Talent Cloud was a bit of a renegade project when it first started - an experimental theory on staffing with a focus on digital talent. It wasn’t an easy fit to the existing government organizational structure, and people weren’t sure where it belonged (or if it should belong anywhere).
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Talent Cloud wouldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for the Chief Information Officer of Canada in 2017 - Alex Benay - standing up to make a home for the project and giving it a focus. When Talent Cloud initially came to the Office of the Chief Information Officer, it was little more than a proposal and a small grassroots start-up. There wasn’t even any certainty that the project would (or should) belong in the organization long term.
But for anyone who’s worked in start-ups, you know how critical those early champions are. Our project was fortunate enough to have several, including the Chief Information Officer, the Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council, and an Executive Director who believed in the potential of the experiment.
Over the years, there have been a number of changes in these leadership roles, but Talent Cloud has been supported by a succession of champions who continue to promote the research. The Office of the Chief Information Officer (Treasury Board Secretariat) has also been the project’s largest funding supporter in each of its years of operation.
Talent Cloud was funded through contributions from partner departments who wanted to support the experiment’s research direction and use the platform itself for hiring term appointments. These agreements were made on an annual basis in the form of Memorandums of Understanding.
It was challenging to run a project like Talent Cloud with the variable nature of the funding that comes with this type of partnership structure, but there’s simply no way the project would have ever existed without the aid of these partner departments. While not all partner departments funded all years of the project, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of their participation. Without the support, intellectual curiosity, passion, and perseverance of our project partners, Talent Cloud would never have made it past the early planning stages.
The partnership model was also only able to cover approximately half the costs of operations in later years as the project grew into a full platform. The Office of the Chief Information Officer has absorbed approximately half the operating costs of the project in recent years. (This is an important factor for those looking to run similar experiments. Funding instability has been a significant challenge for our project operations. While our experience may not represent that of others, we’ve found it difficult to raise resources for a medium size experiment, with a funding requirement that’s too small to require a Memorandum to Cabinet, but too large for a single organization to fund alone.)
Talent Cloud established three layers of governance, in addition to its standard hierarchical reporting to the Chief Information Officer of Canada.
The purpose of the External Advisory Board was to provide insight and guidance on the direction of the GC Talent Cloud initiative, including shaping its performance objectives, advancing cross-sector engagement, and providing advice on its longer-term operating model. Board members also contributed ideas on connecting Talent Cloud to broader trends on the future of work, with a central discussion selected for each meeting. Discussion topics included concepts such as data self-sovereignty, the future of workers’ rights, portable benefits, Indigenous inclusion, next generation employment equity, bias reduction in staffing, credential recognition, A.I., blockchain, and digital identity.
Board members represented a diverse range of perspectives, user groups and areas of expertise related to the future of work, public sector transformation, employment equity and human rights. They were considered leaders in their fields, and came from private, not-for-profit, government and academic sectors.
While the External Advisory Board met several times a year in the first two years of Talent Cloud’s operations, it was difficult to maintain momentum with all the other components of the project underway. As a result, the board has been inactive since late 2019.
As part of their Memorandum of Understanding with Talent Cloud, each partner department appointed one Director General to sit on an advisory committee. This governance body made critical decisions on feature prioritization, received reports on early research findings, and previewed upcoming platform releases and products.
Advisory Committee members brought diverse, deep level expertise of government operations to the project. They shared perspectives that challenged, shaped, and improved the GC Talent Cloud initiative so it could continuously strive to deliver the best possible results for Canadians.
As part of their Memorandum of Understanding with Talent Cloud, each partner department appointed one (or more) HR advisors to be part of a working group. Superusers received training on the Talent Cloud platforms operations and experimental objectives, and were asked to observe and report back on how features and tools were functioning in real staffing processes.
As on-the-ground experts, the HR superuser group was an invaluable source of information for the Talent Cloud project. Meetings were generally opened with the question, “Based on the Talent Cloud features your department has tested since the last meeting, what’s not working for you? What needs improving?” HR advisors would then share stories and offer insights on ways to fix what wasn’t working and add what was missing. These findings were then summarized and shared at each following Director General-level Advisory Committee meeting, helping to inform discussions.
HR superusers also acted as user testers in the design of features for the HR Advisor Portal, and provided policy expertise on rules, policies and best practices for the project as a whole. They were an amazing source of guidance, insight and support.
Over the years, the Talent Cloud team has benefited from the policy guidance and expertise of many mandate holders and authorities in government. Without collaboration, we couldn’t have moved the project forward.
The Public Service Commission has provided reviews of our work to ensure policy compliance and has collaborated with Talent Cloud to test an alternative approach to the Priority Screening Process. We would also like to recognize the policy and oversight roles of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer.
Treasury Board Secretariat’s own Human Resources Division, Social Media and Ministerial Affairs, and Information Technology Division were instrumental in moving the project forward. The team would never have been formed, launched a government IT platform or found a way to share our stories if it wasn’t for their tremendous and ongoing support.
"It takes the insights and efforts of a whole community to deliver change."
Many of the ideas on digital age talent repositories for government were first proposed by a breakthrough theory paper by Deloitte, entitled GovCloud. Talent Cloud and Deloitte shared many discussions on this topic, as well as broader conversations on the future of work. Deloitte’s thought leadership in this area was inspiring.
When Talent Cloud first began, resources were very short, and the team didn’t have enough to fund a full coding team in the first year. Deloitte, eager to see someone move to test the GovCloud concept in practice, donated the time of some of its coders and an expert in Agile methodologies to help the team move forward towards proof-of-concept in its early days. The collaboration was all open source - both teams contributed to a common project on GitHub. It did not involve any financial relationship (explicit or implied), and all the code developed from this collaboration was available to the public. To ensure transparency, Talent Cloud and Deloitte also published a Statement of Collaboration on GCcollab.
While little of that early code remains in the platform today, two significant contributions from Deloitte have lingered. Firstly, the organization believed in the project at a time when few did, and their thought leadership and enthusiasm continue to inspire us. Secondly, the knowledge Deloitte shared on how to set up to run an agile product team in government is used daily by our team. We’re not sure we would’ve cleared all the hurdles we needed to in those early days without this show of support.
Talent Cloud has benefited enormously from ideas sharing with private, not-for-profit, academic and government organizations both here in Canada and internationally. While these knowledge collaborators are too numerous to mention here, it’s important to acknowledge that a project like Talent Cloud can’t be built in a vacuum (unless it plans to spend the rest of its life operating in the vacuum.) The future of work is actively being shaped by thought leaders around the world, and we’re grateful for the insights and research shared.
