Weeknotes — 2025-01-03
*knock, knock* is this thing on?
It’s been far too long since I sat down to share my thoughts publicly, so the beginning of 2025 seems as good a time as ever.
I’ve been the Director of Digital Advisory Services within the Digital Investment Office, within the Digital Office, within the Office of the Chief Information Officer within the BC Public Service since last April.
It’s been a good, busy 8 months. There is a lot more I want to do with my team, to make a difference in improving how digital services are delivered across the BCPS. We’re in an interesting place as we get the chance to see all projects that are coming forward seeking (minor) capital for IM/IT work. Across the team, we get glimpses of the problems teams are trying to solve and how they’re trying to solve them, from resourcing to technical architecture to delivery approach. Unfortunately, we don’t really have a great system for capturing really granular data about all the projects we’ve funded, but that’s something I intend to make some movement on this year.
It’s really eye-opening to see the different approaches and operating contexts across the 12 different sectors we work with, and I suspect there’s a lot we could learn by looking across the millions of dollars worth of digital projects that have been approved in recent years. I think of the good work Sean Boots did with Civic Tech Ottawa — specifically the Large Government of Canada IT projects — Large Government of Canada IT projects comes to mind. What are the sizes of investments, how have they shifted over time? Since we know about how projects were staffed, what technology they used, etc, I imagine there’s a ton of interesting and potentially even useful insights to be had.
Way back when I was early in my public sector career with Transport Canada (2020), I wrote a post that The Government of Canada is not a software company | by Andrea F Hill | Medium where I talked about how trying to shift the public sector to dedicated product funding may be a big departure. So it’s funny to be knee-deep in the funding space, and hopefully in a position to try to influence things.
I have blogged before about some of the challenges I see with how digital projects are funded within the public sector (should they even be projects???), and there is plenty more I haven’t really committed to writing yet. But that’s one of the best ways I know to refine my thoughts, so I really want to get back into this practice.
See you next week!
