Collection search - Chief Information Officer Function [textual record]

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1
Chief Information Officer Function [textual record]

Hierarchical level:

Series

Date:

1900-2006, predominant 1984-2000.

Reference:

R776-159-9-E

Type of material:

Textual material

Found in:

Archives / Collections and Fonds

Item ID number:

4189775

Context of this record:

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Treasury Board fonds

Treasury Board Secretariat sous-fonds

Chief Information Officer Function
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Record information – Details

Date(s):

1900-2006, predominant 1984-2000.

Bilingual equivalent:

Click here

Place of creation:

Ontario

Extent:

112.25 m of textual records.

Language of material:

English

Added language of material:

English, French

Accession:

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Operational Records of the Chief Information Officer [textual record]

Scope and content:

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The series consists of information resources documenting the following activities: policy development, compliance, oversight, community development, enterprise architecture development, transformation alignment, project leadership, international cooperation, accessibility frameworks development and research -- applied the to the broad program areas of Information Management, Information Technology Management, Privacy, Access to Information, Security policy, Federal identity, Communications policy, automated service delivery and the two internal Task Forces for Y2K and Access to Information Review.

In more detail the initial increment of the series includes documentation of access to Information policy and compliance activities (including the Access to Information Review Task Force, Coordination of the Access to Information Request System (CAIRS)), the Blueprint For Renewing Government Services Using Information Technology (1994), Management Framework for Large Information Technology Projects, senior committees related to IT (Advisory Committee on Information Technology, Advisory Committee on the Information Highway, Council of Public Sector Chief Information Officers), Financial Information System initiative, Technology in Government Week (GTEC), liaison with the Gartner Group, liaison with the EKOS Research Associates Inc., Management of Government Information Holdings (circa 1989), Information Technology Security, Federal Task Force on Digitization, Cryptography, Shared Systems Initiative, Administrative renewal initiative, senior management committees on IM (Advisory Committee on Information Management, Information Technology Board, and Senior Advisory Committee IM Subcommittee (TIMS)), Information Management Plan, National Summit on Information Policy, Alignment and Interoperability, Y2K (Year two thousand bug), the Working Group on Paper Burden, IT Community Management Program, Policy on Internet, liaison with International Institute of Administrative Sciences, Electronic Document Management Systems, Task Force on Informatics (1986), artificial intelligence, Electronic Service Initiative, Libraries, Mail Management, Dominion Archivist's Report to Treasury Board, Informatics and Infrastructure fund (17 priority projects including RDIMS - a GC EDRMS solution, and PKI system for encryption), telecommunications and telephony and Information Technology Standards development. Many of these activities are also documented in the Administrative Policy Branch Series and the Program branch series and related accessions.

Additional name(s):

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Chief Information Officer Branch

Biography/Administrative history:

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Chief Information Officer Branch : The management of Information Technology as well as Information Management in its broadest functional definition has been an integral part of the mandate of the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) and scope of its activity since long before the office of the Chief Information Officer was created in 1996. Before the CIO Branch there was initially a Chief Informatics Officer supported by two successive transient entities, the Financial and Information Management Branch (1995-1996) and the Office of Information Management, Systems, and Technology (1993-95). These initiatives manifested TBS efforts to reconceptualize, reconfigure and reposition its role in managing information technology as a distinct business function and enabler, complementing its comptrollership and expenditure management accountability frameworks. This evolving function had long been an integral part of the Administrative Policy Branch (early 1970s to 1993) and before that the Management Improvement Branch of the late 1960s. The earliest TBS classification system to incorporate automated information technology as a discrete sphere of activity, appraised under authority of the National Archivist, was dated October 1967 and was covered by RDA 68/021.

Though a residual APB structure survived until 1995, the growing and dynamic IM/IT dimension of its activity had shifted into an autonomous organization program function by 1993 under the rubric of the Chief Informatics Officer (the first limited scope of the TBS CIO function). It was out of these initiatives that the Blueprint for Renewing Government Services Using Information Technology (1994) was developed as the transformational vision within which CIO would be re-launched and developed after 1996 as a discrete and expanded branch-level business line (CIOB).

Indeed, the years after 1993 mark the slow realization that IT, rather than being the driver of IM and service to the public, is more of an enabler that must be harnessed to larger and more comprehensive (senior) management frames of reference and strategic deployment applied to core operational programming if the public sector was ever going to achieve the potential efficiencies and improved performance promised by modern computer technology. The emphasis through the CIO function shifted increasingly towards the coordination of management frameworks, in distinction to a status quo of nominal management of Technology initiatives and projects by the centre (i.e., TBS) but still applied and managed semi-autonomously within departmental frames of reference by bureaucratic IT fiefdoms.

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) function was announced in August 1996 and Paul Rummell was appointed the first Chief Information Officer for the government of Canada. However, in spirit and direction, the CIO Branch is part of a broader TBS transformational initiative stretching back at least to the launching of The Blueprint For Renewing Government Services Using Information Technology process in 1993 and its eventual publication in 1994 under the leadership of J. A. (Andy) Macdonald, a former Comptroller General, as first operational "Chief Informatics Officer" of TBS.

In trying to cope with this dynamic environment since the 1960s, TBS, as the active management agent of central GC authority, has found itself perpetually playing "catch-up" in the effort to harness technological innovation to the federal jurisdiction, to establish the right balance of roles and responsibilities with the private sector and to coordinate service oriented goals with other levels of government

By the late 1980s, however, computer innovation and Web technology were offering a whole new model for service and the private sector was rapidly exploiting information technologies in a serious way to transform both their internal business processes and the way they were delivering services to customers. By the early 90s, the gap was widening in the quality and nature of service delivery between the private and public sectors. Government was by no means oblivious to what was happening. Within the Administrative Policy Branch, the Bureau for the Delivery of Government Services (BDGS) began to explore a new approach to service delivery consistent with modern comptrollership principles. The BDGS demonstrates a dramatic shift in strategic thinking that led senior branch management to conclude that improvements in management practices from a service oriented perspective would require a whole new way of doing business at the Secretariat. TBS business processes were recast to mirror the service orientation that TBS was urging a more collaborative horizontal approach with lead departments as partners reinventing every single aspect of program delivery on a service-to-client, results-based and values-based governance model. The upshot was the Service Innovation Sector, and a completely recast IM/IT business line administered through the Chief Information Officer. (Eventually, both were to converge further in organizational terms after 2004.)

The other characteristic that distinguishes TBS activity after 1990 is the unrelenting pro-activism in which it took the initiative in its two reconstituted functional supra program activities - Management Policy Development and Oversight and Expenditure Management and Financial Oversight but especially comptrollership (broadly defined) and technology-enabled business transformation. It is no coincidence that the CIOB was formally constituted in the same year as the TBS launched its radical revision of the expenditure management system to conform to the enhanced requirements of comptrollership principles. The underlying preoccupation for both initiatives was to escape the "Vision Trap" and to get transformation of government service delivery and internal program activity operationalized. Since 1996, TBS has completely changed the way expenditure is managed and accounted for by government departments and through the CIO it has turned "transformation" into a template formula (Business Transformational Enablement Program) that modern comptrollership and the Management Resources and Results Structure virtually compels the senior management of departments to implement if they want to survive as players in the bureaucratic hierarchy.

In the new CIOB mantra, the historical need to build better systems has evolved to the point where CIO of TBS had become a strategic partner for the entire business of client departments, not just informatics. In 1999, the CIO's responsibilities were expanded to include the development of an enterprise-wide information management and technology strategy into reality in the Government On-Line initiative including secure channel and the development of an RDIMS suite, an integrated Electronic Records and Information Management System (EDRMS). These dynamic TBS initiatives were backed up by the full force of government priorities outlined in the Speech from the Throne, Oct 12, 1999 and Feb 18, 2000. By 2000, the transformational scope had gone far beyond integrated service delivery and the CIOB boldly declared that "by being a model user of the Internet Technologies, government will encourage more citizens and businesses to use the Internet." With still only a minority of Canadian Citizens (45%) linked up, this amounted to the state acting as technologically savvy agent crossing the line into social reengineering in order to make the operations of the Canadian State more efficient. At the heart of this initiative was the CIO agenda.

By 2004, the CIO Branch had absorbed the whole scope of service strategies in general and GOL catalytic initiatives in particular. In 2007, CIOB took on the suite of internal service initiatives designed to further operationalize the long standing shared service programs pursued since 1993 while (temporarily) spinning off support functions related to GOL to PWGSC and coordination functions associated with GOL to a new separate TBS Transformation Alignment Office. By 2007, CIOB saw its highest value services as business system transformation and horizontal information technology management applied to all government programs.

The modern CIO, then, is an integral part of the deliberate and self-conscious transformation self-initiated by TBS beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating after 1993. TBS sees itself as a fully rationalized program-integrated central agency performing a comprehensive role in leading the public service to achieve the value-based goals deriving from approved priorities of Cabinet and consistent with both best practice in public administration around the world and the full potential of a technology-enabled service focus in a results-based and fully accountable regime. In this vision, the CIO Branch serves a critical role in asset management increasingly focused on information as a key product and operational resource (asset) or program deliverable.

From CIOB perspectives, the goal is to establish a climate of continuous improvement working towards maturing repeatable processes operating internally within departments and through TB to Parliament through the expenditure management system. TBS is the OPI for operationalizing comptrollership principles in all aspects of GC activities on an enterprise-wide basis in relation to all aspects of IT/IM management. In as far as IT/IM is increasingly linked to operational program rationalization as its key focus, CIO becomes the pro-active centre of information technology-enabled organizational transformation across government. The CIO is the Office of Primary Interest within TBS to lead, promote enable and guide an accountable and results-based client service approach across GC both within government and with external clients (citizens, businesses and foreign clients).

Also included in the CIO universe are two substantive Task Forces closely associated with it: the Y2K Task Force (1997-2000) and ATI Review Task Force (2000-2002). These Task forces operated as nearly self-contained entities over several years with high degrees of autonomy and committed resources and they each possess a substantial discrete (closed) recordkeeping system of their own. These task forces complement major related CIO vertical business lines and provide valuable supplementary documentation of those business lines as they evolved from the early 1990s to 2002. They have been included in this series because TBS has so treated them and because they were both TBS internal initiatives that demonstrated the new more pro-active program philosophy of this dynamic central agency.

Finding aid:

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Textual records (Electronic) The finding aid is a file list providing file code, file title, file part, file part type, inclusive dates and the archival container number. 55-138 (90: Open)

Additional information:

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Source of title:

Title based on contents of series.

Arrangement note:

The records incorporated into this accession include all records with the CIO prefix and in addition those with the AIRTF and Y2K prefixes. These latter prefixes reflect separate series created for Treasury Board Sponsored Task Forces but which are treated by TBS as activity accruing to the CIO function. Other series Prefixes that are anticipated to be accrued to this series include, TAO, SVS and LAB. They all reflect activities that has accrued to the CIO function as it has evolved since 2000.

Related material:

For records related to Access to Information, Privacy, Security, Federal Identity, Communications and (technology enabled) service delivery, especially for records that predate 2005, consult other series related the Treasury Board Secretariat sous-fonds and associated accessions, especially, Program Branch, Administrative Policy Branch and Service and Innovation Sector as well as the task force series and some linked accessions.

Source:

Government

Related control no.:

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02-0585-26 OFRC
2001/001
2010/001
2011-00154-4
2012-00102-5
2014-02239-9
2014-02259-3
2015/001
2018-00188-4
2018-00431-X
4-2002-05-085 WFRC
93/015
R776
RG55

Record disposition authority no.:

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2010/001
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Conditions of access:

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Textual records

[Consultation32 Restricted by law]

Volume [R776]

[Consultation 32 Restricted by law]

24336--24631;

[Consultation 32 Restricted by law]

25417--25447;

[Consultation 32 Restricted by law]

26521--26562;

[Consultation 32 Restricted by law]

27344--27539;

[Consultation 32 Restricted by law]

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