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Government of Canada

Roles and responsibilities: Guidelines for health data and dashboards on Canada.ca

Roles and responsibilities

We collaborate with a variety of internal and external stakeholders who contribute to our dashboards.

Please note: Not all of these collaborators will work on every project.

Table 1: List of Health Canada (HC) and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) collaborators for the integration of data and dashboards
Collaborator Role and responsibilities

Digital Communications

Data and Dashboard team

Digital communication advisor (DCA)

  • Lead on data and dashboards on Canada.ca and help with publishing process and approval
  • Helps content contributor meet Canada.ca web standards (for example: plain language writing, translation, second language concurrence, accessibility, user experience, information architecture (IA)
  • (TBC) Involved to establish the site and large changes
  • Monitors web analytics

Content contributor or Content creator (CC)

(HC & PHAC program or other department)

  • Client or partner (Interdepartmental program partners like StatsCan, DND, ISC, CSC, PSPC, PSC, PT's...) who is a subject matter expert. They provide content and data
  • The content contributor owns the content and the data
  • Reports publishing priorities to Digital Comms. Priorities will be added to the tracker for approval
  • Gets approvals from their senior management

Strategic communications advisor (Strat comms)

  • Helps client define web content needs
  • Provides strategic communication advice on the project
  • Helps to align content with the department’s strategic messaging
  • Highlights the needs of website users through intel such as public opinion research and web analytics
  • Gets approval from their senior management and/or informs as a FYI

Digital transformation (DT)

  • Usability quality assessment and metadata
  • UX testing
  • Coordinates with other Canada.ca themes as necessary

Digital publishing (DP)

  • Converts final content into HTML pages on Canada.ca
  • Publishes content to Canada.ca
  • Performs technical quality assessments (TQA) of static web pages

Service Canada (SC), Principal publisher (PP)

  • Integration into Canada.ca’s web management software

Public Health Infobase (PHAC)
  • Responsible for building, publishing and hosting public dashboards and data products (COVID-19 and HC+ PHAC programs)
  • Responsible for maintaining and creating an automated report with charts and graphics that pulls data from a google sheet in real time
  • Using D3 (Data Driven Document) technology to produce interactive data visualizations
  • Coding contextual content about the product and technical notes on how to use it
  • Applying best practices and meeting accessibility, usability, mobility and other web standards needs
  • Publishing tabular data and sharing CSV files format on OGP for transparency and accessibility needs
  • Creating archived reports for historical research
  • Note: Infobase codes and publishes content on the Infobase server (as opposed to Canada.ca)

Open Government portal (OGP)

  • Publishing comma-separated values (CSV) files on OGP

National Microbiology Lab (NML) Geomatics Team

  • Responsible for stakeholder management with NRCan Stats Can Geomatics Teams
  • Responsible for all Geomatics-related product releases
  • Responsible for R&D, geospatial data analysis when needed and some dashboard content

Centre for Data Management, Innovation and Analytics (DMIA)

Corporate Data and Surveillance Branch

  • Responsible for central coordination of briefing style and language for data and dashboard briefings at PHAC (producing briefing templates and SOPs)
  • Responsible for coordinating briefing on data and dashboards at PHAC to ensure consistent language and expectations of briefing materials
  • Responsible for advocating for data and dashboards to be published online for all PHAC branches
  • Informed of all dashboard publications to increase cross-promotion and avoid competing publication schedules

Resource Management and Operations Directorate (RMOD)

  • Leads information technology and information management initiatives, advances policy initiatives and provides support, strategic direction and advice to HPFB in areas including:
    • Information technology portfolio management and technical service delivery
    • Investment planning
    • Openness and transparency
  • Provides support, strategic direction and advice to HPFB in areas including:
    • Innovation
    • Data science
    • Database management, statistics reporting, and web publication
    • Internal communications

Digital Transformation Branch

  • Responsible for installation and maintenance of Cognos/Power BI/SAS software
  • Point of contact for clients for usage, design, and best practices
  • Holds the keys of Power BI

Chief Data Office (CDO)

  • Provide expertise and updates related to CDO’s work to advance FAIR data principles for data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperability, and reusability), availability of data disaggregation (SGBA+), open data and open science, etc. as it relates to public communications, including assisting with documentation on best practices and guidance material when necessary
  • On a project-by-project basis, the HC CDO may support with designing and optimizing dashboards, aligning content, refining data architecture, and providing technical quality support related to data
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