Slicing the Public Pie: A primer on data representations & issues surrounding their use @HealthCanada

Standardizers & Gatekeepers

Furthering the concept of centralization, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) issues policies, directives, standards, and guidelines for all government departments to follow.  These are, in effect, the foci as described with ITIL (which does form a service backbone to FPS information services). Explicitly, section 5.1 of the TBS's Policy on Information Management reads:

5.1 The objective of this policy is to achieve efficient and effective information management to support program and service delivery; foster informed decision making; facilitate accountability, transparency, and collaboration; and preserve and ensure access to information and records for the benefit of present and future generations.

In other words, when it comes to using data representations in the FPS, the following are to be factored in:* Note: "timely" varies in context. Compare a manager's request that may require retrieval within minutes to a formal Access to Information and Privacy request that may take up to a month or more.

If, however, a step back is taken, this makes the TBS a standardizer and departments as gatekeepers of data (and subsequent representations). Standards are nice, but the TBS is a separate entity from other departments in the Government of Canada and can only conduct audits of its policies.

What's more, an additional gatekeeper was added in the 2014 HC IT audit:

The Chief Information Officer Branch...direction for enterprise architecture...will result in the creation of an Enterprise Architecture Review Board (ARB) to play a part in planning for, creating and deploying IM/IT solutions that affect the Government of Canada. Departments and agencies will be expected to implement a similar discipline. The ARB will review and assess the architectural aspects of IT investments against Government of Canada IT direction.

In short, if the ARB rejects a software application used to generate a certain data representation, that data representation style will not be available to the FPS for both internal use and communication with stakeholders external to the department! Further, this policy does not indicate what would happen if management requirements and IM/IT requirements conflict despite the entrenched notion of core mandate activities (as outlined briefly on the Public Service Standards page).

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For a general list of questions pertaining to the federal public service and data representation use therein, click here.

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