Government Operations committee  Thank you. Good afternoon, Madam Chair. Thank you for inviting us again to appear before your committee. With me again today is Ms. Wutti. Following our appearance on October 20, we provided the committee with information on three items regarding large IT projects in the gover

Government Operations committee  Certainly it would be our objective to avoid overcapacity in any IM/IT solution. It's just not a good value-for-money approach. Certainly departments, because they are accountable for their IM/IT investment spend, do have to be able to project the estimated costs with the great

Government Operations committee  Madam Chair, thank you. We will come back with a flow chart that shows, for those projects that require Treasury Board approval, the moments at which we do provide approval and challenge and at which points of the process we can inject oversight and so on.

Government Operations committee  We have not done a study of that nature. However, we are currently studying the community's need to migrate to more modern networks, if you will. It would not be desirable to consider that as a large project, because that is not the case. A series of projects in departments and a

Government Operations committee  Absolutely. That is a very good question. Thank you. The executive dashboard is definitely a key tool in oversight and monitoring. We are in the process of really consolidating information so that in the spring of 2010 we can have a first view of a number of projects across gov

Government Operations committee  Not entirely, and I will clarify it for you. The policy has been available to the community since 2007, but implementation of all components of it is being spread out until April 2011, because there is a major effort in the community and at the Secretariat to develop investment p

Government Operations committee  I understand that it may look that way. Are you talking about Secure Channel, the Voie de communication protégée, or about GENS or SREG, Government Enterprise Network Services?

Government Operations committee  GENS and Secure Channel are two different things. This summer, Public Works made a request for information to the supplier community concerning updating telecommunications services. Secure Channel is not in that procurement basket; it has been in place since 2006, since it was la

Government Operations committee  It was a request for information. There was a consultation, and the final procurement has not yet been submitted. My colleagues at Public Works will be able to tell you more about it.

Government Operations committee  Madam Chair, in answer to the member's question, accountability, according to the Federal Accountability Act, definitely rests with the deputy ministers in each department. It is their accountability to follow policies and ensure compliance with Treasury Board policies, standards

Government Operations committee  To be honest, I can't say that I have the exact way that each department funds their part of Secure Channel. What we do have, and would be happy to share with you, is the allocation of Secure Channel costs across each of the departments. All 129 departments actually use different

Government Operations committee  I'm sorry, Madam Chair, I have to correct the member. Service Canada is an active user of Secure Channel today. They did momentarily stop for a very short period of time. To my understanding, it was less than three months. They have been and continue to be an active user of Secu

Government Operations committee  I don't have the details of their specific funding. However, they did not go to an external service.

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  That's right.