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A complicated doodle in red, green and black depicts frowning faces, characters pointing fingers at each other, and words such as “caged,” “trapped,” “imprisoned,” and “frustrated.” The picture is framed by a black box, and around which are “together,” “relevant,” “challenged,” and “ownership.”
No, it’s not a child’s drawing. It came from a group of adults – civil servants. And it represents a transformation underway in the City of Edmonton’s information technology department.
The drawing is an example of a “rich picture” – a representation of everything the drawer sees as wrong with a situation, contained within a box. Around the box, the drawer writes his or her ideas of how the situation should be, explains Chris Moore, Edmonton’s chief information officer.
This was his idea, putting the municipality’s IT staff members through the rich picture exercise. “I’ve got 40 pictures of unhappy situations,” he says. Each drawing was penned by a group of 10 or so staff members. There are approximately 300 in the department.
The pictures were telling. “We looked at them and said we don’t want to keep being that way,” Moore says. “If we keep being that way, here’s what’s going to happen: outsourced, decentralized, marginalized, irrelevant.”
Moore signed on to the CIO role late last year. Previously the CIO of the City of Brampton, Ont., he arrived in Edmonton with a mission to boost the municipality’s internal technology services, making IT an agent of change, developing the department into a platform for improvements across a range of services. Doing so would require asking staff members to think differently about their roles, communicate better, and consider a whole new management structure. But first, they had to take a good long look at themselves.
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