Evidence of meeting #11 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was transformation.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Chief Operating Officer, Shared Services Canada
We would also like to take you down the street to one or two particular data centres to show you the before and after.
Conservative
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
If I have a couple seconds, I know we discussed it last time, but did we fix the issue with the data centre going on the DND base, and DND had other plans for that space?
Chief Operating Officer, Shared Services Canada
That was a coordination.... There really wasn't a big issue between us. It was made out to be much more than it was.
Conservative
President, Shared Services Canada
The contract for the expansion will be let very soon.
Conservative
Liberal
Francis Drouin Liberal Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll share, because Mr. Whalen wants to ask a question. Could you let me know at one minute?
With regard to the performance management framework, at the very senior level, how do you assess whether or not your organization has done a good job with some of the clients you have? For example, applications are left with departments. They can only install an application if there is a need for infrastructure, if they have enough space, so how do you assess that with regard to communicating your performance with the client? You talked about service level. At the same time, do you communicate “Here's what to expect from us” at some point?
Chief Operating Officer, Shared Services Canada
There are two questions there. On one hand, if there's demand, we'll address demand through existing assets and resources that we have. If they say, “I have a new application. I want to host it”, that can be as big as a breadbox or literally, a building. We have to assess that, so it's either a major project or we simply take part of an existing server. That's not a problem.
On service levels, going back to what Ron alluded to before about having set service-level expectations, that's what we're ramping up to try to set those as a standard as opposed to...simply what we inherited. Because, again, the premise when SSC was established was that we would...
And I have to tell you, this is the way it works in industry at very large scales. We used to call it “Your mess for less”, because we're basically going to keep doing the same thing, but through economies, costs will go down over time. That's basically the value proposition for containing the legacy environment until we get the future state stood up and everyone migrated over.
President, Shared Services Canada
If I might, just in terms of the service-level expectations, we are evolving those, and we will use them as the benchmark to have the dialogue with the client about customer satisfaction as well.
Right now, the customer satisfaction survey is quite impressionistic, but as part of developing this tool behind it, we will have metrics around the service levels to show the client how we've done over time in the delivery of this service to them. That's where we want to be.
Liberal
Francis Drouin Liberal Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON
Do you take into account the department's priorities when you are assessing your own priorities?
President, Shared Services Canada
Absolutely. It is a major part of the account executive role that we have. Their role is to work with the partner to understand their priorities and their needs, and bring that back into the organization so we can build it into our planning.
Liberal
Francis Drouin Liberal Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON
When you bring this back into SSC, is each employee measured in terms of delivering results for the client or department? Are they accountable? Is somebody held accountable for that?
President, Shared Services Canada
I would say, not yet, because the service-level expectations are not well established. To start doing that, I think it is important to have good metrics. In general terms, looking for executives to have part of their performance evaluated against the client satisfaction survey overall, to get to that level of granularity.... We are not there yet.
Chief Operating Officer, Shared Services Canada
If I could add to that, a major milestone for us through the last year was the major reorganization we went through, to where we now have individual service levels, and we have people responsible. We had to change the organization so we could actually get to the state that Ron is referring to.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
Thank you for coming. There are many questions I want to ask, but I just want to focus on a final point very quickly, about the charts in the presentation you made earlier.
You talked about a number of the inputs into the system. From your understanding of how the 2013 and 2015 strategic plans for your organization were made, how did gender-based analysis figure into it, specifically with respect to future hiring of women in technologically based jobs? Is there a plan to encourage training in those fields, to make sure that over time Shared Services Canada is providing gender parity in the workforce for its more highly paid positions?
President, Shared Services Canada
In terms of the planning, I can't say what happened in the past. What I can say is that in terms of building the plans for the future, we have a very close eye on labour force availability and where we stand.
We are slightly below labour force availability with respect to women. We are very close with respect to women, visible minorities, and aboriginals. In terms of diversity overall, we very much have an eye on this, and on the development of talent going forward as well.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for coming, Mr. Parker, Mr. Glowacki, and Mr. Duplantie. We appreciate your attendance. The committee will be determining whether we want to conduct a little further examination of Shared Services Canada, but I do appreciate your time and the information you provided. You are excused.
We will suspend for two minutes, and then we will come back in camera.
[Proceedings continue in camera]
