The Mayor of Ottawa's Task Force on eGovernment was mandated to make short-, mediumand long-term recommendations to develop an information technology plan that improves interaction with the public while increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of city operations.

The task force concluded that the benefits of exploiting proven, successful information technology tools and applications should deliver improvements that can help the city break the lock-step relationship between city growth and growth in staffing and budgets. Over the long term, the task force believes that cutting the costs associated with city growth could deliver significant savings when measured against the city's $2.1 billion budget. Even the most conservative estimates show Ottawa's population growing to one million people in the near future. This represents a 23% increase in population from the 2006 census figure of 812,129. To accommodate this growing population, the city's operating costs are likely to grow by at least 20% based on current trends. However, efficiencies gained from investing wisely in information technology and managing it intelligently could offset virtually all of that 20% growth in operating costs.

The task force identified that the solution was not better technologists, better computing or more software; the solution must be architectural and systemic. The task force concluded that restricting its focus solely to the Information Technology Services branch would yield little in the way of transformational change at the city. Instead, the task force determined that the city could only transform itself by addressing three fundamental themes: citizen centricity, investment and governance. Chapters two to four explore these themes and their relationship to information technology in detail.

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