The announcement of the indefinitely postponed digital identity project on Tuesday called into question the competence of the provincial government for this project. For Jacques Sauvé, cybersecurity consultant at Trilogiam, it should be up to the federal state to initiate it.
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France completed it in five years, and Estonia has had a digital identity for 20 years, underlines the expert. For its part, Quebec has been stagnating for years, and two main issues are the cause, according to Mr. Sauvé.
First, he explained to LCN that people qualified to work on such a project will not go to work for the government for less pay when they can go to the private sector. The salary gap would be significant enough to influence this decision, according to the consultant.
For those who choose to work for the State, they face the second challenge, where they “come up against the environment of civil servants. It doesn’t move. In the private sector, people make decisions, they plan. At the ministry, it takes meetings to plan meetings,” said Mr. Sauvé.
A future federal jurisdiction?
“Digital identity goes further than the definition of the two words. We must not forget the elderly who may not be comfortable with this,” the consultant then explained. This also discusses situations where the phone can be broken. “You need an analog component, like a card with a chip, then a digital component like a mobile application.”
“It should have been developed nationally a long time ago. Our government [fédéral] is good at developing IT projects. We can look at the success of Phoenix and ArriveCan. We therefore want to entrust them with projects of this scale,” he declared.
A lack of management
Mr. Sauvé wanted to clarify that the problem does not lie in the lack of skills in the province, on the contrary: “We have an IT community [technologies de l’information], development and cybersecurity which is impressive,” he underlined. According to the consultant, it is rather the management of the projects which is to be blamed.
On the show, the expert proposes a potential solution, where the government would capon the project, but it would be produced by subcontractors and external firms for better logistics.
Listen to Jacques Sauvé’s full interview in the video above
