Making Ottawa a wireless city is less costly than most people expect and would make a bold statement about how technology friendly Ottawa really is.

The right governance model is key to leveraging information technology investment. A formal governance process sets up both a strategic roadmap and a process of measurement against goals. Successful businesses have a strong technology vision supported by a solid governance structure, which holds everyone accountable from the board room to the mail room. In Ottawa, there is no roadmap for the use of strategic technology, no process for measuring the impact of information technology against service goals and

Successful public sector organizations and businesses view technology as an investment in productivity with long-term, ongoing payback. This is not the case at the City of Ottawa. Instead of recognizing that up-front information technology spending will deliver significant benefits and lead to savings in coming years, for the most part the city appears to be evaluating information technology investment on a one-year cycle. This view is rooted in the fact that the Ottawa budget model is expense focused with

Successful businesses, and many leading public sector organizations, have truly embraced a customer- or citizen-centric service delivery model. This stands in sharp contrast to the organization-centric model employed by the City of Ottawa. The city and its staff care about its citizens but its operational ethos is one that forces the citizen to adapt to city practices not the other way around. In addition, truly citizen-centric business models have information technology embedded in their operations to faci