ECCC Kiosk 2023 Charter

Environment and Climate Change Canada
Data Science and Analytics Centre of Expertise

Mission

The mission of the DS&A COE is to foster a data-driven culture in the department through the use of data innovation.

Vision

ECCC generates insights through data science techniques to derive greater public value from data and improve services and operations.

Mandate

OCDO’s DS&A CoE works with branches and programs in the areas of business intelligence, evidence-based decision-making, and science-specific analytics to:

• Promote the potential uses for data science and analytics to support decision-making and priorities and communicate the business value of data science and analytics prototypes.
• Develop prototypes and proofs of concept of data-driven innovation in support of departmental priorities including services and regulatory development.
• Share methodologies, algorithms, and dashboards developed by the DS&A CoE with others in ECCC.
• Provide advice on the development of effective and implementable data science and analytics pipelines, data visualizations, and artificial intelligence.
• Coordinate and communicate data science and analytics projects and initiatives to the department and the broader federal public service.
• Provide project governance solutions and advice to help sustainably scale-up data science and analytics projects at ECCC.

Core Principles

All DS&A CoE activities are guided by the following principles:

1. Organizational View: We are willing to explore all innovation ideas and use cases with any business sponsor at ECCC.
2. Open to a High-Risk Tolerance: We will define a risk scale before accepting a project. We support a portfolio of risk in our innovation projects, whereby several innovations with higher risk of failure will be deemed acceptable to try.
3. Security Focused: We create new but secure innovations by adhering to all relevant security standards.
4. Benefits realization: We always define the value of a project from the viewpoint of ECCC, the client and wherever possible, Canadians.
5. Fit for Purpose: We acknowledge that even though data science and analytics has incredible potential to solve problems that we have never been able to solve before, they are not appropriate for ALL problems. Our priority is to determine if a problem aligns with our data science and analytics capabilities and not finding ways to solve problems with DS&A when they are not well aligned.
6. Serving Our Mandate: Throughout all work, we strive to understand and articulate our connection, direct or indirect, to ECCC’s core mandate and how we are helping to better serve Canadians.
7. Enterprise Mindset: In everything that we build, we are focused on building enterprise focused and compatible solutions that deliver immediate and local value.
8. Ethics and privacy focused: The ethical and privacy concerns will always be assessed and addressed throughout all work done.
9. Innovation is creativity MULTIPLIED by execution: The DS&A CoE understands that fostering innovation is much more than just fostering creativity, execution is a critical component.

Business and Innovation Goals

The DS&A CoE focuses on both business and innovation goals. This CoE is uniquely positioned to make an impact on the ECCC core mandate by leveraging the department’s data assets and using data innovation to help solve problems that we have not been able to solve effectively in the past. Overall, our intent is to support the branches and programs through data science and analytics in order to better serve Canadians. We encourage branches and programs to develop their own data science and analytics expertise. This will allow the department to build a federated data science capacity, where the DS&A CoE act as a central entity that promotes, supports, advises on, and demonstrates data innovation.