We have started to have those conversations. Mr. MacKinnon appeared when we had our “Going Agile” conference in Ottawa and we were speaking to this. The dialogue about moving to more simplified procurement, more agile procurement, has started to occur in Ottawa.
The idea is that if you have a 280-page RFP and you have 20 bidders, it's going to take the government nine, 10, or 11 months just to be able to evaluate those bids. The bids coming in are going to be hundreds of pages long. The incentive for the procurement officers is that they don't want to have to go through 20 bids of 200 pages. They don't have the resources to take that on, so what do they do? They create an environment that gets it down to one, two, or three bidders. Now it becomes more manageable for them in their process. If you move to a capped 10- or 15-page RFP process, the bids coming in will be 20 to 25 pages, and now you can review 20 to 30 bids.
Now we're comparing and contrasting the bids based on parameters other than just being able to meet all the technical requirements we've laid out in the RFP. It will enable the government to access innovation a little more readily. Oftentimes with the procurement cycles that we're going through now, you're cutting out the potential to access innovation because you're prescribing what technology you want.