You cannot capture a culture in one word. There are many different ways of looking at it. In the message I delivered, I talked about a number of different things. Again, as we discussed earlier, one of those, particularly when you're dealing with something such as a payroll project, is that in government, back office administrative projects are in general not government's favourite types of project. I think they are by definition controlled very tightly on things such as budget and timeline, but it is very difficult to establish how much it's going to cost or how long it's going to take. When you're doing a complex IT project, it's a very difficult thing to do up front. I think that's one aspect.
The other aspect is that in general when there are going to be budget savings from a project, governments have a tendency to try to take those out of departments too early. We also see—and I think Phoenix illustrates it—that sometimes when people are responsible for something, they fall back on looking at the policies and follow the policies from a form perspective rather than a substance perspective, so that they can say they did everything in the policy, but without necessarily making sure they were doing it with the intent with which the policy was requiring it to be done.
I think, then, that there are many different aspects of the culture. As I say, for me it was a reflection upon the fact that somehow Phoenix happened. Despite all the different controls and all the different procedures and policies in place, somehow Phoenix happened. I'm not trying to say that my characterization of culture is right, but I think there needs to be a discussion about how it was that Phoenix was able to happen, even though all of those controls and restrictions were in place. Do people feel that those controls are in fact too restrictive and therefore need to be able to say, “We followed the policy”, and be able to defend themselves by saying that?
I think there's a lot of thinking and discussion that needs to go on about the culture.