Coming to Terms with Information and Communications Technologies: The Role of the Chief Information Officer of the Government of Canada

The dissertation is a case study of a Canadian public management institution. Its focus is the establishment and evolution of a Chief Information Officer (CIO) as a senior official in the Government of Canada's Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS). The CIO was created on the margins of the June 1993 government reorganization, a conscious institutional response to new information and communications technologies (ICTs) in the economy and society, notably the convergence represented by the then-emerging Internet. Its role and responsibilities define a new functional sector in Canadian public administration, combining an IM/IT (Information Management/Information Technology) space with ICT-enabled management instruments and working relationships.;There are five substantive chapters. The first considers the CIO's institutional roots, including the Treasury Board-based collective management model proposed by the Glassco Commission. Another strand is the earlier effects of ICTs on the public sector. The following chapter analyzes the establishment and evolution of the CIO within the Treasury Board model, its successes, failures and organizational "roads not taken." Drawing on e-government literature suggesting the federal government has a "weak" CIO model, a third chapter surveys the IM/IT space, the instruments available to the CIO, and the implications of its relationships within government and with the citizen, private sector and other jurisdictions. A fourth discusses constraints on the CIO's effectiveness imposed by its weak IM role and tensions between IM and IT; the most serious is the political sensitivity of government information and communications. The fifth chapter is a mini-case study of the Ontario Corporate CIO, a contrasting "strong" CIO model that presents an alternative to its federal counterpart.;The dissertation concludes that the weak TBS CIO model can achieve strong results with strong senior public service and political direction but this is difficult to achieve. The CIO is well established but has unfinished business, and there are unresolved issues about its policy mandate, role in collective decision-making and whether it is ultimately an asset manager or the government's chief innovator. The case provides insights to the Canadian variant of the Westminster constitutional model and also to theories of policy and institutional stability, continuity and change.