‘Avoiding failure of imagination is critical’: AccelerateGOV Bitesize Insights
On the eve of this year’s AccelerateGOV conference, taking place tomorrow in Ottawa, Canada, we asked the event’s speakers to tell us what digital transformation topics they’re most looking forward to discussing, and the insights that will help drive their priorities forward in the months ahead.
Here, in the third and final part of the series, we pull together responses from 10 of the speakers from Canada and beyond on a range of topics – from people, change management and collaboration, to AI, digital wallets, cybersecurity, the reimagining of government services of the future, and more.
Liz McKeown is executive director of digital community management at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.
“I am looking for connection points with those that have great ideas to drive modern government changes forward, at speed, and who believe in the power of working as an enterprise rather than in silos,” she said.
“My priorities for the year ahead are to continue the rapid development and deployment of services across the Canadian federal government to ensure the right digital talent is focused on the right problems at the right time. This work will require more people-related data interoperability and experimentation with tools and mechanisms that allow for people mobility across and within systems.”
Tim St-Jean, chief information officer at Shared Services Canada, also emphasised the importance of collaboration across government, and his view that transformation is all about people.
“I’m excited to explore how we can reimagine government services for the future. Our services need to be simpler and more accessible for Canadians. The tech will happen – for me transformation is all about people. Transformation succeeds when we support public servants through change. I’m looking forward to hearing how others are helping their teams adapt, stay motivated, and deliver great services to Canadians – even as we navigate big shifts in how we work.
“Our priorities are to make public services easier for Canadians to access, give employees the tools and flexibility they need, and work together across government to make change happen. I’d love to hear stories and lessons learned about building trust, keeping morale high, and making change feel like an opportunity – not a threat.”
Like McKeown, Nadia Ahmad, chief data officer and head of evaluation at Global Affairs Canada, is looking forward to discussing how to harness the power of data at AccelerateGOV, and noted the importance of diverse perspectives.
“At a time of massive geopolitical shifts, Global Affairs Canada must have the agility to turn evidence into insight at the speed of relevance. My priority is to support the department in harnessing the power of data to understand context and navigate complexity. I’m eager to learn from colleagues about how they’re achieving this agility in their own organisations – what works, what doesn’t, and how we can collectively raise the bar. Just as important, I want to hear diverse perspectives, because the best solutions emerge when different voices and experiences come together.”
Ahmad is also interested in hearing other speakers’ and attendees’ views on unlocking the full promise of AI in government.
“I’m excited to move beyond conversations about efficiency and dive into AI’s true transformative potential – how it can enable us to tackle complexity in ways we never imagined. Avoiding a failure of imagination is critical if we want to unlock AI’s full promise – but we must pair that ambition with a clear-eyed conversation about the risks and responsibilities that come with it.”
More about AccelerateGOV
AccelerateGOV is co-hosted by the Government of Canada and will share insights from governments around the world on how to deliver better, more efficient and resilient digitally enabled public services with public servants from Canada and beyond. This event is an opportunity to learn from government innovators, and will explore real-world transformation use cases in an increasingly complex and fast-changing world.
Find out more about the event.
Frances McRae is deputy minister, Women and Gender Equality Canada.
“Exchanging with others who are grappling with the same trends and looking to seize opportunities is always a highlight [at AccelerateGOV]. A new consideration or a new angle at the right time is valuable in this fast-moving environment,” she said, adding that her priority is to “get people excited and curious about the potential to use new tools and approaches to improve themselves and their organisations”.
Ima Okonny, assistant deputy minister and chief data officer at Employment and Social Development Canada, agreed with her fellow speakers that collaboration is key and that data must be leveraged effectively to deliver better services for citizens.
“I look forward to engaging on strategies to responsibly and collaboratively unlock the full potential of data and emerging technologies, with the goal of delivering meaningful results for Canadians.
“My priority for the year ahead is to leverage data and advanced technologies to improve processes and deliver measurable results. I welcome strategic insights from colleagues to identify opportunities for collaboration and co-creation that drive tangible impact.”
The focus on collaboration and the need to break down siloes if the public’s needs are to met was also stressed by Dany Bernier, chief technology officer and cybersecurity, Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
“I’m looking forward to discussing how we can move beyond incremental improvements and embrace systemic change in how government delivers services. This means challenging traditional delivery models, fostering collaboration, and creating a culture of trust across organisations,” he said.
“We need to share information openly and empower partners to take the lead on initial reviews of applications and services so we’re not duplicating effort but accelerating outcomes for Canadians. By leveraging each other’s strengths and building confidence in shared processes, we can break down silos, modernise faster, and deliver services that truly meet the needs of the public.”
Sonia Brar is chief technology officer at the City of Toronto. She said she is relatively new to government having been at the city authority for about two and a half years “so it would be great to gain learnings from my peers on tactics that can be deployed in government organisations to drive innovation in the absence of or while balancing public policy around new technology”.
She highlighted gaps in the use of data, AI and automation as examples, and noted her desire to learn about how peers are navigating “the politics of government, a culture of risk aversiveness”, and about effective procurement and how other government organisations are leveraging third parties to accelerate outcomes.
Her priorities are to “advance resiliency of our infrastructure so we can be more agile and safeguard digital assets, and to accelerate the deployment of modern technologies – including proven AI solutions – to meet the public’s needs and drive operational excellence with a sustainable, affordable budget”.
Key initiatives underway at the City of Toronto – Canada’s largest and most populous city with around 2.6 million people – include corporate systems transformation; IT digitisation and transformation; use of AI to support public engagement with government services; real-time service performance dashboards; and its enterprise work order and workforce management.
The city authority has around 23,000 frontline workers, C$120bn of physical infrastructure across the city, and runs circa. 600 services.
Alessandro Moricca is chief executive of PagoPA in Italy. He said his aim at AccelerateGOV is to provide peers from around the world – there are eight speakers from outside Canada at the event and attendees from numerous countries – with an overview of “the unique digital ecosystem serving the entire public sector in Italy that we at PagoPA have contributed to building up over the last six years”.
As he explained: “At the heart of this ecosystem are five digital platforms able to centrally manage payments towards public bodies, mobile access to public services, digital notifications, and welfare programmes, as well as data interoperability among public and private information systems.
“Thanks to an open source approach and a cloud-native strategy, these interconnected infrastructures developed by PagoPA are based on secure, scalable, highly reliable architectures and nowadays represent a successful, replicable e-government model which is increasingly acknowledged as an international best practice.”
Among his key priorities for 2026 is the full implementation of the European Digital Identity Wallet “thanks to a national public solution hosted by our mobile application named IO. Through the IO app, since December 2024, the Italian government has allowed citizens to obtain digital versions of their personal documents – for example a driving licence, health card or disability card – within the app wallet and use them to access public services in real-life identification contexts”.
Next year, aligned to the European roadmap, many new documents and use cases will be added to the Italian digital wallet “thus enhancing users’ experience. In this regard, it would be very useful to collect suggestions and insights from similar or experimental projects related to digital credentials and identity wallets run by other countries”.
Dr Inshan Meahjohn is another of the event’s international speakers. He is chief executive officer of Trinidad and Tobago’s National Information and Communication Technology Company (iGovTT).
He said he is looking forward to discussing Trinidad and Tobago’s digital public infrastructure and digital public goods (DPI/DPG) implementations and “the importance of collaboration and shared learnings”, as well as to “being a champion for best practice in DPI/DPG in the Caribbean”.
Looking to the future, he looks forward to “digital credentials, interoperability and digital payments being in place and exciting times as citizens and private industry begin to make use of those DPIs/DPGs put in place by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago”, he said.
Dugald Topshee is chief service and digital officer at Transport Canada. His goal at AccelerateGOV is to find out how other government organisations are rationalising legacy applications without major mission disruption and what strategies have worked best for retiring old systems – more about that in our first Bitesize Insights article here. He is also interested in hearing about AI’s application in the use of digital twins and how to upskill public servants for an AI-driven mandate, as set out in our second Bitesize Insights article.
His third goal is to learn from others about sector-wide cyber resilience.
“In the transportation sector, a cyberattack on one major port, rail line, or air traffic control system can have national economic consequences. Our role as a regulator must pivot to securing the entire ecosystem,” he said.
“Our goal is to deploy new intelligence-sharing platforms to rapidly disseminate threat indicators and establish enforceable cybersecurity standards for transportation operators, extending our ‘Zero Trust’ architecture model to the critical operational technology (OT) environment of the industry.”
To help achieve this, he said he’d like to learn from colleagues and peers in defence or critical infrastructure “what the most effective multi-agency coordination models during a live, large-scale cyber incident that spans federal, provincial/state, and private sector jurisdictions are.”
The first AccelerateGOV Bitesize Insights article ‘Advancing transformation is a team sport’ focused on interoperability, shared services, and digital sovereignty. Read it here.
The second AccelerateGOV Bitesize Insights article ‘Leveraging collective expertise’ covered artificial intelligence, focusing on how to navigate the complexities of rapidly evolving technology, bake in ethics and responsible use, and ensure that AI delivers measurable value. Read it here.
The AccelerateGOV speakers quoted in this article will feature in the following sessions at the event:
Liz McKeown, executive director of digital community management at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Nadia Ahmad, chief data officer and head of evaluation at Global Affairs Canada, and Frances McRae, deputy minister, Women and Gender Equality Canada, will be on the panel for ‘Workforce of the future: Reskilling for a digital, sustainable public service’.
Tim St-Jean, chief information officer at Shared Services Canada, will be on the panel for ‘Read for change: How to manage transformation across government’.
Ima Okonny, assistant deputy minister and chief data officer at Employment and Social Development Canada, will be on the panel for ‘Digital sovereignty in an age of AI and fragmentation’.
Dany Bernier, chief technology officer and cybersecurity lead at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, will be on the panel for ‘Cyber security for all: Addressing the evolving threats’.
Sonia Brar, chief technology officer at the City of Toronto, will be on the panel for ‘Understanding – and boosting – digital resilience’.
Alessandro Moricca, chief executive of PagoPA, Italy, and Dr Inshan Meahjohn, CEO of Trinidad and Tobago’s National Information and Communication Technology Company (iGovTT), will be on the panel for ‘How to build digital public infrastructure’.
Dugald Topshee, chief service and digital officer at Transport Canada, will be on the panel for ‘Boosting the health of government’s technology’.
There will be a total of 58 speakers at the event, from nine countries.
See the full agenda here.
About Mia Hunt
Mia has been editor of globalgovernmentforum.com since 2019. She has 15 years’ experience as a journalist and editor and specialises in writing for civil and public servants worldwide, including covering sustainability policy and related issues. She has led the Global Government Women’s Network since it launched in 2023. Previously, she covered commercial property having been market reports and supplements editor at Property Week and deputy editor at Retail Destination. She graduated from Kingston University London with a first-class honours degree in journalism and was part of the team that produced The River newspaper, which won Publication of the Year at the Guardian Student Media Awards in 2010.
