A public servant in Nova Scotia and Ontario for some 36 years, largely engaged in program design and service delivery implementation. He typically led project teams developing new concepts and approaches for delivering government policy, his personal input was at the business and information technology interface.
From a business perspective he was often seen as a 'techi'. Information technologists looked to him for 'business requirements'. Jim thought he was an architect!
The driver for all of this was a shift in organizational focus away from each level of government undertaking program delivery in their separate silos or stovepipes to increasingly engaging with others to deliver programs and services.
Jim developed a body of practice to advance the partnership and collaboration agenda, to address issues and opportunities beyond the capacity of traditional or vertical organizations, and to explore the expansion of design and architecture into the governance and evolution of 'horizontal' communities. He published a number of papers on Collaboration Architecture, the platform that enables complex relationships.
Jim participated with others from public services across Canada through federal-provincial committees and internationally through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The above shifts in thinking about program and service delivery take place in the context of larger and continuing shifts in the whole policy, legislation, program design and delivery spectrum. In general, there has been a program management migration towards the policy end of the spectrum and away from the design and operation of service delivery. This has created an 'opportunity' for Information Technology to expand its influence away from traditional 'business requirements' to implementations based on more meta-level requirements. At the same time, governments have been faced with the renewal of large legacy program delivery systems. The potential vacuum between policy and technology has not helped their success.
For Jim, this has translated into a behavioural dynamic where our technologists attempt to interpret policy using traditional reference models at a time when those models are changing. Emerging (and more comprehensive) reference models then lead to systems analyst push-back because they are not familiar, as in 'we can't implement this', when in fact they can, they just need new skill sets. This space needs to be occupied by architects exposed to the broader scope of community-based implementations!
And this is what interests him now:
Current interests include how we design scalable and extendible collaborations to address ever changing issues and opportunities; the processes for capturing and translating ever evolving end-user culture and expectations so that community governance and infrastructures can remain relevant; and how we deploy the increasingly rich set of community platforms, models, standards, services and tools that can respond to user needs faster and more cost effectively.
Jim Evans can be reached at jim.evans@bluheron.net or at 905.723.3060
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