Government Operations committee  I think Mr. Westcott has been quite eloquent. I go back to perseverance. The mandate, I think, remains the right one. Mr. Parker and his team are engaging the full community across the government quite actively. He now has a group of deputies and a group of ADMs that are focused on helping to prioritize and address some of the challenges from the demand side, which I think is going to be helpful to their mandate and their mission going forward.

Government Operations committee  There is an approach that could be taken so as not to repeat the same mistakes. The basic mandate of Shared Services Canada was threefold: service improvement; cost savings; and security. From the outset, we learned, with the departments, that the security aspect and the tremendous benefits of centralizing certain functions would enable the government to operate as never before.

Government Operations committee  If I may say—

Government Operations committee  I think that one of the additional learnings that Liseanne referred to was around enterprise planning. There's a recognition right now in the government that for this part of the equation, if SSC was really focused on the supply side of this equation, the demand side had to be worked through.

Government Operations committee  That is not an easy question to answer. In the first 10 or 12 months, we had a fairly clear idea of what the big aggregate pieces were. We were confident in the plans we were developing. As Ms. Forand stated, my role was to develop the first transformation plan, together with my colleagues, the private sector, and the chief information officers of all departments.

Government Operations committee  If I may, Mr. Chair, I would like to add something to what Ms. Forand just said. As she stated, I worked for Privy Council before the organization was created. The data available to us was very important. If we had had access to that data through the departments, that would have given us an advantage and helped us develop somewhat more detailed plans.