Government Operations Committee on May 19th, 2016

[Chris Molinski]

Thank you very much for the question.

Just as Kevin said, departments have different maturity levels. I'm speaking about Transport Canada. I'm not speaking on behalf of my colleagues in other departments, just to clarify.

I think really what Shared Services needs to do is take a step back. There's just too much on the platter to do what it is trying to do, and I think it's an almost impossible challenge to do that, based on how government is evolving.

What we need to do, as I indicated, is to pick where there's one transformative area that makes the most sense, that's going to perhaps cost the least and could show some success. Right now there's a serious credibility issue in line departments with their shared services. People believe in the concept, but the results are not generally there everywhere.

Don't get me wrong. People have worked extremely hard, and there have been some successes, security being a major one. I couldn't agree more with Kevin on that.

I think it needs to retool, do an analysis, set the expectation of what can be done, when it can be done, and what investments are required and then move forward with that.

The first thing, obviously, is to fix all existing production problems that are in place today. If you don't fix those today, we're going to continue to have more outages that are going to cause more issues moving forward. You don't want to spend a whole bunch of money if you're going to migrate off those in the future, so it's a balance, but you still have to make sure the right services are being delivered.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

One of the points you made was about not reinventing the wheel. If you have something that's working, you don't necessarily need to replace it.

One of the changes that previous witnesses from Shared Services Canada were very keen on was replacing traditional phone lines with VoIP. I think they had a number of arguments in favour of doing that. I wonder if you agree that's the way to go, or if you think it was maybe a mistake to push so hard in that direction.

[Chris Molinski]

If I can talk about my new job, the difference is that when I walked into Hewlett Packard Enterprise I could click on a meeting, which would set up a video conference, would set up a voice call, or would set up a teleconference with one click through Outlook, through Skype for business.

There are technologies that are out there. Voice over IP is perhaps a little dated now, but I agree those are the kinds of things where government can really leverage, because they're technology things that don't affect systems directly day to day where these things can provide immense value.

From personal experience, I was shocked just how well this worked and it was all delivered in the cloud. Just to throw that out there, it wasn't even delivered internally by the HP company themselves.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

That's very interesting.

It seems that part of the Shared Services concept, which I think you basically support, is really centralizing things to avoid redundancy between departments. I wonder if at some point there's a risk of concentrating too much of the Government of Canada's IT capacity in too few centres? Does that make us more vulnerable to an attack or a natural disaster or some other type of outage?

[Chris Molinski]

That's a good question. It's all a balancing act.

I think certain things lend themselves to shared services a lot more than others. For example, if you look at basic desk-top services, we talk about email, office automation, business analytics, and we talk about electronic document management; those can all be done. I firmly believe no matter what department you work in, you should have the same services wherever you go unless there's a requirement for something different. There are certain things you can do.

Throwing all the eggs in a basket, technology does exist where you can build disaster recovery through automation. The tools are there so that you can certainly minimize any risk by doing consolidation. I don't like the word “centralization”; I tend to do consolidation where it makes sense.

The interesting thing, if I may, is every department went through what Shared Services is going through. When I started at Transport in 1980, everybody had their own IT. I think there were seven different email systems at the time and different networks and the whole thing, and we went to what we called the “rules of one” where we funded it, established it, understood the business, and rolled it out. At the end of the journey, we had one email system, one wide area network system, and one financial system where we used to have multiple before.

We lived all that and we invested, so we knew. Then when we went to Public Works as part of the data centre consolidation when we transferred the facility over in the wide area network, we had background in that. I firmly believe that if SSC at the senior levels would have listened to some of that.... And I know people use secrecy and they do these other things, whatever it may be, and as a line department CIO that was a big aggravation for me, because we had lived a lot of these issues already and we were continuing to live them again.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

You mentioned procurement and room for improvement in that area. I'd also like to tap into the fact that you're currently working in the private IT sector. I wonder if you see procurement with the Government of Canada for IT as being appropriately focused on the lowest cost or do you think it also makes sense to use that huge amount of procurement to try to develop the IT sector in our country.

[Chris Molinski]

It's an excellent question. From within, government procurement never really worked properly and now that I'm in the private sector, it doesn't work at all, depending on your perspective.

The issue is government procurement is driven towards low cost and IT is not low cost in all cases. It's got to be best value. Right now IT procurement is fragmented between line departments that buy some of their stuff through Public Works because it's in this domain, through SSC in this domain, and a lot of departments don't even know how it works themselves and you look at the private sector on top of that, trying to do business with them, because the private sector has a lot to offer.

As I said in my opening statement, I leveraged those. I could not have accomplished what I did without the private sector helping Transport Canada deliver what we did. We didn't have the people. We had to buy those services and we bought them cost effectively through open, fair procurement methodologies.

Right now, I think government procurement is a mess, and I'm seeing it from the outside and it needs to be fixed. I think one of these things is by creating a centre of excellence where you could have it identified and work with government departments and industry to try to position this to look forward, and it's been tried before. But we have to get away from the low cost. We need the best value. Otherwise, things get into low cost and they nickel and dime and nickel and dime and before you know it, you're paying three times what you would have paid for it in the first place.

Some will argue the ETI is a perfect example of that. I won't comment on that. I wasn't involved in the procurement, so I'll leave it at that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

I think we'll cut it off there, but we should have at least another three-minute round.

Monsieur Drouin, please.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Radford, in your long speech, you mentioned keeping the lights on. I'm wondering, when you came in, what sort of performance management metric was in place to.... I know Mr. Molinski mentioned that there are various levels of maturity within different departments. How did that impact the performance measurement metric in place?

[Kevin Radford]

Thanks for the question.

From a “keep the lights on” perspective, we immediately focused on the 1,572—I believe that was the number at the time—mission critical systems that had been identified by people like Chris and the CIO community and the programs they supported. Every week we created an operations committee. In Chris's opening remarks, he said he had a service management organization that was tracking how his systems were operating, etc. Multiply that by 43, and in some cases, multiple service management organizations. In some cases, the departments kept them, and in some cases, the department passed them to us. We had to coordinate those in a holistic way without universal tools. For, I think, some 73 different systems, etc., we were tracking what was actually going on in the systems at risk. From a performance metrics perspective, we went right to basics: What are the incidents that are occurring? Let's track those. Let's report on those, and let's track how long it's taking us to respond and how long it's taking us to repair. Let's meet every week and discuss that. Incident management under the ITIL, information technology infrastructure library, is how this is met. It's an international library of terms that everyone understands, but in the IT sector, we focus on incident management and doing that through a holistic process.

The second piece was to move into problem managing, looking at where we were seeing trends and in what systems. We kept metrics on those.

The third of course was the change management area. It's just like if you own a condominium here in Ottawa, you normally get a little posting that says “Hey, we're coming in three months, or during this weekend we're going to be bringing systems down and then we're going to be up. Let's plan together with regard to how this is going to impact our program.” From an operations “keep the lights on” performance perspective, that was how it was managed. It was managed weekly under tight governance. Initially our chief operating officer at the time, Grant Westcott, oversaw that process, and then I took it over. I can't remember exactly when, but that was how we managed it. From time to time, it was an open forum. We would be privileged by having someone from the CIO community in observing on that as well.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

You were talking about procurement. Did procurement ever impede your ability to slow down process, in terms of replacing...or performing your job?

[Kevin Radford]

I wouldn't put it as procurement impeding us. I could tell at P3, looking at salary. That was really easy to predict. Looking at the systems we supported and the capital program that would be necessary to do replacements, I could predict with some accuracy after year one, which was kind of a learning year for all of us, to within a couple of percentage points how much we would need to spend to sustain the legacy systems. What I would say impeded us was investments. In the first year, we were under the economic action plan, and like all departments, we were asked to give up basically 10% of our overall funding envelope. For us that represented $150 million. I believe the number now is about $209 million that's been removed.

The Auditor General said we needed to invest in order to uplift. We were under a savings plan, if you will, to invest from within, and eventually that made it very difficult for us to maintain procurement vehicles to keep various systems up and running. Our focus was on mission critical, and part of the overall philosophy from a strategy perspective was that we almost needed to invest to save. I wasn't responsible for that, but I was certainly involved and consulted regarding some of the service design and where it was going. In this past budget, I saw that significant numbers of dollars were put into uplifting those—I can't think of a word other than legacy—existing systems that were supporting mission critical programs for Canadians and for the government.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

That's great. Thanks.

Mr. Molinski, on the procurement theme again, the previous witnesses mentioned that SSC is keeping procurement because we have to have the expertise. IT procurement is very complex, and you say we have to create a centre of excellence for procurement. Do you believe that Shared Services Canada should keep procurement? I know you've already said you wanted to move it out, but why would you say that?

[Chris Molinski]

I believe you could say that, from an efficiency perspective and best practices perspective, you can work collectively together. If you have bursts of work that you need to get done, you can reassign because you have a specialized organization that can do that. Whether you're procuring a tank or you're procuring an IT system, it should be the fundamental.... The content may be different, but the process should be fundamentally the same.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

That's great.

How much time to I have?

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

You have one minute. That's for both the question and the answer.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

I want to build more on procurement. How do you feel, now that you're in the private sector? Usually if there was a procurement challenge, when IT procurement was at PWGSC, you would be able to complain at PWGSC or at least get a fair hearing at PWGSC. Do you feel that you get that same chance at SSC?

[Chris Molinski]

I really haven't had that issue to deal with in the private sector. I think the people are always open at Transport Canada. I have met with SSC procurement people in my new role, and they were very open and very understanding in explaining to us the new systems, because we weren't told. Sometimes things would change. For example, HP has standing agreements with departments. It was divided in two; some went over to SSC and some stayed in departments.

We weren't aware of that until we met with the SSC procurement and were told. They said communication had been sent out. It may have just been an anomaly, but the question is very fragmented. I've always found that the people are open. They're working very hard to do the right thing. These people are committed to deliver the right services. Sometimes it's just the amount and the competency of the people they have, because sometimes it's hard to replace people who have the required skill sets. That's when, if you have a centre of excellence, you can build that, transform it, and make sure you have the people coming up who can deliver those services.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

We go now to five-minute rounds. We should have time for at least three intervenors.

Mr. McCauley, you have five minutes, please.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Mr. Molinski, thanks for your passion on this. I'm glad you speak very fast, because we wouldn't have gotten through your report otherwise.

[Chris Molinski]

I've been accused of that my whole career.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

You were talking about email; one of the pillars was the unified email. I think you said to get rid of that. Could you expand on that?

[Chris Molinski]

I'm saying get rid of it from a contractual perspective. I'm only referring to the period up to when I left and I retired from government. But if a project is that delayed, why and what are the chances? If it's salvageable, obviously you want to salvage it, if you've already invested money in it. But when do you stop sending good money after bad? I don't know. It's just something I would do, or look at, because as I say, I think there's lower-hanging fruit that could be picked, unless this could be implemented and back on track soon.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Driving the cost or driving the inability to get it done.... As an outsider, it seems very simple to switch over.

[Chris Molinski]

Again I'm speaking as a retired civil servant. I think it had to do with the procurement and low cost, and perhaps not the best value.