Bringing business and IT together around Digital: An Update on The Hub

After 6 months of head-down work on The Hub and our Digital Strategy, I owe an update.

To start, I could have never imagined Transport Canada’s receptiveness to working collaboratively to solve business problems. When I first proposed The Hub concept as a means of addressing the key issues behind our IT project failures, I expected some typical resistance. Instead, The Hub—as a process and a way of working collaboratively with our internal business clients to explore their clients’ needs and their own business processes—has become an integral tool for problem definition and project intake. It is now the core component of Phase I of our Project Management Framework, underpinning concept development.

Leaders must be active enablers of business and digital transformation.

Strong leadership and support for digital transformation has been key to The Hub’s early successes. But transformation is hardly a choice anymore. The digital world all around us is driving the need for our organization to change (even transform) to remain relevant. We realize that our leaders must, therefore, be active enablers of business and digital transformation.

This is why we ‘trapped’ more than sixty members of our senior executive management team in a large room for two days at the end of January to learn together and then collaborate (using Hub design processes) to set our Department’s digital transformation priorities. The result? The cornerstones of the Department’s first Digital Strategy were co-developed. And this dedicated group of leaders has since helped to articulate business change opportunities and to co-create the digital transformation roadmap, complete with targets for “going digital.”  

A draft of Transport Canada’s Digital Strategy is now in the hands of our Department’s newly formed Digital Council, comprised of six Directors General, including the CIO, Chief Data Officer, Innovation Centre head, Transformation head, Innovation Policy lead, and lead for Motor Vehicle Safety. We expect the Digital Council to share the Strategy widely once it has been formally adopted.

The process of establishing The Hub and co-leading development of Transport Canada’s Digital Strategy has been an amazing and productive journey for so many of us, thus far. If nothing else, it has brought together the Department’s business leaders and its IM/IT organization to mutually set a business strategy that is client-centred and focused on today’s digital policy, innovation and service imperatives. But, it has done so much more than that.

It’s these kinds of results that make the effort and cultural stretching so worthwhile.

These collaborative processes and new tools are changing how we approach and solve problems, and they are yielding many, many more conversations and opportunities to transform how the Department can fulfill its mandate to enable a safe, secure, efficient and innovative national transportation system.

For me, it’s these kinds of results that make the effort and cultural stretching so worthwhile.

So what's next? Start building a strong capacity for service design on the foundation of our digital business strategy (giving direction) and The Hub (enabling transformative thinking and action).

As we pursue this journey, we will, of course, continue to need great leaders, strong collaborators and experienced service designers to get there. Go!

#TCdigital