Registrar & CEO's Message
APEGA
The Relentless March of Technology: How it Affects You, How it Affects APEGA BY JAY NAGENDRAN, P.ENG., QEP, BCEE, FEC, FGC (HON.) APEGA Registrar and Chief Executive Officer
Technology surrounds us and dictates our day- to-day lives far more than pioneers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs ever envisioned. The youth of today were born into this technological age and live within it effortlessly. As engineers and geoscientists, we are as tied to technology as everyone else is—perhaps even more so, because, along with relying upon it, many of us are developing it, improving it, and finding new applications for it. Some of you may even monitor pipelines from the comfort of your homes. Many of you review and approve documents far away from the traditional office, without ink touching paper. This is both freeing and challenging. So much of what we do intersects through information technology that, without forethought and willpower, few of us would escape screens, memes, news alerts, and tweets for more than a few waking hours a day. We embrace information technology to put food on our tables and stay connected to friends and family, albeit while developing strategies to cope with its side-effects. APEGA is not immune to this. With 2020, our centennial year, looming large, we are on the same technological march as you are. I wonder what our self-regulatory world must have been like in 1920. Obviously, the challenges were huge then, too, because the public had been harmed by unregulated practitioners. The ethical engineers of the day knew something had to be done, so they devised and proposed the self-regulation model still used throughout Canada.
All these years later, APEGA faces challenges our predecessors could not imagine. Operating the association, interacting with members, advancing our regulatory processes, analyzing and protecting data—these are but a few of APEGA’s IT buckets. Many of our lessons learned and improvements made within these areas have been mentioned before in this column, elsewhere in The PEG , and on other APEGA platforms. Let’s focus this time on how we manage our practice standards and guidelines: their review process, content, and future, and how the information age affects them. These critical documents build upon and clarify the professional practice and ethical considerations found in the Engineering and Geoscience Professions Act (the EGP Act ), the General Regulation, our bylaws, and other legislation. Practice standards and guidelines are where the proverbial rubber hits the road. APEGA needs to get them right, so APEGA needs to make sure subject- matter experts, members, and permit holders are media, the public has more information—and more misinformation—at its fingertips than ever before. The relentless bombardment of data, facts, figures, images, and news is contributing to the public’s growing distrust of individuals and institutions that present themselves as authorities, including regulatory bodies. With access to so many conflicting facts and alternative views, it is increasingly difficult for people to navigate news and wholly trust the information properly engaged, consulted, and informed. Spurred on by the advancement of social
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