Evidence of meeting #24 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 project.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Well, I would say that people who are aware of what the workload is would have a very good idea of what that number should be.
Again, I'm assuming that there are reasonable plans that are created on an ongoing basis, so I would say that within a period of a few years you should have a fairly decent idea of what your full-time complement should be. Yes, I would say it's doable, for sure, as long as the planning has been done and the workload is known. You should be able to do it, absolutely.
NDP
Mathieu Ravignat NDP Pontiac, QC
Thank you. I'm going to move on to a second subject.
I would like to talk about the consultation process that you used, particularly with the workers, the public servants at the provincial level and the unions.
In your opinion, was that consultation and collaboration essential?
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Yes, absolutely.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
For us, I think it was very important. We had ongoing dialogues with our bargaining agents. We have two main bargaining agents that we deal with, and it's important for us to disclose to them before we make changes. That's what we have and that's what our arrangement is. Clearly it's always valuable to have their support. They're not always going to agree with you, of course, nor should they, but being open and transparent and telling them what was going on was important.
What was just as important for us was our communication with our staff as well. We put a huge amount of effort into making sure we communicated to people and that we were transparent with them. We knew we were rushing fairly quickly, with a two-year time window to get this done, so it was important for us to do a lot of communication. I personally put a lot of time into getting that message out.
NDP
Mathieu Ravignat NDP Pontiac, QC
We hope that the colleagues on the other side of the House have listened to this example and taken note of that model.
Do I have any time left?
NDP
The Chair NDP Pat Martin
Thank you, Mathieu.
For the government side, we will go to Mr. Bernard Trottier.
You have five minutes, Bernard.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
Thank you for coming in today. It's a real delight to have you here today. As a taxpayer in the fine province of Ontario, I'm really proud of the work you're doing. Of course, Ontario has its own fiscal challenges over and above what you're doing, but I think together we'll right things.
I also have a bit of background in these kinds of projects. I spent the last six years of my career, before becoming a member of Parliament, working with an organization called IBM. You might have heard of them. Many years ago we went through our own transformation across about 150 different countries; we lived that, and of course we helped other clients also transform themselves.
The cost savings are pretty solid. Obviously this is something you've lived and you're able to document. I want to talk more about the service side of it.
Your customer, as an IT organization, is the ministries and the clusters. I'd like you to describe some examples. Pick one or two ministries or clusters and describe how, on the one hand, customer service to your internal customer was improved by doing the consolidation—in other words, it wasn't just a cost question—and then in turn describe how those ministries or clusters are able to deliver better services to the citizens of Ontario.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Just one clarification. Clusters and infrastructure belong to the same IT organization, so the clusters CIOs have a dotted line into every deputy, and I do their performance appraisals. We are one organization, and that's a very important thing.
However, to go to your specific service question, what we set out to do on day one was we wanted to at least match the service we had when we went through transition. That's enormously difficult to do, as you know, coming from IBM. We worked a lot with IBM and a lot with HP on their transition and what they had done. One thing we had been warned about was we would see a dip in service, so fight against it, but it will happen, and be ready to respond to it.
I would say probably a really great example of what we focused on was through our help desk. Part of the new structure consolidation was with our help desk. We probably took a huge step up in our measurements and our metrics on what was actually happening at the help desk, because we knew our calls were the most important thing telling us how we were doing.
One incredible advantage of having consolidated together was the fact that we could actually see what that picture was. We put a classic big screen up on the wall. We were reasonably well automated on our help desk. We were seeing the number of calls coming in, how many calls were waiting, what kinds of problems they were having. So through that consolidation, we had a single window into how we were impacting the 65,000 to 67,000 employees of the OPS.
I think I also mentioned our upgrade from XP and Office to the new version. That would have been an enormous undertaking seven or eight years ago. It's still a big undertaking, but it's nowhere near as big as it was.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
From a service impact to OPS, we really reduced what those service impacts are.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
Just to clarify something then, let's say the Ministry of Education or Health or Transportation are able to go through migrations and make changes more effectively. If you are a citizen demanding services from those ministries, would there be any changes that they might have noticed, anything that was better now or anything that was worse?
February 6th, 2012 / 3:55 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Nothing's worse, I would say, certainly from a service level perspective. We introduced the online birth certificate program, for instance. It's a fairly convoluted application where we had infrastructure running in two separate places for an application. To have done that, where two cluster infrastructure groups were trying to coordinate that, as opposed to what we have now, where Service Ontario is our key client-facing organization, by having done that consolidation I know for a fact that we could certainly deliver it a lot quicker. For both birth and death certificate programs, for sure I know they improved.
Another good example would be OSAP. We recently went mobile with our OSAP app, for instance, and we could never have done that. If we'd had infrastructure spread, we could not have done that in the speed we did it.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
To maybe rephrase what you're saying, with the pace of change in technology you're able to deliver that much more quickly—
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Absolutely.
Conservative
Bernard Trottier Conservative Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON
—and more effectively. It's harder to do in a decentralized, non-shared-services organization.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Not only harder to do, but because you have no standardization on platforms or operating systems or applications, or anything, the cost of building the connections.... There's no comparison at all.
NDP
The Chair NDP Pat Martin
Thank you, Bernard. Thank you, Mr. Nicholl.
Next, for the Liberals, John McCallum for five minutes.
Liberal
John McCallum Liberal Markham—Unionville, ON
Thank you.
Welcome, Mr. Nicholl.
I want to try to get the timing straight in my mind first. As I understand it, beginning in 1998 you moved to the system of a relatively small number of clusters.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Yes.
Liberal
John McCallum Liberal Markham—Unionville, ON
Then beginning in 2005, I think you said, you took two years to move to one single entity.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Infrastructure entity.
Liberal
John McCallum Liberal Markham—Unionville, ON
Yes.
So if you look at the period as a whole, starting from 1998 and moving forward to today, I would have thought that.... Do you not have to make certain investments that cost money before you save money, or did you save money right away, starting in 1998?