Speed and agility are not attributes traditionally applied to government organizations. But times have changed. As the economy ground to a halt and tens of thousands became unemployed overnight, fast and furious deployment became a reality for assistance programs that previously spent years in the pipeline.

“People are literally losing their jobs,” said Benoit Long (pictured, right), chief transformation officer at Employment and Social Development Canada. “There is no support; there is no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. And the trust that people have in the government is pretty much at risk right there and then.”

Reassuring citizens is of utmost importance, according to Joel Marchildon (pictured, left), managing director at Accenture Inc. of Canada. “Getting something out there that’s going to reassure citizens, that’s going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what’s becoming important,” he stated.

Long and Marchildon spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, about the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. They discussed how the pressure of responding to COVID-19 has forced a rapid transformation in government information-technology workflow. (* Disclosure below.)

Proving that public and private organizations can coordinate under extreme time pressure, Accenture and the government of Canada’s employment and social development office leveraged the technology of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Connect cloud call center to help millions of at-need citizens access Canada’s emergency response benefits program.

The solution was officially recognized by the Amazon Public Service Sector, which named it the Most Innovative Connect Deployment during its 2020 Partner Awards.

An accessible work in progress beats perfection stuck in the pipeline

As lead technologist for the government of Canada, Long knows how projects of this scale generally work. The last call center he set up took two years to design, two years to procure, and five years to install. To go from concept to up-and-running in two weeks was a feat he never thought could happen.

“I think the playbook around the readiness for change was shocked into existence,” he said. “It’s a bit like showing up on a basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically.”

Even the already agile Accenture had to adapt to cope with the speed of deployment. “We had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally even for our organization could have taken weeks,” Marchildon said. “It forced us to react and act differently as well.”

The desire to deliver a polished product has been dropped in the need for a solution that citizens can access right away, Marchildon added. “What’s coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is that perfection isn’t the most important thing out of the gate,” he said. “Its ability to get stuff out there quickly, test it, change it, test it again, and just always be iterating on the solution.”

The new normal will never be the same

There’s no going back to the slow and arduous workflows of the past, according to Long.

“I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can’t do this more often,” he said. “The appetite inside the organization for that level of mobilization, speed and solutioning, and being engaged rapidly, you just can’t take that away once they’ve tasted it.”

Although the pressure is now on for the public sector to perform with DevOps agility and speed under non-crisis scenarios, the change is positive, according to Long.

“It’s exciting and nerve wracking sometimes,” he said. “But as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible so the benefits of all these solutions can make a difference in people’s lives.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. Neither AWS, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE