The Distinction Awards take on a dramatic new tone in 2009 with the introduction of a new event format, and an expansion of the recognition program for nominated projects. The new-look Distinction Awards Program formalizes recognition in two principle ways: by presenting all nominated projects that clear the first round of judging with a “Service Delivery Award”; and by creating a new “Gala Celebration” that project teams, leaders, deputies and executives can all participate in. 

This year the Distinction Awards will truly become the recognition program they were conceived to be. Every nomination that makes it through to the final round of judging will be recognized with a Service Delivery Award which will include the project name and the individual names of all team members listed on the project, and up to 17 exceptional nominations will receive a coveted gold Distinction Award Medal.

According to Andrew Moffat, the president of SCOAP, the association of Canadian IT professionals that has conducted the judging for the past 16 years, “the intention of the awards has always been to celebrate excellence within the Public Service. In the past the awards followed an old paradigm where the ‘winners’ were the medalists. The changes being implemented this year recognize that all of the projects that make it through to the final round of judging are worthy of recognition because they clearly demonstrate excellence. Going forward, the gold medalists simply highlight the best of the best.”

GTEC’s Executive Director Kevin d’Entremont also said, “competitions don’t encourage high standards of excellence in the public sector. We are choosing to put the emphasis on celebrating the exceptional service that already exists in the public sector, in a meaningful ceremony that is appropriate for all to enjoy”.

Ticket prices for the Gala Celebration have also been reduced to encourage participation by more team members. The 2009 Gala Celebration will be presented in the stunning Great Hall of the National Gallery of Canada. Beginning and ending with elaborate receptions, and with the Parliamentary Precinct as its backdrop, the Distinction Awards Celebration Gala will be attended by government CIOs, invited Deputy Ministers, leaders in industry, and the Secretary of State for Science and Technology, the Hon. Gary Goodyear.

For more information on the Gala, judging and to reserve tickets, please contact:

Silvia Villon
Distinction Awards Gala Manager
GTEC
Tel: 613-736-9851, ext 120
e-mail: svillon@gtec.ca

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the challenges governments face in balancing the needs and expectations of the individual being served, the collective needs of society, the concerns of taxpayers, and political agenda of government.  My last entry expanded upon this by sharing some insights from our recent Global Cities Forums on what citizens are actually saying about what they want and expect from their government and how it should improve the quality of their lives.

This week I want to continue this discussion by outlining a framework we have formulated as a result of these forums to promote a more active relationship between citizens and their governments. We’ve introduced a Service Value Governance Framework representing a more publicly engaged model of governance, one that truly connects people—as citizens, service users and taxpayers—with those whom they elect to lead them and to shape and direct their public services.

Derived from the common concerns and ambitions of all of the groups of Global Cities Forum participants and the principles of public value they defined, the framework is built around four components:

1.       Outcomes—  The purpose and mission of public service provision should be the actual improvements they produce in the lives of the people they serve—such as better health and wider learning—and not simply the amount of service produced or economic efficiency achieved. Traditional measures of public-service performance—such as student-teacher ratios or arrest rates or numbers of hospital beds, for example—no longer satisfy the public demand for improvement. What matters is the actual difference public-service organizations make in the lives of the people they serve.People—certainly the participants of the Global Cities Forum—want the realities of their lives to shape government services and to provide the strategic direction and operational alignment across government organizations.  Managing through a focus on outcomes is a means of ensuring that multilateral strategies and holistic solutions are applied to the conditions or issues that most affect local people.

2.       Balance – The people with whom we spoke believe that governments should tailor service provision to meet the wide range of different needs across the population. People are increasingly accustomed to private-sector services that respond flexibly and discriminatingly to their individual demands and see little reason why government cannot do the same. As service users, people want more choice in the type and means of service delivery.However, it is also important to make explicit the challenge of balancing choice and flexibility with fairness and common good. It will not happen intuitively; it requires clarity and analysis, even if political judgments have to weigh one side of the balance more heavily than the other.

3.       Engagement— An overwhelmingly consistent finding from the Global Cities Forum is participants’ desire to see government offer more opportunities to involve people in setting priorities and plans for public services to deliver improvements in their own lives. Moreover, they want to be able to do this on an ongoing basis—not simply through rare public consultations or superficial user satisfaction surveys. Further, when government enables people to play a greater role in setting priorities and planning public services, and as people have increasingly more means to engage with government in a consequential manner, individuals will be empowered to assume more responsibility for improvements in their own lives.However, engagement must go beyond asking people what they want. It must also include active programs of educating people about their rights and responsibilities and initiatives to enroll them as active partners in improving outcomes.  Governments must work to ensure that the engagement they have with people is as consequential as possible. Deliberative events such as the Global Cities Forum empower local people to consider and discuss issues with others from their wider communities. Consequently, such events can provide richer and sometimes surprising insight. Clearly, the Global Cities Forum reached only a tiny subset of the population of each city, but as governments extend public-engagement activities more widely and more frequently, greater numbers of people will become involved and the benefits of their engagement will multiply.

4.       Accountability—Across the eight Global Cities Forum events, we found that all people want more information from government. Our research also shows that high-performing public-service organizations are using performance management data as a powerful tool for engaging people and other stakeholders.  Sharing performance information with people can help build understanding of government’s constraints and limitations.Therefore, our findings indicate government must move beyond simple information sharing and make information such as performance and budgeting data available and actionable. In making the right types of information easily accessible to the public and implementing mechanisms to help people take action, the public is able to play an active role in holding officials accountable, improving service delivery to the community and supporting program funding.

These four components provide meaning and a language with which to clearly articulate a relationship that is about genuine engagement of people in their governance—not one that is merely about voting in elections, answering surveys or paying taxes, as important as these things are. We consider this type of engagement critical to governments achieving high performance

I’d love to hear your thoughts on both the various components of this framework and how emerging technology could be applied to further benefit Canadian citizens in future. 

I was asked to participate in the GTEC blog and to provide some thoughts on the topic of Outcomes.  The importance of outcomes for public services and the citizens they serve is a topic I’m passionate about.  As a recipient of government services, a citizen, and a taxpayer with 3 children in school, I experience first hand the dilemma and delicate balancing act that our public sector leaders, policy makers, and managers are expected to deal with. 

On the one hand, as citizens we want better more responsive services which address our individual needs – services that are creative, competitive and that improve our environment.  On the other, as taxpayers we want our governments to act responsibility, spend wisely, and keep our taxes at a fairly constant or reasonable level.  

Ultimately, the challenge is to find ways to efficiently address the expectations of citizens and produce more or improved societal outcomes for the public monies spent. 

At Accenture, we continue to research and study this challenge extensively.  We have published a book, Unlocking Public Value which addresses how citizens measure success, different to shareholders looking after a private company.  We have established an Institute for Public Service Value which focuses on the connections between public management, service delivery and improved social outcomes – or the creation of “public sector value”.  Our research describes how the pressures for public service improvement have grown more forceful than ever because citizens have growing expectations of government. We are generally more vocal about our needs and we are conditioned and influenced by improvement in the goods and services provided by the private sector (at least some of the time!).  We want better targeted, more personalized, responsive and efficient public services.  But that’s not all.  In addition to higher quality services, we demand that government services improve the conditions of our lives and to deal with the issues we care about, such as the environment, poverty, or public safety.

There is little doubt in my mind that our leaders, policy makers, and public service managers are intent on improving the performance of their organizations to improve government services and the manner in which they are delivered.  We have seen legislative initiatives in Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United States and several other countries set up frameworks for driving continuous performance improvement across key public services. While some are still focusing on budgetary and expenditure controls, others are adopting more innovative approaches that attempt to balance social outcomes, immediate service delivery issues, long-term developments, and short-term “voter sensitive” achievements. This balanced approach is not easy to action and means a change in public service performance management away from crude measurement of organizational outputs towards a more sophisticated targeting of public value and outcomes.

While, we are clearly moving in the right direction, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you think we are doing in balancing the needs and expectations of the individual being served, the collective needs of society, the concerns of taxpayers, and political agenda of government.  In particular:

• What do people think government should be doing to improve the quality of people’s lives?
• What sort of relationship do people want with their government and with the public services it provides?
• What can government do to help ensure that its public services – the primary way it interacts with people day to day – actually deliver value by improving the social and economic conditions of individuals’ lives?