Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Thank you all for coming and offering your thoughts.
It's hard to disagree with what's being said at the general level, and I don't. It's better to be more flexible. Obviously, you want to tap the best talent that's out there in order to be able to move projects forward, and you want to be outcome-focused because you want to ensure when you have a contract that you're actually getting to where you want to be. That sounds like a really obvious statement, but apparently it's not as obvious as one might like.
There are some questions that come up for me. I think part of the way that you end up with the culture that has developed, one that is overly rigid and can get in the way of achieving the outcomes that we want, is to try to be able to compare apples to apples. Also, in government they are not spending their own money, as a private company does, which, if it fails—well, that's the market. You close up shop and move on. Maybe you start up something else, and maybe you don't.
Here we're accountable to other people for the money that's spent, so we need to be able to make the case. If you can't make the case retroactively or if there's a lot of commercially protected information that you can't disclose to people, then what you can do up front in the procurement process is try to be very clear about what it is that you're asking companies to deliver so you have an apples-to-apples comparison.
In order to avoid some of the pitfalls of overly comfortable relationships between particular governments and particular contractors and to not have that become an open-ended revenue stream for a private company, how do you combat that in the relational model? To me, transparency seems like your best bet in order to be able to have a long-term, dynamic, changing relationship in terms of what government is expecting to get out of the contractors it's working with.
I wonder to what extent an adequate level of transparency, in order to have the public be able to evaluate value for money, is going to be resisted by the very people who we would want to recruit under that model, and I wonder if any of you would like to speak to that aspect of the problem.