IM Learning and Awareness Panel Discussion - HTML Transcript

DATE: January 27, 2006

LOCATION: Congress Centre, Ottawa, Ontario

IM Learning and Awareness Panel Discussion

Jane Lindsey: Good morning. Can everyone hear me all right? Good, okay. And before we start the first panel, I would say, if any of you at the far tables toward the front are finding it a little hard to see the speakers, please move in if you wish to do that. The first panel is focussed on learning and awareness. We're going to begin with reflection on some very important work that's been going on on building learning capability for IM specialists, for people such as yourselves, and to hear about that I'm going to give the floor to Francine Frappier and Francine, I'm going to ask you to walk us through what the work is and then we're going to do a pause and I'm going to give you a little chance to kind of talk briefly about it at the tables and then have a little dialogue all together. Then we will hear from our other two panelists, Dena and Linda, whose focus is not on building expertise in the IM community but building expertise in all employees. Francine.

Francine Frappier: I am pleased to be here to talk about the IM professional development and certification program. The program has been under development only since October 2004 and I'm very pleased to tell you that we have succeeded to complete the development of seven IM courses for the IM community, and those courses are going to be delivered by the Canada School of Public Service.

So today we will see that... I'm going to speak about the program overview, its benefits and components, and we will also show you the course curriculum, the description of each course and show you also the competencies and how those competencies correspond to the courses offered. I will also present the impact of the project.

ORO's mandate is first of all lead a collaborative enterprise-wide approach to community development in support of government change initiatives. It is important to mention that ORO has three components. The first one is the IM community, the second one is the IT community, and the third one is the service delivery community.

The program will review Treasury Board ministers approve the allocation of funds to implement the MGI Policy, so that's why we got the money for to develop those courses. Throughout the championship of the IM committee, we were supported by the IM community to develop those courses and to design all the programs for the IM leaders and practitioners. I'm sorry, I don't have my glasses so it's a problem. I don't see when it's far and I can't read it. So yeah, that's it. The objective of the IM certificate program is to provide the community with the new competencies required to implement the MGI Policy, according also to the new business needs of the government and priorities of the government. 

We developed the program in partnership with the Canada School of Public Service. That made sense because it was... it is our School and they can deliver courses across Canada in both official languages. The program component, the tools showed we have a [inaudible] and technical competency assessment tool. That tool helps us to identify our strengths and weaknesses. So our weaknesses. So those can help us to develop our education training plan that we have to do every year. Also, the course curriculum, we have developed the seven courses, so I will talk a bit later about this and if you want to have more information because I have just a very short period of time here, but you can visit me at my booth over there and I will be pleased to show you that tool that we have in the courses.

The certification component. The certification component is going to be developed by... in cooperation with the CGSB, the Canadian General Standards Board, and we are beginning this process as we speak. And then we are going to have the standard certification, which will assess the... if there are possibilities to have credits that would recognize experience and formal education or other training. The program as it is now is mainly composed of seven courses, but it's not... we will continue to develop the program. It will include also other type of learning experiences.

So with support for government priorities and initiatives. As you can see, there are new initiatives in the government and each one of them has something to do with information management like the math where public servants makes... where public servants are comfortable through better stewardship of access, including information, the HR modernization puts a renewed emphasis on learning and education, which links with the IM certificate, the IM professional development and certification program, which builds also on competencies and provides professional recognition.

The shared system and service initiative, Service Canada and common administrative shared services are initiatives which moves us toward improved delivery of information, programs, services to Canadians and more ready information community plays a large part in these initiatives, and of course the learning policy, which promote a continuous learning, so which the program does.

What are competencies and competency-based management? First of all, the competencies link to the strategic objective and capabilities of the organization. They can be used in all aspects of human resource management, organizational design, recruitment, staffing, training and development, [inaudible] management. It helps to develop, to manage most... not just with what is achieved but how it is achieved, and the competency-based management is a Treasury Board-endorsed approach to managing human resources that provides consistent throughout a fair manner in line with the project service legislative policy and sound CBM practices, and it is developed in cooperation with key stakeholders, including employees and bargaining agents.

So here are our competencies. We have the [inaudible] competency. For instance, leading IM, which is discussed in our course on visioning and it's part of all of those courses. We have, we want to do with this, it's to make sure that we can influence decision makers about IM. So we have those competencies that can help doing that and they are... you will see in our courses that it will... it is based on those competencies. Regarding the technical competencies, like for instance we have planning. Here again we have leading IM and the strategic planning for information... information sharing course that discussed leading as well. So those competencies are really the basis of our IM curriculum.

Here you have our list of courses. The title may still change slightly, but they reflect the concept. I would like to inform you that the courses mentioned in the green block are going to be offered free of charge by the Canada School during next school year. So get ready to register. They are free, and the Canada School is going to publish in the very near future all the description, cost, and all the detail to register. So they are supposed to do that in a couple of weeks that are coming.

So this is the basis of all the program so far. You have the legal policy. That is a very important course that explain exactly what the federal context is and those courses are not [inaudible] what exists somewhere else. It's really to express the need of the federal government context. 

The next phase is to develop the standards of IM certification process and to continue to develop the program because now we have seven courses but the program is going to continue to development. We will deliver also and update the IM courses to the Canada School of Public Service and also we will work closely with the CGSB to develop the certification process. 

Regarding the impacts of this project on the IM community. As you see, there are many of them. We can just mention the development, that we developed conditions that have led to the creation of an efficient partnership and synergies between IM projects. So that's a big plus for everybody because really it created real synergy between those projects and helped many people to work together. Also it allow us to prevent duplication of efforts. And also what is most important, and I have to thank the IM community, all those who help us to develop the program because it's really done through a thorough consultation across Canada of the IM community, and I would like to thank all of those who participated in this success and helped us to develop those courses.

Also it takes into consideration learning products available in the private sector, universities, and colleges, etc. and it also, all this will finally enhance professional recognition and career development. So delivers and updates these courses to the Canadian... to the CSP, the Canada School of Public Service in both official languages a plus, too . It will be a uniform knowledge throughout Canada. And as I said, we work closely with the Canada School and the CGSB so this is a big plus, too, because they are two well very good reputation, and very well known for their good work. So I invite you to visit the kiosk again and I will be pleased to reply to all your questions. Thank you.

Jane Lindsey: Thank you. I'd now invite all of you to take about five minutes or so... Yeah.

APPLAUSE

Jane Lindsey: And you get to do it again after, too. I'd like you to take a few minutes at your table and it's also a chance to kind of chat with colleagues. Think about what Francine has told you. What kinds of things did you hear about the professional development program and its competencies? What did you hear that you like the sound of? Is there anything that surprised you? And are there any questions that you would like to ask Francine here today, and in questions I'd urge you to focus not at the level of what's the content inside one particular module because that's best handled by visiting the booth, but if you have questions about its design, about the competencies, about the overall construct of the program or how it'll work, please do. So take a few minutes at your table. What did you like, any surprises, any questions, and then I'll open it up for us to talk together. 

BREAK

Jane Lindsey: Okay, nice to hear some buzz and it's a good way to get going in the morning. You see out there some microphone stands. I would like to invite you if you have a comment that you could share from your table about what you liked that you heard or a surprise or any questions. I'd invite you to go to one of the microphones and let's bring them out in the room. So who's got some comment or some question that you'd like to bring back, in this case to Francine? I think somebody's on the move over this way, okay. Here, good. I'm going to start... well, I'll start here because you made the mic first and then I'll move right over to number four. Number three.

Question: Okay. The courses: you're saying some of them are going to be free and there are other courses I see, but are there restrictions on who can take and attend the courses?

Francine Frappier: Could you just...

Question: Are there restrictions on who can attend and take the courses?

Francine Frappier: It's mainly for the IM community, so whoever in the IM community that is interested can register. And I know that I can speak about that, too. The people working in programs that develop information sharing with other provinces or information sharing, whatever, with other... in other contexts, and they certainly need that knowledge as well. And when we speak about the Information Management Committee, we don't speak only about the records managers but we speak of the community itself as a whole.

Question: So my incoming CR-04s and that, I can send them on the courses? There are no restrictions? 

Francine Frappier: Definitely.

Question: Okay.

Francine Frappier: Very welcome. And we had in our pilot, if I can add, we had CR 04s, we had AS, whatever level they're on in those categories, from AS 01 to AS 06, and the people were very, very pleased with the quality of the courses that were developed and they were very pleased about the content and most of them said, "Oh, when can I register for the next one? You know, I want to be on the next pilot because I really, really enjoyed those courses." And the course development is not completed yet. We've got some comments from the pilot and the Canada School is being right now as we speak developing and modifying the courses to adapt it a bit more to the comments we got from the pilot courses. And the courses that are going to be delivered in the next fiscal year will be translated and available throughout Canada.

Jane Lindsey: And let's go to number four.

Question: Hi, Francine.

Francine Frappier: Hi.

Question: Realization that... the CGSB School is very good, but not all government is in Ottawa. It's nice to be off on the training and the courses. Are you going to be going Web-based because, formerly coming from RCMP, we have people in Iqaluit, Whitehorse, Yellowknife and also not everybody is close to major cities and you've got people even in Richibucto, New Brunswick. Is this training going to be available on the Web at the outset, not down the road?

Francine Frappier: For the moment we don't have a plan for that. I don't say that we won't ever have it. I can tell you that the program is still in development but as I said earlier, the courses are going to be delivered by the Canada School across Canada in both official languages. So that won't be... won't prevent anybody from whatever regions they are from to register for those courses. Also, the Canada School if there is an amount of people enough, there is enough people, they will, I think they will consider going just specifically for that request. 

Question: Thank you.

Jane Lindsey: So some food for thought it sounds like on this one. Is there another comment or a question over at microphone four?

Question: Yes. The Professional Learning Centre at the University of Toronto offers a certification program and they have courses in Ottawa and in Toronto and I've taken a couple of those courses, and I was wondering if those were portable and would be acceptable by this program.

Francine Frappier: The program that we have developed and that we're still developing takes is mainly for the federal context. We know that there are courses being delivered by other institutions, universities, colleges, and those courses are very valuable, and at this stage for the moment we began to develop the seven courses for this fiscal year, but how we are going to give equivalencies or whatever, recognize what has been done somewhere else, it's being developed right now. We began that last week. So that is coming. There will be a manual that will explain all that. 

Jane Lindsey: Now I thought I saw someone standing over here. All right.

Yes, please.

Question: Hi, good morning. I'm Sabina with Western Economic Diversification in Edmonton. I would like to understand better the intention of the certification regulation that you want to move towards, if this is something that would be specific to government or intended to be sort of a nationwide professional designation for IM practitioners in both the private and public sectors, because if that's the case, there's typically a regulated designated as regulated by a province, not federally, from my experiences that I've had in the IT-regulated experiences. So I'm just wondering how far you hope to advance this because there could be potentially a tremendous amount of work there.

Francine Frappier: Yeah. For the moment what we have developed is for the federal public servant. So it's not for anybody else. But there are some provinces who informed us that they will be very, very interested to come and participate in our courses. The Canada School can deliver courses, can accept people from the provinces. Sometimes they will have to learn about how we proceed to do business with us or something like that. So maybe they will be interested to register. But for the other point of view, as I said, it is in development right now and we will make sure that this is at rest .

Question: Thank you.

Francine Frappier: You're welcome.

Jane Lindsey: Thank you. So with focus from Francine on building the capacity inside the government community and certification in that line. Let's now put our attention to what amount those many, many thousands of people who need to be literate and need to be accountable and need to take advantage of IM in government but who are not IM specialists. So I'm going to now give the floor to Dena Speevak from Agriculture Canada and Agri-Food and we'll then be hearing from her colleague and I'll bring it back to you all.

Dena Speevak: Good morning. Bonjour. My objective this morning is to give a status report on Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's IM education program project. I want to say that I'll just be talking about the project itself, but I want to invite all of you to come to our booth and see the IM education program itself. At this point in time, we only have it in English and we're going to be getting it translated and our target date is to have the program completed by March 31st. At our kiosk, we also have a sign-up sheet. We're going to be putting the program on CDs and if any of you would like to receive a copy of our program on CD ROM, please feel free to sign up at our kiosk.

A bit of background. The cost of the project was $150,000 with $75,000 coming from the MGI Policy Fund. We're very proud to have partnered with NRCan in this project. Our vendor was Systemscope and in implementing the project we had a few constraints. We obviously had to respect any government and local intranet publishing standards, and we wanted to not have the product be dependent on a department having a learning management system. So we kept the technology quite simple but effective. It was also our intent that the product could be reusable across other departments. 

So basically, our objective is to develop an online self-study program for all employees in the department. It's to educate employees that IM is not only the responsibility of records managers and IM specialists and to empower employees to effectively and efficiently manage information in their day-to-day work, it also attempts to create awareness of basic IM responsibilities and principles which employees need to apply to their work, and of course in understanding those IM principles this could also be used towards the rollout of IM tools such as RDIMs .

We've developed eight distinct online modules. They're Web-delivered. We will be loading them on our departmental intranet. The modules are fairly short in length. They would take somebody about 10 to 20 minutes to do. There's an optional quiz for self-assessment at the end of each module and if a person clicks the wrong answer, up pops the box to explain why their answer was incorrect. We've developed a supporting website to provide context to the package and there are also internal and external links of relevance to the topic.

I'm very pleased to say that the modules on the website, there's a choice of format. The user can choose the online version either with or without audio. As well, there's a PDF format if a person wants to print the material and keep it by their desk or read it elsewhere, and there's a PowerPoint format for individuals to use in classroom presentations or at meetings.

Now this is a sample page from the product. This page is on the... for the email module, and you can see that there's the choice of the module with sound, without sound, PDF, PowerPoint, and the self-assessment quiz. 

And here are our module topics, the eight that we selected. We consulted with many other departments to find out what would be the best content for this package. IM 101, the first one, talks about why IM is important and what are employees' key responsibilities. The last one in that list, "Understanding IM Within the Federal Government," talks about IM at a bit of a higher level. It looks at information as a strategic business resource and talks about the MGI Policy.

We're at the point now where we're getting our modules translated. We plan to make the product live on the intranet early in the new fiscal year, and of course a very important part of the rollout of this package will be developing a communication plan to engage employees to use this online tool. In the longer term, there are many other possibilities. It would be excellent to add some how-to modules to the package. I consider this an evolutionary product.

So again, I'd like to invite you to come to our kiosk, see the actual content of the product and sign up if you would like a copy of the product on CD ROM, and we also have handouts of this presentation.

Jane Lindsey: Thank you.

APPLAUSE 

Jane Lindsey: And now I'm going to ask Linda Mayne to pick up on the same topic of tools to raise awareness and competency in general public service employees.

Linda Mayne: Good morning, everyone. I'm actually from Prince Edward Island. With the exception of Western Diversification and ACOA, we're probably the only head office, federal government head office that's outside Ottawa. So I'm pleased to be here given there was a big blizzard that was supposed to be on the way that almost grounded us, but there was nothing, it blew out to sea.

Basically we've been working on an e-learning package as well. But to clarify, we're actually part of Intake Two, and Ann invited us along. She thought there was a fair amount of interest in the e-learning and where we are, so we thought we'd share that with you, preliminary as it is. The difference between what we are doing and the take that Agriculture Canada has is that, from the outset, our e learning tool we've been looking at it with the insight of providing it to all federal government employees, so that's both in terms of content and in terms of distribution channels, so that's the base that we've started with.

And just to give you some sense with the team that we put together, we were looking for something that would provide awareness to all federal government employees that would take the average person about three hours' worth of material to get through. So that's about where we are.

And this today is just to give you some sense of a progress report. As we said, I'm Linda Mayne. Some of the experience that I have, I just started in the Information Management field about four months ago. Before that, for a few years I was in the HR field and I was heading up the learning programs nationally. So that's given me a bit of a good base to take this project under my wing. The person that could not be here today is Ginette Marcil and I want to recognize her for being the person with the dedication and the vision to realize that this was a good way to go, and she's the one that put forward the MGI package.

I've brought another person with me though today and his name is Richard Douilette (ph) and he was new to IM and he's going to be helping us on this package, and he's just over there. Wave, Richard. So the topic of discussion today, and I won't belabour this, we're just going to talk a bit about where the project started from. I want to recognize some of our partners, give you a good sense of the approach, where we are today and what I see as the next step.

The project origins—basically, just a little bit about Veterans Affairs itself. We did complete a capacity check in April of 2004. Education and awareness was one of the top six themes that came out. From that, there was a working group that got put together, which I was supporting when I was in my HR job, so it's come back to me. In terms of what was it, if we did education and awareness, what was it that people would be looking for, and culture, accountability, guidelines, and tools were the piece that came out of that subset. It lined up very nicely with the kinds of themes that the MGI Intake Program was looking for. So we've been moving forward with that. 

The challenge that we've found as being part of Intake Two... the retrospective, is in terms of timing. What's happened at Veterans Affairs for those of you who hadn't heard, we have a new Veterans' Charter. They're the most sweeping changes that have been done in terms of service delivery for the department in 60 years. So it's very major. And in terms of trying to use any of the internal resources of the department, just the simple things, like trying to get through contracting, has been a challenge. But nobody could have foreseen that, and we're living with it and we're getting through it. And those particular changes are going to be implemented on April 1st, and what they're about is, they're leaving the, basically leaving the services for the older kind of veteran in place, but they're trying to get services in place for the modern-day veteran that's coming home and needs to be reintegrated back into society. So it's huge. That's all I can say about that.

These are our partners. So as I say, at the outset we started off trying to make sure that we were going to try to hit the needs of all federal government employees. We put the call out and again we would still invite anyone who's interested. There's lots of time to come aboard. Just give us a call, and if you want to come talk to me after just to see a little bit more about what that would entail, I'm going to be anchoring a booth with Hélène Valin over there and that's the one when you first... when you're trying to leave here it's the one on your right. So I'll be there.

These organizations have been invaluable in terms of moving this forward and in terms of keeping this at a very broad level. A couple of the people are here today. I saw Nina Keegan and Valerie... Uh, there you are back there. Wave. Hi. And Paul McLaughlin from Industry Canada. They've been invaluable. And I think I saw Sharon Emmanuel over there. Hi. And there are lots of others but they've just been like tremendous. 

Our approach, what we first did is, we looked around. We decided rather than build from scratch, we looked around, we knew there was some very good stuff, and ironically enough we found Agriculture Canada as well and that was one of the ones that we reviewed. Recordology, most of you have probably heard of that one. That's the Health Canada one. We looked at CIDA and the other one we looked at was Foreign Affairs Canada. Before we started looking at them, though, we decided it was good to sort of focus on what is it that's important. So that's where we had that discussion about it is sort of a basic three-hour awareness overall broad view that focusses some on MGI. 

So we did that and we used something called Blooms' taxonomy. So for those of you that hadn't heard of it, you can... next time you can take a look at the way that people are advertising courses, and what it is, it's basically promises to the learner. So when you're done with this course, you will understand how to... you will know how to apply. So it's very basic that way. So the first thing that we did is, we established those learning objectives in that way and a couple of the ones that we had, for your interest, is you'll understand the importance of IM in the Government of Canada and you will be aware of other IM resources and sources of expertise.

Then we realized as we were building that, that that probably wasn't enough yet, so we developed an evaluation criteria on top of that and some of the things that we were looking for was, we were looking that it would be easily adapted into a generic format because we didn't want to get into anything too complicated, and with minimal investment. We wanted to make sure that the tool could accommodate people that were visually or had audio impairments. We wanted to make sure that from a learning or an instructional design point of view that the participants were getting good feedback as they go through the e-learning, and that was basically engaging for the learner. 

So those were the things that we were looking at, and then we had the working committee members go through the different products and evaluate the thing on that thing. It was very difficult. It was a good thing that we had done the criteria because that's what made it a little bit easier. Again, a retrospective, had we set it up properly from the beginning, we would have weighted certain ones right up front, so we had to go back and do that piece. CIDA was the one that won, not because the others weren't great. Some of them were just a little more difficult to make generic, for instance, so they came off the board that way. And that's what we were doing.

The CIDA one, just for anybody that's interested, the objective of that particular course is defining information management and why it's important. It's applying the information life cycle when you're managing information. It's identifying key policies and regulations governing IM in the Government of Canada, and applying IM accountability. So that's where we are. 

Then the next step was to work with CIDA because it was contractors that had developed it so we wanted to make sure that we were free and clear to take it, alter it, and make it available to the rest of the world. So we have got the legal go-ahead. I signed a paper yesterday, so we've got our agreement in place. We've crossed that one off. The contracting issue that I mentioned in our own department, getting that kind of stuff, we are wanting to engage the original people that designed the content for the CIDA course because it's much simpler. They know exactly where to go and they can make very quick suggestions in terms of how to make it generic. We'll be working through that with the working committee. So that contract is this close to being signed.

Our other partner in this has been the Canada School and the Canada School has been wonderful, Campus Direct and I talked about distribution channels. We decided from the outset that's the easiest way to get it on. It's going to have to be reprogrammed because it is an authorware right now so they're going to make it so that it's in a much easier format for them and it'll be a much easier format if the Web link changes or something like that within the program. It'll be much easier to change down the road. And it'll be available to everyone free of charge, I am glad to announce. For anyone that's doing anything with Campus Direct, they're looking for good e-learning packages that they can... that other people have developed that they can put on there. So it was a very positive experience.

Library and Archives is another one that's a very, very strong partner in this. One of the things I wanted to point out is they also have some MGI money to help small departments and agencies, so we've brought them on board and we realized that we don't have enough money to do it all and they've agreed to take on the translation and they're going to take over the contract for the narration that has to happen because we have to completely redo all of the French and the English. So that's where that is. 

Oh, sorry, I can see but you can't see. All right, there's that one. All right. Next step. Great. And this is where we are right now. We are going to be managing very quickly the generic changes with the guidance of the working committee. I think what's going to happen, we had hoped to have everything done by the end of March but because our other contract is not in place and there's been some delays there, we're going to have to re look at when this is going to be done and what is possible. So I'm thinking about late spring is when I think that you will probably see something, as long as there are no more delays. Obviously there's going to have to be testing, then there's the release and this is the part where we're going to be using all the channels that we can to make sure that everybody knows that it's available in both official languages on Campus Direct. So that's the advertising piece. And then we're going to be making sure that it's established inside some of the things like the IM portal so that you can find it in different places.

Then it'll be up to individual departments if you wish to use it or not. Ourselves, because we are so busy with the Veterans' Charter, we have like an overall strategy, we know that that's what we're going to use for IM awareness for all employees, but we certainly don't have any kind of rollout plan because there's no time or appetite in the department right now for that. So each department would have to take that and decide where does that fit in your strategy. And I think that's everything that I have to say. I'll be over with Hélène if you have any other questions and I think Jane.

Jane Lindsey: Thank you. 

APPLAUSE

Jane Lindsey: Sounds like some really excellent analysis and study has been going on. Let me invite you again at this table to take a few minutes, talk about your impressions about what you've heard, how does some of the considerations, some of the criteria you've heard both Linda and Dena identify, how do they apply to things maybe you've been thinking about, and what questions would you like to bring forward before we move on it this morning. So a few minutes at your tables and we'll talk together again.

BREAK

Jane Lindsey: I hear lots of buzz out there. I'd like to hear what are some of the kinds of ideas, observations that are coming up at your table. What are you noticing? What are you struck by about this work that's been done for these training programs? What questions might you have for Linda or Dena and then when I've checked that we've handled those I'll also open it back up if you have any additional ones for Francine. And we'll begin at microphone three.

Question: Jean Vera Singha , Privy Council Office. I have two questions if you don't mind, two for the price of one. I'm very interested first of all that this is happening. That's wonderful. I'm wondering, though, what requirement there will be for existing employees and new employees coming into IM to have this certification. Right now I'm a librarian. To be a librarian in the federal government it's required to have a Master's degree. I was speaking to my colleagues and their certification is all over the map. We heard this morning from Jim Alexander how important government information is, it's at the core of government. But I'm sorry, but records management for example is very low education/certification level that's required. There's something wrong here. I know this is the beginning of a certification, but will it be required by people working in the field? That's the first question. 

The second question, I was very excited to hear from Linda because I'm involved in my department with an IM/IT orientation which is weekly, and at the moment it's compulsory. I put that in quotation marks. Again, your IM orientation, your training, is that... will that be compulsory for employees or is it just there and nice to have but you don't really need it? So two questions.

Jane Lindsey: Let's start with your second question because I'm going to put it back initially to Linda and Dena. You're not in a position to legislate for everyone but I'm interested in what your thinking is, what the departments you've been involved with are thinking here.

Linda Mayne: My own thinking around the compulsory, I just know from having been in HR we ran a compulsory, mandatory thing for all managers and I know from experience that unless you back that up with a consequence it's hard to get everybody and that's the first step. The second piece about that, I know for Veterans Affairs, we haven't thought much more about it other than we know that we need a very good product and we're going to deliver that because that's what we promised to do. Strategy for that will come after, and we'll talk to senior management and talk about making it available and making sure that the time frame is reasonable. 

And the thing about Campus Direct that's good is, it does have a learning management system, so we will be able to call them up from time to time and say who's taking it and who is not. And if the appetite is there for senior managers, one of the ways that... in learning programs that we had used to make people a little more interested in completing stuff is, we would make managers accountable and we would ask for how many in their area had taken it and how many had not, and we would report that upwards. So you can see where's... 

Dena Speevak: At Agriculture we haven't really gone as far as deciding if it would be compulsory. I don't think that's the direction we would go. I think it would be... we would depend more on a very effective communications plan, perhaps a lot of booths in the lobby of the building, this kind of thing. I think what does interest us down the road is some sort of performance measurement to determine how effective is the program in culture change. People who have run through our program, do they then find their behaviour changes? And we've talked a little bit about could we have people register online when they begin the program and then subsequently do a very quick survey of those employees, and if we had some evidence that it was having an impact then that might give us some leverage with managers in getting them to have their employees take the time to do the program.

Jane Lindsey: Great. And Francine, to you, you may feel free to comment on this one if you wish, but certainly the qualifications in the IM community.

Francine Frappier: I was asked the question before. "I have a PhD. Why would I register, you know, for one of those courses?" "I have a Masters degree. This is a certificate. What is the value for me?" First of all, I have to say that the informal education is certainly... would certainly be recognized. Also we have... even if we have a PhD, our knowledge has to be kept up to date and that's what we want to do with the certificate. We have also to understand the context of the federal government. This is not taught nowhere else. So like I was speaking earlier about the legislation from a legal framework and policy, so I am legal and policy... We change the title so many times. But this course is going to explain the federal context. It's not taught nowhere else. This is certainly a knowledge everybody will want to know, to get. But as I said, we wanted to make sure that we are not going to duplicate what exists out there. We are here to express the... 

Like I will take an example. Like the IM environment and vision. That course explains what is our current context here in the federal government. What is the vision of the Government of Canada for IM? What is the vocabulary that we use in the federal government? Also, this course explains the governance structure. This is not taught in universities and colleges. So this is, you know, it's mainly to make sure that everybody who's working in IM is at the same level, understand the same vocabulary, speak the same way. 

And when we speak about leading IM is how you influence decision makers. It's good we can learn from each other because IM, as you know, people say uh... the people complain, you know, it's like nobody understand IM and so on. So in those courses, we explain how we can do that and we have very interesting people participate in the course as presenters, as speakers, and that explain their experience and how they succeeded to... with IM, what experience they had and how they did it and so on. So that's all what I can tell you at this moment. And also, as I said earlier, we just developed those seven courses but the program itself is in the process of being developed. But the formal education is certainly to be taken into consideration.

Jane Lindsey: Are there other questions or comments before we wrap? Yes? Microphone two.

Question: Hi. I'm Julia Ginley . I'm with the Canadian International Trade Tribunal and we're one of the small agencies, under 100. I wanted to start by thanking the speakers. It looks like there's some excellent work going on out there. My question relates to the Web-based training that I guess at Veterans Affairs, but also to the other courses and everything that are being developed. Are we going to have one source of these things so that you've got one point where you could go in and... I'm looking at the integration of all these things and I'm looking at the fact that we don't want to duplicate effort as the speakers just said. So how is it all going to come together so that I can say go to the school and I can enter one spot and I can look at the awareness for my staff and I can look at the different courses that might be for IM specialists. I'm looking at one spot so I'm asking the question: Is that going to happen? Is it in the plan and who's taking the lead?

Dena Speevak: Well, first of all I want to point out that the courses that Francine is talking about are for the IM community like us, people working in IM and in records management. What Linda and I are talking about is for the implementation of MGI for all government employees to realize that they need to manage information effectively in their day-to-day work, be it email or thinking about the privacy or security of information. So the purposes are different, and I think that... or as Linda said, there's going to be a general government IM training for all employees offered by Campus Direct, which is available to all departments. At Agriculture, our intent is to load our product on our intranet and other departments are, you know, can do the same.

Linda Mayne: The only thing that I can add to that is, it was one of the conversations that we did have at the working group level. For sure, one of the conversations has been, it's only that like our product is only going to exist in the one place so that we don't have to worry about synchronicity. You know, you make a change to one and did you catch the other one? But what I'm kind of hoping is that on the IM portal, that maybe when we get to that point what we would talk about is a strategy that makes it clear that, you know, this is for... this one is available for all employees, perhaps targets for the IM community, Francine's stuff. So that's probably what I would start that conversation rolling. It's a good thought.

Jane Lindsey: Sure. And then we'll just wind it. Come over here and that'll probably close this off. Quickly. 

I'm head of Corporate Services, okay? So I'm responsible for IM as well. We're small, as I said, so as you know, we wear many hats, each of our employees. I know that all these things, as you say, and you know they exist, but I would really like to go to one place whether it's IM professionals, whether it's for staff and cultural change, whether it's for the program that... the business side. One spot, because we don't actually have the time to do all the searching, so I'm going to ask you to... I think you're making a real important point. I'm going to ask you to bring it back to this room probably in our 2:30 session this afternoon. 

Chris Molinski is going to get us all talking about kind of what's been working and challenges, but also what ideas you have to help the community, to help IM advance, and that's the kind of thing that can be fed back for example to Jim Alexander. So perhaps you are seeing a need on the broad picture for something that doesn't exist now. So take note and please bring it back into conversation later in the day. I'll even check for it. I'm going to take a couple more quickly. Number four.

Question: John Fotheringham from Library and Archives Canada. It's actually what I had in mind, a suggestion. I've seen some of these programs, well at least recordology in any case. I'm quite impressed with it, especially the scenario that... various scenarios that they have. But I'm concerned that fundamentally what we're trying to do is get people to come and learn about our world, the world of IM. I think it might be an idea also to get them to see their own world in light of IM and that might be true insinuating IM into the training packages of everything else that's done in government. You know what I mean?

Jane Lindsey: And that's also a thought... I know many other areas are doing that, for example in many of the programs at the Canada School. There are kind of modules built in or perspectives. It's a good point. 

Linda Mayne: Just to add to that, one of the things that we've done this time at Veterans Affairs and it's working very well, it's just a very quick comment. In the Veterans' Charter there's all kinds of new business processes that are being developed on the business side to accommodate the change, and we've got an IM person on each of the working committees for each of the business lines, and what we're doing is actually incorporating the IM messages right in those training packages. So it's just a thought. So you look for opportunities like that.

Jane Lindsey: Number three.

Question: Yes. I'm Lt.-Col. Phil Zurdai from the Department of National Defence and I would like to echo the comments from the last two people. The work that's been done by the panelists and the other organizations in the government to create information management training packages is excellent. The question is how do we bring it into people so that we practice information management, we integrate records and other information management disciplines in day-to-day work in the Government of Canada. It may be as simple as taking parts of the Veterans Affairs packages and including it in public service orientation, for example. 

But we also need, I think we also need to have... to have information management practices looked at as part of the HR development strategy for the public service and to have a lead. CIO Branch could certainly provide the lead as to what we're looking for competencies, etc. and then have an integrated training package developed. We have a bunch of... right now we have independent activities that are going on and it needs to be coordinated so that you have... so that you apply or provide the right training at the right places or provide the right information to the right people so that they can do their work.

Jane Lindsey: Thank you. Well I'm going to... I'd like to thank all three panelists and you, all of you, for your thinking and this is doing exactly what we're hoping. You're both getting insights on individual projects and tools and thinking about the bigger issues, the kind of system change, how do we get it working across the board. So thank you and Hélène Valin.

Hélène Valin: I will echo what Jane is just saying. It's just wonderful to hear the comments that you are taking. Certainly I am taking notes and would be getting back to you. It's important, it's key that we get this right. So all your comments are certainly welcome. I'd like to on behalf of everyone just thank the panelists again and offer them a small token of our recognition for the time that they took to be with us this morning.

APPLAUSE

Hélène Valin: So on with our travels. I'd like to remind you now we're at the break stage and from now till about quarter to twelve we'd invite you to go and see the kiosks. I wanted to mention one of the groups that is not in the program is NRCan who are here by special invitation. They were part of the IM Day in the fall. There was a lot of recognition on the work that they're doing and they've joined one of the kiosks. So as you go through, they won't be officially in the program but certainly they will be willing to stamp and to explain to you their project. 

You're reminded to use your passports in the program and also we thought we'd make this a practical tool, so in each of the pages where there's a short description of the project objectives is your opportunity to get your passport stamped here, but also to take notes, write down names, your thoughts, so that as you go back it becomes then your learning journal also for the day where you're able to reflect back on what you've seen today.

I thought I had a third message here for you. To also to... if you have, and I see some people and they stopped me to see whether they had the right questions or the right answers in their treasure hunt, and they're tricky questions, let me just tell you. So this is your opportunity to go through the kiosks and really find the answers. You can stop me and I can validate if you're on the right track or not, but this is your chance to fill out your treasure hunt, put it in the deposit box by the registration so that you can be part of the draw later on today. So have a great travel through the kiosks and I'll look forward to seeing you at noon time. Lunch time. Sorry, they're asking me about lunch time. Quarter to twelve we should be coming back. Buffet will be served here on your left. Thank you.