Government Operations Committee on Feb. 6th, 2012

[David Nicholl]

I was private sector.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

When you joined, you became a public servant. Is that correct?

[David Nicholl]

I did.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

What is happening outside government in the private sector? Are they way ahead of us on this from a government perspective? If you could give us the lay of the land, I'd appreciate it.

[David Nicholl]

We have a fairly mixed infrastructure model ourselves. If I've left the impression that we do it all ourselves, we do not; we have a fairly large private sector involvement in everything we do.

For instance, our network is totally outsourced. We do not do our own network. It's a contract that we've run for quite a few years. Some of the remote support for our more complex servers is provided by the private sector. The private sector advises us on numerous things. We have just built a new data centre in Guelph, for instance; we're going through a massive transition of about 500 applications from our old decrepit data centre into this beautiful brand new data centre in Guelph, and we've had a lot of help to do that. We could not have undertaken that process without private sector expertise and involvement. They are involved with all the steps all the way through.

For any technology changes we go through, we have expertise from the outside helping us, whether that's Microsoft or IBM. As well, advisory services from the PwCs and the Deloittes of the world are very much involved in what we do.

We try to live the partnership theme with our private sector partners. They are our partners. They work with us very closely. As you do, we go though enormous rigour on procurements and contracts, but once they're in, they become a partner, and we really operate that way.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

With your vision of where the computer world is going, what would be the downside for Canada not to pursue the shared services approach that Ontario did? I think we're basically in agreement around the table. There are maybe some practical pieces about how it's implemented. There might be some different views on it. As a Canadian—I'm assuming you are Canadian—

[David Nicholl]

I am.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

—why would you say it is important for the Government of Canada to pursue this approach at this time and not wait any longer?

[David Nicholl]

As a taxpayer, I would say that there are enormous benefits to both the efficiency of the operation you are running and to your ability to turn around services for citizens and businesses in Canada, purely because you can't do anything without at least two ministries talking these days. Everything is interrelated, especially on the service side.

Transportation doesn't exist on its own anymore. In fact, transportation doesn't even deliver the services anymore. If you walk into Service Ontario, you want to be able to do your driver's licence renewal and your health card renewal at the same time. If you haven't made some strides to integrate the organizations, trying to do that very simple action is very difficult. Just from pure common sense of what it takes to deliver integrated service, it's just a prerequisite.

We have to work more closely together. Citizens don't care that you're feds and we're the province. They want to be able to come in and do a transaction with you, and they don't really care where you're from. We also have to work much more closely than we do with the federal government on how we can integrate our services better. We did it with the birth certificate and the SIN card, so that when you have a birth of a child, everything is done at once. By integrating like things together, you just deliver services so much better than you can do when everyone is spread out across the place and not doing it together.

There are other great lessons to learn. Talk to the IBMs and the HPs of the world. They couldn't have done what they did unless they had gone through the agonies they went through. IBM certainly would not be the success it is if it had left itself the way it was.

We're no different. There's no reason we can't learn from both private and public sectors. Certainly our experience is that we can deliver services so much more quickly than we could before that consolidation.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you, Mike. That concludes your time.

Mr. Boulerice is next.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Before I start, I'd like to make sure of one thing. Was the Integrated Justice Project part of the whole review of the centralization of IT services in the province in the late 1990s and early 2000s? Was it part of the whole process?

[David Nicholl]

No.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Oh, it wasn't part of it.

[David Nicholl]

It's history to me, I have to admit. I wasn't around for it, but I saw no overlap between them at all.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

I just wanted to check.

What feedback did you get from the various agencies and ministries following the changes made at the end of the exercise? What were the general comments? Where there many complaints? Did anyone congratulate you? Was there a lot of discontent or were you lauded?

[David Nicholl]

As I think I did say earlier, honestly, it was a tough couple of years. We were fixated on our service levels. As I explained before, the help desk consolidation allowed us to know right away how we were impacting people in the OPS. There is no doubt whatsoever that we had to be on our game to respond whenever we had issues or problems.

We never had an impact on citizens and we never had an impact on business. We certainly had to put people through a fair bit of change and go through a fair bit of change management when it came to something as simple as changing someone's e-mail address, because it does impact a lot of things.

I would say that what we wanted to do was prepare for the worst. We wanted to prepare to ensure that no matter what change we went through, we were ready to respond, right to someone's desk if necessary, during those first few days whenever a major change took place. We set ourselves up to do that, and I think we were pretty successful at it.

That said, change is always tough, and there's going to be stuff that happens; again, it's really about how you respond to it. People will give you congratulations for responding quickly. They don't normally congratulate you when you just do the job and it happens to work. That's just a problem with IT in general.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

What performance indicators do you use to verify the quality and efficiency of those services? Are those performance indicators the same for the ministries and for the businesses you offered services to?

[David Nicholl]

I would say yes, very much so.

At the service desk, for instance, we'd measure exactly common things, such as how long somebody was on the phone, how long each call took, and how many calls were coming in. We'd measure how good our knowledge records were, meaning that when you get a call, what was the quality of the answer? Is it something brand new, or have we come across it before, and if so, is there a record there for it? We certainly measure things across the board, such as our network response. We'll measure all kinds of response times at various stages of our network.

It's quite difficult, sometimes, to measure an end to end; it's hard sometimes to actually get a measurement of when you hit enter and it goes off and comes back and then something happens. Because there are so many parts involved, it's sometimes technically quite difficult to actually come up with those numbers, but we've done it as much as we can. We measure it on a monthly basis and we publish it on a monthly basis. It's a very important part for us.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Perfect. Thank you.

You made major changes and there was upheaval that perhaps upset some employees. But I'd now like to hear what you have to say about the future. What technological challenges do you anticipate? What measures do you plan to adopt for the future?

[David Nicholl]

I would say that it's the size of some of the products that we have to run. For instance, we have one of the largest Microsoft Exchange instances in Canada. We and the Royal Bank seem to battle it out a little bit for who's the biggest. I think we are; it's not something we're terribly proud of, but we are.

I would say we're always aware that consolidating exposes more; by that, I mean you're actually a lot more aware of your usage and what you're actually doing with it. When you're spread out across the map and you haven't really got a good control on what your assets are, it's quite likely that things are happening that you're not even aware of. When you consolidate things into one place, you can see them all and measure them. It's mostly good stuff, but occasionally you will come across something, either from a scale perspective or perhaps from the pure knowledge perspective of knowing you've got that much, that can have ramifications for you. You're a lot more knowledgeable about your environment because you can see it.

That's generally good. There's sometimes a downside to it, but generally it's an upside.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you, Mr. Nicholl, and thank you, Mr. Boulerice.

That pretty much concludes the one hour that we had set aside for your testimony, Mr. Nicholl. I'm sure the committee joins me in thanking you for coming. We find it very interesting and very useful.

There is one thing I would ask. I know there was a request—from Mr. Blanchette, I believe—for you to provide some of the additional data regarding the amount of contracted work versus in-house work, so if that data could be sent to the clerk of the committee, it would be very welcome.

[David Nicholl]

Sure.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

Thank you very much for coming. We appreciate it very much.

[David Nicholl]

You're welcome.

[The Chair, NDP, Pat Martin]

It's very useful.