Ontario Province Governemnt - The Treasury Board Secretariat and Cabinet Office

Case Overview

The business of supporting government strategic planning, decision-making, and implementation tracking has unique needs and challenges that are currently being met with several disconnected systems and manual processes that have been implemented over time in silos or with minimal regard to information sharing or evolving user needs. Many of these existing systems and processes duplicate effort and/or data which creates confusion for users, results in data quality issues, increases costs to operate and generally slows down the business of government. Also, the information managed by the Cabinet Office Policy and Delivery Division is not currently connected to information managed by other central agency partners, such as Cabinet Office Communications and Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS).

Customer Overview

The Treasury Board Secretariat is the ministry of the Government of Ontario that is charged with supporting the work of the Treasury Board/Management Board of Cabinet, a joint sub-committee of cabinet that manages the fiscal plan of the government including controlling all government spending, approving labour agreements and workforce planning, manage the provincial contingency fund and oversee the procedures and directives that guide the operation of the Ontario Public Service..

The Ontario Cabinet Office is a ministry of the Government of Ontario. Its role is to serve as the Premier's ministry, and as such its employees are not political appointees, but are permanent members of the public service.

Cabinet Office is headed by the Secretary of the Cabinet, currently Steve Orsini, who is also head of the public service.

Business Challenge

The first major challenge that the Ontario Public Services project managers and Conet-Tech consultants might face is not knowing what exactly to expect from the first phase of the project before the June 2018 election period. Knowing about short deadline and Wwe recommended a Joint Application Development to meet project goals (cost, schedule, quality) through a systematic process with proper planning. We made realistic assumptions about resource availability and deadlines to achieve quality results.

The technologies

- Agile development - Scrum, User Stories, UX design, Web UI Design, CI, TDD, Automated Tests
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MVC Framework, Angular, Web API, SQL Sever, C#, .Net Framework
- N-tier Enterprise applications, Microsoft Azure file storage, Document DB/Cosmos DB, GIT, Microsoft Project


 

 

Solution

Theory of Everything (ToE) is initiated by EAB to modernize the end-to-end decision-making processes within Cabinet Office, and make strong linkages to fiscal and communications decision-making.


As per the Premier’s Office, Cabinet Office, Office of Lieutenant Governor, Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs Technology Roadmap, August 2017, several systems are currently marked at end of life or otherwise requiring refresh – the mapping of existing applications to this project’s deliverables 

Potentially the project could develop multiple User Interfaces for different stakeholders to address their specific needs. For instance, Cabinet Office meeting management, Legislation & Regulations Committee meeting management, OTB Meeting Management and Ministry meeting management, etc may each have a slightly different interface.

The first phase of the project will have the following modules:

Commitment Tracking – Replacing the existing system with enhanced features, functionality and integration to this framework. Commitment Tracker is designed to track election and governemnt sources, statements, and commitments. It conains confidential information and documents covered by the Oaths of Office. For security reasons, access is limited to specific users.





Key Activities – All aspects of Key Activities management including: Items as Policy Milestones, Risks to Key Activities, and Delivery and Ongoing Milestones

Meeting Management System for Cabinet Committees – All aspects of scheduling and managing meetings including: Strategic Planning, Meeting Items/Policy Milestones

Submission Management - all aspects of scheduling and submitting documentation (in pdf format) for meetings for ministries to interact with Cabinet committees

BinderBrowser 2.0 – Updating the existing system by integrating it to this framework, and potentially enhancing features and functionality.