I think there are two things. When we were facing this problem in British Columbia, what we recognized very quickly was that we didn't have the talent in-house and that it would take too long to grow it, so we put in place something almost like a SWAT team, a very small, smart, hand-picked group of the best people we could find from the private sector. It was not a firm. We didn't go out and contract with a firm. We hand-picked the individuals, and we brought them in-house, and we had them basically be... It was just 12 people, not huge, for the entire province.
We hand-picked them. We had solution architects, we had expert legal, we had HR, we had labour, we had smart financial minds, and we had people who had deep experience in terms of putting together complex deals and managing relationships. That secretariat served out to government, and we had the focus of....
I would suggest creating a centralized, funded capability. The role of that capability would be twofold. One is to model how one does these deals, so they would go out and they'd do the first 12 or 15 or 20, or whatever it is, pulling the public sector in behind them.
You would also create a program whereby you would be training and institutionalizing how one does this, but that's going to take, I would say, three to five-plus years. I think that's the first piece you need to do. You need to bring it in and create it, very consciously and carefully.
Part of the job is to support these projects right across government; the other part of the job is to build the capability in-house. There are two parts.
I think the other piece in parallel that you would need to do is look at the procurement officer of the future. Treasury Board started this piece of work and then stopped it. I don't understand why they never went forward with it. What they wanted to do was look at the skills required for modernized procurement. What are the capabilities? What are the career paths? Where do we find these people, and how do we develop these people? How do we pay these people? It was basically to create an HR framework for the development, maintenance, retention, and future-state function for procurement.
I think you need to do both, but if you just do the first one, you're going to be waiting too long, so I would create your SWAT team, and in parallel with that, I would create your procurement function of the future, and then start to really build it.
It will take a generational change. Don't be afraid to bring people from the outside in who have done it before to seed that effort and get it started. Over time they'll move out and you'll have created a capability, but you need it kick-started.
You need some people who have no territorial turf to defend. Their whole job is to be the change agents that you need to break through the doors that they don't even know are there. You need to create that capacity, and it's very difficult to do it in-house because the inertia is just overwhelming.