Thank you, Madam Chair.
I will address your question as to how and when SMEs can be used by government departments and agencies in the project process. First of all, they can be used to assist departments in analysis prior to any project or prior to any solicitation or procurement process under way. Government departments exercise the standing offers and the vehicles available to them to do that quite regularly. When a department comes forward to the board with a project, the department generally has its business case and the proposed way forward, but if it's coming to the board with a project of an application nature, then it hasn't yet necessarily picked the solution. It may be going out for the selection of a COTS product, and at that point it could structure the project and the request to include SMEs.
In other cases, if they are renewing an application that's already existent and they have come forward to the board for project authority for renewal, once they have the authority to proceed on that renewal, again, they can go back and exercise the procurement vehicles available to them and use SMEs. There are many good ones, and according to the Public Works figures that I've been told, I believe we use SMEs quite extensively.
There's no specific guidance. I think all departments are very careful to find the best value for money in whatever services they contract for. Often that can be SMEs, because sometimes they are smaller and more nimble than very large organizations.