Rosie Lombardi

Organizations in both the public and private sector are tightening the screws on their Internet usage policies and enforcement procedures. The rise of social media such as Facebook and bandwidth-gobbling video sites such as YouTube is prompting many to revisit and tighten their rules, says Daniel Lublin, a Toronto-based employment lawyer.

The public sector faces some major challenges in replenishing its aging ranks, particularly in attracting young IT professionals to public service as university enrolments in computer science continue their steady decline.

Alarms are sounding from many quarters about looming shortages in IT staff. The public sector will be particularly hard hit. An attrition rate of about 50 per cent over the next 10 years is expected for senior government IT staff due to early retirement, says David Tighe, VP at OriginHR, a Toronto-based recruiting and retention services provider.

Video surveillance in public places is growing at a rapid clip across Canada. City after city is introducing or expanding it, even in smaller municipalities such as St. Catharines and Brockton, Ont., says Michelle Chibba, policy manager at the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (IPC) of Ontario.

The government is scrambling to deal with social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies that are spreading like wildfire across the nation, particularly among the young. Some say social media can revolutionize government communications, while others say they are enormous time-wasters. How should governments tackle this new beast?

Back in June 2006, when Facebook was still a university phenomenon, a group of civil servants started up the Government 2.0 Think Tank (G2TT) in Ottawa. Led by Patrick Cormier, then a military lawyer and a project director at the Department of National Defence (DND), G2TT's aim was to provide a forum to connect people who want to use open source and Web 2.0 concepts to make governments more efficient and interactive.

The use of Web 2.0 tools in the federal government is expected to increase but most implementations will be internal in nature, according to Ken Cochrane, CIO of the Government of Canada.

As more and more services move online, identifying and authenticating citizens in cyber-space are becoming more difficult for governments. Citizens want one-stop service but they also want assurances their personal information is kept private. Securely sharing identity information while remaining within the confines of privacy legislation, therefore, is a challenge the public sector is working to overcome.