Evidence of meeting #11 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was smes.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President, SageData Solutions Inc.
I have a different opinion from some of the points brought forward earlier. I can only talk about my own limited experience with my own companies.
President, SageData Solutions Inc.
It was part of our business plan when we set the company up 20 years ago. We don't want to compete on a level playing field with everyone else. I don't want to be one of 4,000 organizations offering a better web page.
We've developed products that no one else has, and innovation is what drives us. We can say that if you have a problem, we have a solution, and no one else has that solution, so here's the price and let's go.
From our point of view, innovation is what drives our company all the time.
Conservative
Former Chair, Canadian Business Information Technology Network
Well, you're talking to somebody whose company is called inRound Innovations.
I'll tell you what really drives innovation, from our perspective: it's access to opportunities.
I suppose to a certain degree we believe that the government has a certain socio-economic responsibility to help small business, but as I said earlier, we're not looking for special treatment. What we're looking for is continuing to have access, and we think that bundling contracts is something that stymies innovation in the Canadian government.
I don't buy into the notion of economies of scale, because I think innovation comes through niche companies like ours. I do have experience with the big guys, and I know that in my service management practice, when I worked for Compaq HP, it was still five or 10 guys sitting around in a particular section. That was the extent of the experience we had in that company. We just happened to sell under a broader label.
As I said, it's important that there not be initiatives that prevent us from continuing to have access to government contracts.
Conservative
John Carmichael Conservative Don Valley West, ON
Ms. McCallion? Then we'll come back if we have time.
Board Member, Canadian Business Information Technology Network
We're not a product development organization. We're a service delivery firm. The key for our firm is transparency within our own organization and with the organizations we deal with. That means transparency with the consultants we deal with and with the clients.
We try to keep our costs extremely low and pass those savings on to our clients. That's the way we try to be innovative and separate ourselves from some of the larger organizations we compete against.
President, SageData Solutions Inc.
It breaks my heart--I'd like to be a hard-nosed businessman, but I'm not very good at that--when I go into government departments and see them doing drudge work the hard way, with errors and mistakes, and I have a solution: I want to give it to them. I love that, and my team loves to have innovations that we can give. I just wish the procurement group would get out of the way and let me give these people the tools that would help them do the job better.
There's an opportunity here if we can do that: you can improve the efficiency of government and speed up innovation. But at the moment, based in Ottawa, Nortel is dead, I don't have any high-tech, and the federal government is an extremely difficult sell: there's too much of “we've been doing it this way for 30 years, so why bother, the clipboard is good enough...”.
Chief Executive Officer, Amika Mobile Corporation
As an entrepreneur, one of the things that drives you is making sure that you know your competitive landscape really well and you live in fear of your competitors catching you. I tell my team--my CTO is here--that I want the “catch me if you can” features. That's how you drive the entire team towards trying to be at the front.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal John McCallum
That brings our meeting to an end.
I'd like to thank our witnesses for their frank interventions and answers to our questions. I think we've learned a lot.
The meeting is now adjourned.