Category: community     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 5 comments

The term 'intrapreneur' is not a novelty in the business world. It's been around for 25 years and is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as "a person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk taking and innovation". The idea is gaining a lot of traction these days in the corporate world, with companies like Google and 3M allowing their employees to spend up to 20% of their time incubating their own side ideas. In government however, spending time on rethinking a process or product while working around bureaucracy is a notion that is typically frowned upon.

Governmental bureaucratic structures typically enforce compliance with rules and procedures and can kill new ideas because innovation often requires challenging the status quo or questioning long-held assumptions that may have worked well in the past. Furthermore, cultivating innovation is an evolutionary process and cannot be done overnight. Trial and error, experimentation without taking on undue risk, and adaptation to change should be concepts in the arsenal of every PS employee especially given the government's newly adopted PS renewal mantra. In this day and age, intrapreneurship seems to be the only cost-effective way governments can quickly replicate successful internal and external innovations, by adapting them to local contexts instead of always trying to reinvent the wheel.

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Category: standards     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 32 comments

Over the last few years, the Government of Canada has done its best to attempt to control the look and feel of its internal and external web properties by instituting the first two versions of the Common Look and Feel (CLF) Guidelines and mandating that every department and agency adheres to them by certain specific dates. And while the current version (CLF 2.0) is a definite improvement over the original version of CLF in terms of accessibility, coding standards and visual interface features, ask any user experience designer out there (and by out there I mean outside of GoC since I'm outside the firewall and therefore have no idea about the CLF pulse on the inside) and they will tell you that it is still nowhere near a modern web standard.

I mean no disrespect to the guys at TBS, but after a couple of iterations, it's time to get this thing on the right path. I think the first two versions have proven one thing: that creating the visual blueprint of our government's web presence should NOT be left (entirely) up to internal organizations. I can't even begin to guess the total amount of taxpayer money spent on creating the CLF specifications, and the even more obscene amount spent to port government web content from CLF 1.0 to CLF 2.0. And while there are a handful of departments (e.g. Service Canada) that have done a nice job of designing within and around the constraints of CLF, most of the Government of Canada sites (including the TBS site) are still a visual eyesore. And it's not just TBS' fault, it's the individual departments' complete ignorance of color theory and their inability to select design shops (because let's face it, most of them hire external consulting firms to do the web deed for them) that actually understand how to design a professionally pleasant website in the 21st century.

I could go on an on about why CLF 2.0 is bad, but that's not the point of this post. What I'm going to do is attempt to give you my thoughts on what would make CLF 3.0 a much more successful endeavour, from both the GoC perspective, as well as the taxpayers'. Feel free to download the template (MS Word document, 100Kb) that I created for the purpose of this discussion (you can also do so by clicking on the image above). The template is distributed under a Creative Commons (CC) Attribution Share-Alike license.

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Category: community     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 5 comments

It's not a secret to anyone that baby boomers are about to retire in massive numbers and public agencies can ill afford to fall behind in the talent game. On paper, mobility across jobs, projects and teams are just some of the reasons why the public sector should be an employer of choice for today's top talent in all disciplines.

But let's face it, as much as no one wants to hear it (especially in a city like Ottawa where a large percentage of the population are public sector employees), the situation is not quite as well defined. The public sector bills itself as an environment that makes a difference in people's lives. These days however, 76 percent of a recent survey of young people up to the age of 30, think non-profits are more likely to make such a difference compared to only 16 percent who would prefer the public service for this same reason.

Now let's look at creative types (insert your favourite creative job here, I am a User Experience professional so I do consider myself part of this group). Since a great deal of our work relies on imagination, we absolutely don't enjoy working in a command and control organization. Moreover, creative types enjoy an environment that relies on the enthusiasm and optimism of young adults. Something we can find in non-profits, boutique consulting firms, etc. but not so much in the typical public sector department.

Another survey of young professionals revealed their notable preference for job mobility within a single organization as opposed to the open market. Sounds like an ideal situation for the public sector, but in reality, its image is one of a slow-moving, bureaucratic monolith, hopelessly experimenting with 'innovative practices' fed by external consulting firms, to streamline itself in what is becoming a much more competitive economical landscape.

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Category: community     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 2 comments

A lot of young people (either still in university or recently graduated) ask me about the prospect of getting a UX job in Ottawa, especially in the current state of the economy and the rising number of unemployed technology workers competing for jobs. While I don't monitor the job sites frequently, my answer to them is that I personally never really had a problem being employed, either as an independent or as a full-time employee, so as long as you put in the time to acquire the necessary technical/business/artistic skills required, I don't really see why you wouldn't be in good shape.

However, when i do do a quick scan on the typical job sites (Workopolis, Monster, JobBoom etc.) dealing with the National Capital Region market, the most I've seen is a couple of postings at a time. Traditionally, cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal tend to have the bulk of the Canadian UX market, but I still wondered whether I was doing a real search or I was just scratching the surface. Another quick look in the careers sections within the websites of two well known Ottawa interactive agencies (Fuel Industries and Teknision) reveals at least about 10 other UX related jobs, but they are typically high end (Flash/Flex, UX Architect) requiring at least 3-5 years experience. The jobs catering to junior resources still seemed a bit more scarce.

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Category: community     Posted by: cornelius     Discuss: 2 comments

Over the past couple of years I have travelled and worked in some markets that feature an extremely vibrant UX scene. Whether it was New York, Los Angeles or Toronto, all these big cities had an active UX and design community that helps develop, promote and create business for user experience professionals. Meetups, BarCamps, DemoCamps, they happen weekly, so if you want to network with like-minded professionals in your field, there's ample opportunity to do so.

Ottawa on the other hand does not provide any of that 'infrastructure'. There are great UX minds here, from academia (Avi Parush and his team at Carleton's HotLab), to accessibility gurus (Derek Featherstone), to the designers and managers involved with the creation and evolution of most Federal Government websites, they all exist, but they either work and participate elsewhere (who am I to talk right ?) or simply choose not to participate at all.

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