Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the invitation to appear before your committee to discuss the Auditor General's chapter on large information technology projects. I'd like to introduce the government officials joining me today. I have with me Mr. Alexander, who is the deputy

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. As you know, government online was part of a bigger initiative by the government called Connecting Canadians, and as we look at that, the secure channel was a clear component piece to enable government online to achieve its outcomes. So, as Mr. Poole indicated in his

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Poole is really here to answer questions on the secure channel.

Public Accounts committee  Those two projects have been, as you know, very successful. There are perhaps some differences between those two projects, which are very targeted. You're talking about the census and “My Account”. They are very targeted, very specific automations of work in a very specific area.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. When you look at the enhanced management framework, it is a series of best practices that have been defined. They were first defined in 1995, as you've outlined, and made available to all departments. In reality, many departments do follow the practices. There are e

Public Accounts committee  From our perspective, we would agree that it has been an issue that has been a challenge, and the process that we're—

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. The real challenge here, probably, at the end of the day, is the measurement of whether or not departments are following the guidelines, and that's something we are being very focused on through the management accountability framework. So I'll focus on that as a tool

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. When we look at projects overall, one of the things that we have developed and we're in the process of implementing with departments is a methodology called outcomes management. Outcomes management is a process whereby the business owner of the solution that's being d

Public Accounts committee  I think that when you look at that comment, one of the challenges we and many organizations outside of government have is with specific specialized skills. As you indicated, just after 2000 there were a lot of people available in the Ottawa marketplace. Many of those people have

Public Accounts committee  I think, once again, the government's position is that we need to do much better in the area of business cases. Of course, we do receive business cases with Treasury Board submissions. One could look at them and say they perhaps do not explore all of the alternatives available wi

Public Accounts committee  On the question of smaller versus larger projects, if you look back at the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, a lot of what we were doing was automating very specific functions in organizations, such as pay systems, tax, and some of those more specific functions. As we move into the curr

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good morning, committee members. Thank you for the invitation to appear before your committee today to discuss the Auditor General's chapter on safeguarding government information and assets in contracting. In chapter 1 of her 2007 report, the Auditor

Public Accounts committee  The government security policy lays out the broad elements of security that departments need to follow. The standard goes in and looks specifically at what is required when we're looking at the contracting of resources. It is a much more focused piece of material. It goes deeper

Public Accounts committee  Yes. They must identify if there are security requirements, so that responsibility is clearly with the departments. They need to complete a checklist, if they are going to Public Works, to have Public Works do the contracting for them. If they're doing their own contracting they

Public Accounts committee  Maybe, Mr. Chair, I could respond to this. You would look at the efficiency within the system and ask that question, which I think is a legitimate one. One of the things the Treasury Board Secretariat is actually engaged in with Public Works and the PCO is leading an initiati