Evidence of meeting #119 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 need.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Pat Kelly Conservative Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB
Okay. Well, I'm still struggling for a solution that I can understand as to how we obtain this shift in mindset. Do you want to add something, Mr. Akrouche?
Managing Partner, Strategic Relationships Solutions Inc.
Yes, I thought I'd provide a little bit of an answer to that.
Really, you need to bake into your business arrangement a relationship and strategic management framework that addresses this, one that says that we are going to measure the performance of this relationship, and not just the performance of the vendor but the performance of the relationship as a whole.
What does that mean over time? You need to align that as time changes. You need to have the mechanisms within your relationship management framework, as part of your contract, to actually do this. That's the answer. That's the right answer.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much.
Madam Mendès, you have five minutes, please.
Liberal
Alexandra Mendes Liberal Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all for being here.
I'll follow this conversation about where to take into account the accountability and the performance measure. Would your suggestion, Ms. Tisdale, about the SWAT team that needs to be created include somebody from the Auditor General's office, for example, who would be part of the compliance and the measurement process?
Managing Partner, Government and Public Sector, Ernst and Young LLP
That could work well.
When we did it, we had somebody from the Ministry of Finance. We had to build the internal capability to look at risk differently, so we had them engaged, almost designated, on our team. We'd involve them right from the beginning around the inception of the solution. If it was the Privacy Commissioner, it meant various risk things, and we involved them from the beginning.
The other thing kind of connects with the two points here. It is that the governors—the MPs, the cabinet, Treasury Board—need to agree to what the outcomes are up front, and then allow the team to get there. They need to say, “Okay, here are the goalposts, and you have to come in between them. We empower you, as long as you stay between these two goalposts. Come back and tell us when it's done.” They won't have to go back and forth. You have very robust discussions up front about what the risks are, what the goalposts are that they're comfortable in. Then the team is delegated with all the right people to make it so, and then they come back and report how they're going to track that going forward. However, they don't have to come back. As long as they stay within the parameters that are agreed to up front, they're empowered to deliver.
Liberal
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
They do have to come back, because when you say, “Go between these two goalposts”, that's your intention as a leader, based initially on what I would think would be a very challenging amount of data that you'll use to make that choice.
Initially the leader will say, “This is my intention, to go between these two goalposts”, but when the team starts to execute, you may learn something. Maybe it's not those two goalposts, maybe it's these two goalposts over here, or there might be a slight deviation as you go. That's called learning, and that's the reason—
Liberal
Alexandra Mendes Liberal Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC
Just for my understanding, when we're talking about goalposts, we're talking about the outcomes that we are expecting.
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
Yes. You have a specific outcome you want to reach and you have this intention, but you need to exercise the team and go through an iteration. We usually run on about a 90-day window. In a 90-day window, we want feedback to come to strategy again to say, “Was my strategic intent correct, or do I need to tack the sailboat just a little bit? Am I right on and do I just keep going, or is this a stupid project, and we need to stop it because it's just not working and it just didn't make any sense?”
You need to have that. That's where the de-risking of the project comes, because every 90 days there should be an out. You could have a long-term engagement for three years, but every 90 days there should be an out: are we doing the right thing? Do we need to adjust? Do we need to keep going, or do we just need to stop?
Liberal
Alexandra Mendes Liberal Brossard—Saint-Lambert, QC
That comes back to Mr. Akrouche's point about the relationships, and that's where I see it would be extremely important to have that.
Mr. Leduc, I think you have something to say.
Vice-President, Government Relations and Policy, Information Technology Association of Canada
I spent 17 years in the bureaucracy, and I've led some major projects. Undoubtedly, we have some of the mechanisms in place. We have interdepartmental meetings. We have central agency meetings. We have to go through the process.
The issue, when you get to that table, is the interpretation of the policies and the procedures by everybody around the table. I'd say, “I have this project. I need to go in this direction”, and 19 out of the 20 people would give me reasons I couldn't do it, rather than how to do it. There are a couple of senior bureaucrats I've been discussing this with who are new to the federal portfolio, and they can't believe that there is this culture that just says, “You can't do it for this reason, for this reason, and for this reason.” The risk aversion is there, and it's at an all-time high.
I started to challenge the process. I said, “This can't be right. I'll never get this done in a month of Sundays. I will never get this done if I have to comply with what everybody has said.” I started to ask them for the written rule, and nine times out of 10, there was no written policy.
It comes back down to a cultural issue. We have done agile procurements in the government, and we've had success—not enough, but there's been success there. We've had multidisciplinary teams that work when there is a strategic goal.
The Syrian group was an interdepartmental, multidisciplinary team that had a set of milestones to meet. It wasn't one department that was overseeing all of it. We had an interdepartmental working group. They moved mountains in months. They met targets, and it was really impressive.
Government has done this, but the default culture is to avoid risk at all cost.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
I'm going to have to stop you there, unfortunately. You will have another opportunity though.
For a five-minute round, go ahead, Mr. McCauley.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
There's some fascinating stuff here, a lot of issues.
Mr. Murphy, you asked at the very beginning what we hope to achieve. It originally started out as a conversation around the SMEs. I've had a couple of very good conversations with our procurement ombudsman, but if you read his report, it's quite disheartening. Small business people encounter a lot of issues with the government around billing, mostly around difficulties with RFPs for procurement. That's what we've heard from a lot of our witnesses.
To go back to that subject, if tomorrow you were head of the government, how would you tackle the issue of government procurement for our SMEs? Where would you start?
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
The right answer to that is that I don't know. To give a prescriptive response and say that this is the solution—
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
Well, no, because I think it's a process. It's a process of direct engagement. As Andy was saying, it's about building a relationship. It's about the direct engagement, because the SME has to give me feedback on my bureaucracy. If that happens every three years, well, we're not going to fix it.
Conservative
President, AdaptiveOrg Inc., As an Individual
I'd say it should be quarterly, but in order to do stuff quarterly, you have to make it lighter. I don't need a 400-page report. I want a few pages. Also, I don't need a $3 million RFP. I need something under $100,000, maybe under the NAFTA limit, because that gives us more capability to manage.
It should be a very small, quick procurement with small teams and direct engagement to get feedback so they can come back to you with a really intelligent answer.
For example, “The ombudsman was right. When we looked at our process and how we did it, we have some flexibility here. We didn't think we had flexibility over here, but when we escalated it up, they said that we could bypass policy around that because the policy is not giving us the outcome we want, or we need to change the policy. We need to do something. Over here, is this legal? No, you can't get around that.”
It's this ongoing engagement and feedback. It's not, “Hey, we're going to do a program across government.” That will be a failure for sure, because there are so many variables.
Conservative
February 13th, 2018 / 12:10 p.m.
Vice-President, Government Relations and Policy, Information Technology Association of Canada
It's simplification. At the end of the day, why are we still pumping out 200-plus-page RFPs for something as simple as Wi-Fi? Why can the government not procure Wi-Fi simply by saying we need a public and a private Wi-Fi that meet these 10 requirements? Why can't it be five pages long?
It's because in order to avoid any potential risk of any kind, we mandate 78 different mandatory criteria. We mandate security up the yingyang rather than saying we need a public network.
When you go to a meeting in 90% of the buildings around this city, you don't have access to Wi-Fi. They'll bring in industry, and industry will say, “We'd like to present this. What's your Wi-Fi code?” and you'll say, “We don't have Wi-Fi.”
Why are we stuck in the Dark Ages? Simplify it. From an SME perspective, they're not going to spend three years on an RFP process, ever.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
No, and that's the feedback I've had as well when we've done seminars back in Edmonton and northern Ontario, but also here.
Ms. Tisdale, would you comment?
Managing Partner, Government and Public Sector, Ernst and Young LLP
I think some of the rules around limitations of liability are also a real impediment, so just keep it very simple.
Conservative
Managing Partner, Government and Public Sector, Ernst and Young LLP
The U.S. government is even doing things like paying for providers with a credit card. They're using reverse auctions. If they want some development done, they put it out there. You just go online and you bid for it. You get paid with a credit card. It's simple, simple and easy. There's no procurement process, just an online auction.