Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I have on my left side Mr. John Glowacki, the chief operating officer for Shared Services Canada. On my right side is Monsieur Alain Duplantie, the chief financial officer for Shared Services Canada, a recent addition to our department.
With that, Mr. Chair, I would propose to go quickly through the overview.
The objective here is simply to give you an overview of SSC's mandate, of its information technology transformation agenda, of its short-term priorities, and of course to answer your questions.
SSC was created five years ago to improve IT infrastructure service delivery, transform the government of Canada's email, data centres and networks, and generate value by implementing a government-wide approach to managing IT.
SSC was set up over a period of time. It was announced in August 2011, and then there were the acts that established it and several OICs. It involved the transfer of personnel, assets, and contracts from 42 separate departments and unique organizations into one central department.
Something of this order of magnitude is unprecedented in the Government of Canada. When you think about a merger and acquisition, usually you're talking about two firms, and effectively here, we're taking personnel and assets from 42 firms. That gives you a sense of the order of the transformation overall. To carry out our mandate, we work very closely with the Treasury Board Secretariat, Public Services and Procurement Canada, the security agencies, and all the partner departments.
The starting point we had is one of the parts I'd like to underscore. It was very diverse. There were about 1,500 mission-critical systems, applications that cover very important programs for the Government of Canada around benefits, employment insurance, policing, and tax systems. The overall order of magnitude was about $2 billion per year on this suite of services. To give you a sense of scale, at the time SSC was established, the overall spend on IT in the Government of Canada was about $5 billion. So roughly 40% of the overall expenditure was affected by the transfer and creation of SSC.
The balance of that expenditure, which still resides in the departments, is on the applications that are running on the infrastructure and the end-user devices, for example, that are maintained in the departments: laptops, desktops, all those types of devices.
We started with 63 different email systems for 43 departments, and more than 500 data centres varying in size and quality. Over time, we've discovered a wide range of—I wouldn't call data centres—servers and equipment spread across the country as well. There were 50 wide-area networks that are siloed, set up narrowly, which didn't necessarily talk to each other in over 3,500 buildings.
That gives you a general sense there's a lot of duplication and a lot of possibilities for efficiency. I'll get to it in a bit, but with all of these different points of entry into the Government of Canada systems, it also provides a significant security concern.
The starting point was complex, costly, and insecure. It has a long-term unfunded liability. As the Auditor General noted in his report of 2010, there needed to be significant investment. That was one of the factors that led to the establishment of Shared Services Canada.
What's the transformation about? It's about consolidating those data centres. We're looking at going from over 500 to about five data centres, from 63 email systems to one email system, from more than 50 siloed networks to one Government of Canada network, and modernizing the telecom systems. A lot of the telecom facilities we have are nearing end of life. We need to provide for the procurement of a centralized spot to do the procurement of workplace technology devices with a view to improving the overall security of those devices that's permitted by the centralization.
What will Canadians see, and those clients who will provide those services to Canadians? They'll see fewer systems, fewer failures of those systems, improved security, more bandwidth, more storage, and things like improved video conferencing.
How does this all fit with the bigger picture? In a digital world, we'll be more capable of handling the big data, supporting the mission-critical applications, protecting the sensitive information of Canadians, and having more flexibility in terms of the storage and compute capacity for the government. This is becoming a big issue in the science community, for instance, where you have very large datasets that are initially there, but then the scientists use them, crunch them, and don't need them anymore or want to archive them. Do you want to put that in a data centre and hold that for the Government of Canada on an ongoing basis? Probably not, if it's unclassified data.
All of this aligns with overall digital service delivery, efficiency in internal services, and the modern agile public service.
I think that SCC has made significant progress in its transformation. As I said earlier, the data centres are an important aspect.
We created three enterprise data centres for the Government of Canada. We made improvements to the process and significant improvements to the system's security. We established security operations centres. We examine all of the government's purchases and verify where the equipment comes from, to make sure it is safe.
Finally, we have substantially streamlined the telephone system. We awarded contracts to two companies to begin streamlining the networks. The rollout began this week and we have begun installing and implementing the new networks. For this project as well, this is just a start.
In 2016-2017, SCC will reset its plans for transformation. We are currently carefully reviewing all of the hypotheses that underpin the transformation plan. The moment is crucial for that review and study. We are closely examining budgets, the time needed to reach objectives, and the size of the projects, in order to be able to meet the government's needs in the context of an economy based on innovation and the services provided to Canadians.
We're moving to a different type of business model relative to what was established previously, with clear focus on the elements that are necessary for the transformation and the operations of the department to be successful: a new service strategy to reinforce the delivery of quality service to the clients; a financial strategy looking at different pricing strategies; and the long-term sustainability of the IT infrastructure. Project management is key for a department like SSC.
And finally, the people strategy, which is probably the most important of all, given that our employees are the most important asset that we have; the skills and talent that they bring will make the projects happen.
