cannot expect everything to be perfect right at the beginning. Now for solutions, we have to think about information management before information technology in order to have better planning, and then we have to make employees responsible top down and down back up as well for each person to be responsible.

APPLAUSE

Hélène Valin:(interpreter) So I hear that you are saying it's important to have a solution, not necessarily a perfect solution, in order to make progress. As we have said, we have to find people who are converted, who are champions for the cause. 

Question: Friday afternoon joke if I can say. We started talking about information management and I think I got people [inaudible] by some of my comments. We started talking, well, what happened that was good. So it's question number one. We didn't even finish question number one. The first person said, "Well, information management is more important than it was," and then I said, "Really? Are you sure?" So let's go back because some of us have been in the government for many years, so do you remember program review one and two and three? What happened? 

They told government departments, do your core business, forget about what's not core, so if you're a real property , I mean whatever you're supposed to do, so forget about finance, HR, admin and guess what? Records, information management. That's not important. So [inaudible] admin. Then a few years later, which is about when I started working in IM because I used to be in IT, perhaps I should have stayed there, that's what I say now, anyway. So a few years later, I joined IM. This will be an interesting field. And the first thing we found out because of all those program reviews we were rusted , no more resources in admin and IM, same in IT. So then it was Treasury Board came to help us and they said we'll do IM rust-out funding, IM and IT rust-out. 

So luckily some departments, perhaps ours too, were lucky enough to go to Treasury Board and get some rust-out IM funding, which means we will catch up a little bit to have some policies, guidelines, awareness, you know, all kinds of nice things, and this is it. They said, "Come to us once, never come back again. You got your money, do whatever you can with it." So we did what we could and then go away. Luckily enough, we still rusted and then GOL came. We said, "Oh, gee," and now not much happened and then a good thing that happened was the MGI Policy. It's a good policy, it's more integrated than the other one. It's simple, it's clear, it's good. So the Policy came but there's also the bad side, which is no resourcing to apply to Policy, no follow-up, no nothing, so it's a nice policy, a good policy. 

Then Treasury Board again came to help us. They'll said we'll put an MGI project funding. Great. Well what happens after? What's next? So my conclusion would be instead of say... we move a bit and we... we should make sure that department heads understand that IM is their core business. It started a program review. IM is part of their core business, it should be funded, it should be managed in such a way, and even within a department. It's not just central agency versus departments. It's also within a department. If I'm a director of IM, which I am, my staff and myself, we're crying out in a desert because whether we have resources or not doesn't matter. Business lines don't.

They don't have time to invest, they don't have resources because it's not value that's being important. Oh, yeah, there was Gomery, I'm not talking about Gomery, but aside from that, in general, business lines want to deliver their business and if they're not told, even though we say it's important, they don't realize because they manage, they managed their business for so many years without managing their IM properly. So what difference does it make? 

So I think, instead of say we put some things in the system here and there to patch, well let's address the core of the problem which: Is this important or not? And if so, how come department heads don't get it? And then bring it down. Anyway, it's a nice conclusion, it's a nice hope for Friday afternoon. But doesn't mean we didn't do a lot. But I'm saying, as a government, we're not there yet. But we have ideas, but we're not there to implement it. So perhaps I should retire first. I don't know how long it will take. Do I have time to retire?

APPLAUSE

Chris Molinski: I have a couple of comments. First of all, where's the joke? And secondly, I have a headache. No. You raise a very good point but I think we have to look back at ourselves. We have to convince our clients that information management is important. Managing information, information management, collaboration, knowledge management, all those things that we need to do. And you know what? We can't boil the ocean. But I will tell you if you can get some of your clients involved and get them to be change agents and show the value of moving this forward... I know from Transport Canada, for example, we have some electronic tools implemented across the department, and the way I got the $14 million I needed to implement with RDIMS, I piloted with one of our most difficult clients and got, demonstrated the benefit. Was it perfect? Absolutely not. Were the processes and procedures that need to be put around it? Yes. But at least we were electronifying our data and he was able to show the benefit and he actually sold it to the department. 

Because, really, if you look at the nineties, we talked about the paper mountain, the nineties is the information of lost... or sorry, the decade of lost information. Try to go read an 8" floppy or a 5 1/4" floppy diskette today. They're gone. Email stuff, gone. So paper people say it's a big issue. Yes. In my view, perhaps we should just leave it and move on, stop creating it, put the stake in the ground and move forward with the least electronic tools across government that we need to implement in a consistent and holistic fashion. Will it be perfect? No. But at least we'll have something to build upon. 

So back to your point and you raise a very good one, because the departments have a lot of priorities, deputies, front and centre and a million things. How do we get a piece of it to show that information is involved in every one of them? Finance, you have legislation requirements. HR you have legislation requirements. IM, we have policy, and the policy doesn't seem to be followed by... we have directives. It's up to us in this room to make a difference every day in making that happen because if somebody's going to wave a magic wand, say information is now important to everybody and everybody's going to fall in line. Absolutely not. So use your best management pick where you can make the most and the biggest difference and start changing that culture and see what happens as that steamrolls forward. Remember about a job for life?

Hélène Valin: Microphone number four.

Question: I'm not tall enough. Can you hear me? Okay. Hi, Chris. A couple of items, thoughts that came. We have a lot of prophecies that we throw out and, you know, this could happen. First have we had any floors collapse because there's too many boxes being stored somewhere, you know, that kind of thing. I think we have to make ourselves into disciples to deliver, and this is... you're going to find this funny, but to have at least some messages in our pockets so when we're waiting at the elevator and the CEO is there or an ADM, we can at least engage them in a one minute conversation. Go out there and communicate. 

So there's the communication side of it. And some of that messaging can't be such a burden that, you know, it's hard to take the MGI and say, "Oh, I can just take these key messages out and to be able to deliver it like very easily." You know, maybe it's a publicity tag. That kind of building the grassroots movement is maybe something to look at. The other is integrate IM activities into our systems development methodologies. Departments can start doing that. That's not that difficult to do. And that way, when a program manager comes in and says, "I need a system, I need a system," IM is up front, at the front, the forefront. 

The other is, you mentioned about IT, you know, coming to the dark side. Well, maybe we should look at... be very opportunistic about flying over there and picking up some of the IT people and bringing them over there. Actually, I talked to Andrew about that yesterday, about how do we make it attractive, right? There are so many anomalies between the... in terms of the structures, the classification. I mean, people get so hung up on that, rather than looking at projects and competencies and engaging people on neat projects. It's not something necessarily that they're going to be there for life but at least engaging people from certain communities, whether it's IT or whether it's the business communities. And we've been successful to a certain degree in terms of engaging people from the business community at Parks Canada.

I've seen today a lot of great content that's being produced with respect to IM awareness. It's very disparate, though. All in little pockets. Treasury Board has funded a lot of these. We need to bring them together and we can't wait for years to do it. We need to do it fast, we need to do it now, we need to make it online, accessible, and like Chris, you said just do it, just do it, and then we evolve it. And this is an opportunity to engage the private sector in some of this stuff because we don't need to always host it. You know, some of the technical stuff, you know, find a provider to do that but the content is where the IM practitioners need to stay engaged and to be able to update it. 

Another thought is, we put together cost for... monthly cost for your Blackberry, for any other devices. This is how much it costs, you know, on a monthly basis or a yearly basis for a desktop. Maybe what we have to put is a line item in there, is for storage. This is how much it costs you for transitory information, and by the way, the corporate... the corporate storage... or the storage for corporate records included. 

So it sort of motivates them to say, "Gee, all of this could be transitory," or if it hasn't been catalogued or classified, "Gee, that's engaging people into saying we need to make, you know, make our information..." I guess to cull it, to look at it, because we can put the tools on the desktops and that's our responsibility. I mean ours in terms of IM and IT, and once those tools are there, it's no more shame on us, it's shame on the business community. It's shame on you for not paying attention, classifying your information, culling it, making records, you know, all of that. So those kind of messages, some of it, I don't know how to implement it, but they're just sort of initial thoughts. 

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Chris Molinski: Those are excellent thoughts. On the Crackberry, as I like to call them because they're so addictive, I think we should take a whole bunch of them away because people really don't need them, to be honest with you. But anyway, that's just... we can save that subject for another day. But the bottom line is, the information-you raise a good point-is distributed, people are using it every day. We're losing that. How do we manage it? So it's a question of awareness, it's a question of building the tools and processes in to support that in an automated fashion until we can obviously... we have manual processes today.

The difference between IT and IM workers in my view is blurred. Just because you're a CS doesn't mean you're an IT worker. A lot of CSs are IM workers, and conversely the other way around, too. You know, we have a 20-year benchmark and I see Nick did sort of skulk out of here. Is he gone? Yeah. Because we need to... perhaps it's one of the things that's on the table is looking at the whole HR renewal. We have spent a lot of time and effort on the CS community or the IT community. We need to do the same for the IM community. We talked about the leadership initiatives, we need to talk about updating as we move into an electronic world because it's different from just the records managers. Very important, but IM is a lot more than that. 

And when you look how diverse we are all the way from libraries and what we're doing with webs and content management and all those other things, we really need to get a grip on how we plan to manage our workforce as we move forward because I can't emphasize enough our product is information. And if we don't have information workers that can help our clients manage that and deliver it to our clients, we're not going to be successful in the longer term. So that's one of the challenges, obviously, that we need to move forward on.

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Question: Last but not least.

Chris Molinski: Oh, okay.

Question: On to questions two and three from our happy little table. The point from our last speaker is really important and I think I'd like to take a little bit more of an analogy. We're drowning in our own garbage. 

Unidentified: Which department are you from?

Question: National Defence. But we're packrats. We're afraid to throw things out. We're afraid to get rid of information. We don't have a systematic way to do it or we're not applying it. We don't classify our information so we have a hard time doing it. And, you know, if I ran my house that way it would explode at some point. I mean if we... that's our biggest challenge, is getting rid of the stuff we don't need and stopping the making of indiscriminate copies of the stuff that we don't need because we have no way of getting it around. That and making sure that information management is my problem and not somebody else's and that IM tools are for me to use, not somebody else to use because they're part of what I have to do to do my job, not something that I think of or that I have to do as an add-on.

So concrete steps. I was speaking at a Navy IM conference about a year ago and they were saying... the biggest whine was, "We don't have the right tools to do IM." And I said, "If you're not going information management, you're not only not doing your job, you're putting your sailors at risk because you're not doing the things you need to do." We have to start doing IM with the tools we have and once we start doing IM with the tools we have, then we can start thinking about how we improve the tools, how we replace them.

Which means small steps. It's nice to have an enterprise records management system but if I don't have the wherewithal to include metadata in the information that I produce, it's not much use to me because I have to go back and do it afterwards and then it becomes too hard. And the third piece has been alluded to a couple of times. We have to measure progress and reward success. If we don't measure it, nobody cares. It's like I told you to do it. Same thing with my kids. If I tell my kids to do something or don't do something and I don't say anything when they move off the rules, then I know they're going to ignore me. 

And, you know, the IM community, or implementing IM in the Government of Canada or in a department or in an organization is the same thing. If you don't punish and reward to a certain standard, you're not going to get there. And 20 years ago, we were doing excellently in information management and records management and then we let the IT community convince us that the computers were going to do it better than the people and we threw the people out. We abandoned our processes and now we're trying to reinvent the wheel. So, you know, this is one option or one time where we have to look at what we used to do well and then try and figure out how to do it in the electronic environment. 

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Chris Molinski: Okay. Thank you very, very much for your input. You know, I'm extremely proud to be a civil servant and I can see that people in this room are as well. It's through ourselves that we'll make things happen and sometimes, as we spoke about, we don't see all the movement, but it is happening, the momentum is building and we need to keep on.

The other thing I didn't tell you about when I did get the $12 or $14 million to implement our EDR mess, I used a little bit of an extortion as well, because this was about the time that the Somalia Inquiry was underway and that DND actually shut down for a day to look, I guess, through their garbage and find what they could. And I actually said to our deputy minister of Transport, I said, "Do you realize if a plane falls out of the sky and people are killed or hurt and we can't show an audit trail of our inspections and what we've done?" and we had some instances at the time, the Dryden Inquiry, where we were just being completed on things along those lines . 

So it really hit home, and that's really at the end of the day the message I want to leave you with. Try to make it a value to the clients we support. The MGI is important for compliance and there should be a reward and a punishment for people that do, but at the same time, we need to continue to move the value forward of managing information from a client perspective. So we want to start small but think big and continue to build on that and move forward. So thank you all very, very much. I certainly appreciated the input into the conversation.

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Hélène Valin: Thanks very much, Chris. I'd like to on behalf of everyone to help you also on a professional level, on a personal level, continue your own journey in the IM and in other venues.

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