Two of CIPS-Alberta's Directors (Brian Brandon, VP and Pat Glenn, Secretary) had a meeting with the Government of Alberta (GoA) Deputy Premier/Minister of Enterprise and Advanced Education on May 1 in Edmonton.  With the Deputy Premier were David Peace, the Executive Director of Innovation and Advanced Technologies and Percy Cummins, Executive Director of Immigration Policy & Programs.

We talked about IT as one of the fastest growing sectors globally and the role of ICT in productivity.  We pointed out that if Alberta was to grow its IT sector and use ICT for gains in productivity, more ICT practitioners would be needed and we would need to be able to upgrade skills of people currently available but not employed or underemployed.

We also pointed out that Canada is 16th of 17 peer nations in productivity and if we closed the productivity gap with the USA, it would return $66B  to the bottom line of the Government of Canada.  Extrapolating that, it could return $6.6 B to the bottom line of the Government of Alberta.  This was of great interest.

In terms of development of the IT sector, we learnt of government initiatives to determine the barriers to growth from a regulatory perspective and the review of Alberta Innovates. The GoA is looking at models that have been used by other jurisdictions to develop sectors:  Harvard/MIT; Silicon Valley; TelAviv...

We asked about an IT Strategy and were told that there was one done in 2008 and it was being updated with the input of stakeholders.  We were told that CIPS would be included in the stakeholder group.

We also talked about our initiative with SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) and again, this was of great interest.  They asked when we would have SFIA in place and were advised that once ready, CIPS would be invited to participate in discussions around immigration.