Public service colleagues from around the world look to “make the connection” for improved citizen service delivery and modernized government at Showcase Ontario 2005 in Toronto, Ont. according to Ontario’s corporate CIO.
In his keynote welcome to this year’s Showcase attendees, Greg Georgeff, Ontario’s corporate CIO, said that public servants, working together, could deliver results, and results are the citizenry’s bottomline. Modernization firstly means delivery of efficient and high-quality service to citizens.Text
“We are all looking for the best for our jurisdictions,” Georgeff said. “We are colleagues because we need each other, and we are willing to make that connection.”
At Showcase you can acquire the skills, information, and the partnerships that help all people working for government, in the public’s best interest, deliver better citizen service, he said.
“You understand that the work ahead of us, when we talk about modernizing government, is fundamental to everything that we do,” said Georgeff.
Georgeff also noted that governments must progress from being process-oriented to product-oriented.
“Dealing with your colleagues and joining up in partnerships is key to what we need to do (to achieve modernization),” he said. “But we also need to understand what modernization is all about.”
In Georgeff’s opinion, modernization firstly means delivery of efficient and high-quality service to citizens. Also, government must be able to meet the increasing demand for health, education and all the other services that they were elected to provide.
“Modernized government can also contribute to a fiscal reality – the elimination of $750 million (in government expenses),” Georgeff said. “For the last year-and-a-half, Ontario has been developing, and now implementing, a new strategy that takes us all into the future.”
The new strategy is E-Ontario. Modernized government can also contribute to a fiscal reality – the elimination of $750 million (in government expenses). For the last year-and-a-half, Ontario has been developing, and now implementing, a new strategy that takes us all into the future. The new strategy is E-Ontario.Greg Georgeff>Text
E-Ontario will be immediately responsible for realizing $100 million of that $750 million in fiscal restraint that Ontario needs to achieve going forward, according to Georgeff. E-Ontario will deliver the social and economic benefits more efficiently and directly to the citizens of Ontario.
“We will do it,” he said. “But more than that, E-Ontario is a strategic position that lays the foundation for what we need to do in the future.”
The program will pool Ontario’s hard and soft assets because experience has shown that governments can drive out the costs and prevent the duplication of services, Georgeff said.
“If you drew a circle 500 metres around my office, you would find about 500 servers in that area,” Georgeff said. “We can take that down to about 280 servers. How many servers is that that you don’t have to pay for licences for, that you don’t have to maintain?”
The savings from this type of consolidation are significant, he said.
“We need the resolve, the energy and the mechanisms to do the job,” Georgeff said. “That’s where we are going to get with (E-Ontario). As we go forward, $100 million becomes (a) very real (target).”