Thank you very much. I'll be happy to leave a copy of my notes when I leave.
First of all, thank you for inviting me to appear today in front of this parliamentary committee. I feel honoured to be here today. I am speaking as a former employee of the federal government and not Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the company that I presently work for. All the opinions, comments, and input are mine and mine alone. The input I am providing today is based on my knowledge and expertise of Shared Services Canada up to June 14, 2015, the date of my retirement from the federal civil service.
I spent 37 years working in the federal government, all in the information management/information technology domains. I worked at the Department of National Defence from 1978 to 1988, and I started at the lowest possible level that you could start at in IT. Then I was at Transport Canada from 1988 to 2015, the last 15 years as chief information officer. I was the longest-serving CIO in this position.
To start, I am extremely proud of the time I spent working in the federal government, and in particular as the CIO of Transport Canada. We accomplished much. My employees were very skilled, passionate, and committed to service excellence in supporting departmental program delivery. They worked under considerable resource constraints and pressure to deliver the required services and to meet the performance levels required. TC's IM/IT had the lowest employee attrition rate of all Government of Canada IM/IT organizations. I am most proud of this. We valued our employees and they valued working at TC. They were kept extremely busy and were given the authority and accountability to get the job done. Under my leadership as CIO, TC was considered a best practice department in IM/IT strategic planning, operational excellence and efficiency, thin client desktop, server virtualization, operation automation, information technology service management, and information management, particularly electronic document management.
TC received the highest Treasury Board Secretariat management accountability framework ratings in IT management every year and was the only department to receive the highest MAF rating possible in IM. My management team and I spent considerable time sharing our best practices and lessons learned with other government departments. TC IM/IT received numerous departmental and Government of Canada awards during this period. TC IM/IT also leveraged our private sector partners, where it made sense, to help us transform and deliver the most efficient, cost-effective and high-value IM/IT services possible. We could not have achieved our goals, over my years as CIO, without private sector support and expertise. I am profoundly thankful to all my colleagues, internal and external, and my IM/IT partners for all the support provided to me and the department. I feel honoured to have worked with these people and very honoured to have accomplished what we were able to.
I also want to thank SSC employees and previously PWGSC employees who have supported the sharing of services. I'll get into details of the sharing of services before the actual Shared Services Canada was created. I know that many of these employees worked extremely hard to deliver the best possible services and were and are committed to service excellence. For that I am eternally grateful.
I'm going to take you back a little bit to the mid-1990s when TC went under massive transformation with the privatization of air traffic control to Nav Canada; Canadian Coast Guard transfer to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans; and the privatization of national airports, harbours, and ports.
This transformation resulted in TC's employee base shrinking from over 30,000 employees to 5,300 employees over a five-year period. These changes resulted in Transport Canada having an over-provisioned IT infrastructure. A $20-million data centre at Macdonald-Cartier International Airport in Ottawa had just been built before the devolution transformation direction was announced. This data centre and the associated IM/IT infrastructure, computers, network and data storage, and human resources were now being utilized at less than 25% capacity. The solution to this issue was to transfer the TC data centre, all associated hardware and software, all IM/IT infrastructure contracts, and 30 TC IT employees to Public Works' government telecommunications and informatics services, or GTIS as it was known, or as it was commonly referred to, baby shared services.
The end result was that TC was able to save costs and avoid $2 million annually from a $10-million spend. It had been costing us $10 million, and we were able to have the service delivered by Public Works for $8 million.
Public Works was also able to leverage the excess data centre space, associated IT infrastructure, and the transferred employees for other government departments, resulting in over tens of millions of dollars in cost avoidance for the Government of Canada. Service level standards were established, and performance measurement processes were put in place. It also should be noted that the Macdonald-Cartier data centre, built by Transport and transferred to Public Works, is one of the flagship data centres for Shared Services Canada today.
Additionally, a few years later, Transport Canada transitioned our wide area network service to PWGSC GTIS, leveraging the shared services already being delivered, and bought the WAN service back on a fee-for-service basis, based on volumetrics and performance. Again, significant savings were achieved for TC, and there was significant cost avoidance for the Government of Canada.
Tactical and strategical government committees were established, and all the associated required management operational processes. Both those shared services initiatives were a resounding success and should have been a best practice for the future Government of Canada shared services direction.
I will start by saying that I firmly believe in the shared services concept when done properly and where it makes sense. TC and Public Works proved that it does work.
In my opinion, when SSC was formally announced, line departmental CIOs were generally not aware, and minimal consultation had occurred on any planning for the implementation model. It is my belief that planning for SSC was done at such a high level that operational issues associated with the implementation were not completely understood. The implications and complexities were vastly underestimated, and impact on line departments was severely underestimated. When SSC was formally announced with no new money allocated to support implication, and in fact, significant resource reductions identified, it was clear to me at the time that SSC had an extremely minimal chance to succeed, right from the start.
My experience and knowledge told me that significant—in the billions—investment had to be done to meet SSC's and the Government of Canada's identified objectives. In addition to this, I was extremely concerned about the magnitude of transformation being proposed and the lack of strategic planning to support this transformation. Line department CIOs already had their hands full delivering existing and transformative services to support evolving departmental program delivery. The analogy of a change in car engine at 100 kilometres an hour could be used here.
It is my feeling that if departmental CIOs had been fully consulted, better informed decisions could have been made resulting in a modified shared services implementation that could have been actually implementable over a prescribed time period with the proper investment. In addition, any existing SSC business cases at the time for the most part did not include departmental transformation costs. One example is the email transition initiative. The business case did not include any departmental costs for application changes, training, or implementation. These departmental costs are significant and should have been included so an informed decision could have been made on the direction and implementation that was best for the Government of Canada.
Shortly after SSC was announced, a letter was sent to each line department deputy minister providing additional information on the SSC initiative and saying that existing IT services and the required associated service levels would continue to be delivered by SSC. This was shocking for all line departmental IT employees and CIOs, as SSC management had little idea of the actual services being delivered, and had minimal idea of the required and established service levels. SSC also made it clear shortly thereafter that they would not establish service level reporting.
Common belief was that SSC did not want to create service level standards, as there was significant concern that the service levels could not be maintained. This was very difficult for many departmental CIOs to accept, as many departments had implemented IT service level standards to meet the program requirements of their respective departments. TC was able to minimize the impact of this and maintain its required service levels as the TC employees transferred—more than 35 of them—to SSC remained on TC premises and were dedicated to TC.
TC had a strong operations management, which included accountability for reporting on SSC services levels. We established a position at the senior level to actually monitor and manage the SSC services to Transport Canada. TC would not allow any changes on SSC employee relocations until a transition plan was developed. This was just beginning to occur when I retired in June 2105.
SSC also made it very clear that its focus and priorities would be on the transformation agenda and not supporting sustaining existing services and support. This direction had resulted in critical hardware/software maintenance agreements not being renewed, data centre support systems not being maintained, critical hardware becoming end-of-life and beyond, software becoming obsolete, and skilled support resources not being replaced, both employees and contractors. This in turn resulted in many major server outages and SSC losing even more credibility.
In fact, one major outage—some critical systems down for days, many others down for 24 hours—at the Macdonald-Cartier data centre, which TC had built, was due to not having 24-hour/7-day power maintenance contracts. This is unheard of when it comes to critical data centre services. This maintenance contract was for the daytime only and was provided by a Toronto-based company, five hours away. When the outage occurred, SSC had no idea, or very little, of what systems ran in that data centre, what departments were impacted, and how to do the proper problem resolution and associated escalations to minimize impact.
Many more outages have occurred and continue to occur. Recent press and internal Government of Canada documents validate the severity of the issue. This is of critical importance to all Government of Canada CIOs, as program delivery is being directly and significantly affected.
After SSC was announced, I and members of my management team attempted to insert ourselves into as many SSC governance committees as possible, to both support and attempt to influence direction. It quickly became apparent to me that for the most part, SSC on the transition side didn't want to hear any input, and that the direction had already been set by senior SSC management and was not open to change. This was relayed over and over to me as I attempted to provide input, challenge directions, and offer recommendations. I offered to have TC take on the leadership for the ITSM initiative under SSC's authority, a critical piece of work for SSC success, but the offer was declined. Little progress has been made on this file.
I specifically remember one planning meeting that really stands out in my mind, even though it happened three years ago. I was told that TC computer applications did not meet SSC standards, and therefore would not be moved to the SSC production centre in Buckingham, as had been planned. This was the first time I had ever heard of these SSC standards. I asked what consultations had been done and why these were not Government of Canada standards. I did not get an answer. I escalated up the line in SSC and still did not get an adequate response. I could go on, but you get my point. I am sure that for some of the most senior SSC executives, I was considered a pain in the backside.
I firmly believe that when consultation did occur, it was done for SSC to tick a box rather than to hear what departments wanted to say. I also heard the same from many industry experts. At the most senior levels, SSC seemed to know all the answers before the questions were even asked or input even provided. Government of Canada partners felt marginalized and even under attack from SSC, as the rules of engagement and procurement continually changed.
It became apparent to me that line departments were considered as users and not partners, even though SSC continually indicated the opposite. To be partners, both sides must be included in the planning and decision-making process. This was simply not the case in the vast majority of instances on the transformation side.
Another one of the issues I had with SSC was that I was never able to obtain an integrated strategic plan covering off all the transformation areas. The ETI, or email transformation initiative, and network and data centre consolidations are all interrelated and impact each other. Add in the departmental implications and you have a strategic plan to begin to move forward. Without one, it is impossible to do the detailed planning required for successful implementations. In my view, this has never been done properly. I asked continually to see this plan and the associated HR plan for SSC employees. I do not believe one existed then.
After SSC was created, procurement resources were transferred from the then PWGSC to SSC, and SSC was given the authority to do their own procurement. This, in my view, was a grave mistake. It has resulted in significant issues with procurement, including issues with process, security exemption clauses, fairness, transparency, and perceived favouritism. It is my opinion that the Government of Canada should have one procurement centre of excellence, and it should reside in PSPC...what is it called now?
