Evidence of meeting #15 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was procurement.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:20 p.m.
As an Individual
Okay.
I'm just trying to answer your question.
I've been with the Clerk of the Privy Council and I've heard him say we support Shared Services Canada and that enterprise approach. So people are saying they do. What's important is that central agencies provide the support to bring the community together so that we can have demonstrable action: this is our plan for 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19. As Chris said, that may need to be reworked, but there has to be a plan with results that we're tracking as we move forward.
The one small example—and I know we don't have a lot of time—is that we did move the CRA data centre, one of the largest production facilities, in the second year of our operation. Now it was a plan; it was well developed and it also included all the disaster recovery for Canada Border Services Agency. The talent is there and we accomplished it. I was responsible for that program and it went flawlessly.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Colleagues, I know that now is the planned time for adjournment.
Mr. Whalen has just informed me that the next hour was supposed to be on the study plan for the Canada Post examination.
This was nothing further for you two gentlemen, but the government has not had enough time to examine the study plan that was set out and an hour may be a little bit more than is needed. If you wish, and I'm looking for the consensus from this committee, we can adjourn now and go into that study plan from Canada Post, which we had put aside about an hour for, or if the committee wishes, we could extend the invitation to these two gentlemen to stay for an extra 10 or 15 minutes.
It's up to you. The government, I think, desires to have the witnesses stay.
Mr. Masse, Mr. Blaney, Mr. McCauley, Mr. Weir.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
Steven Blaney Conservative Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC
If the government has more questions we can certainly support it, but on our side we're fine now.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
All right.
We will stay for an extra 15 minutes, until 4:45.
Mr. Ayoub is finished.
Mr. Blaney, the next question is yours.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
Steven Blaney Conservative Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC
As I have indicated, if the government has some questions, that's fine, but on our side we're fine.
4:25 p.m.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
I would similarly suggest that it would be fine if Mr. Radford wanted to use any or all of my three minutes to continue answering Mr. Ayoub's question.
4:25 p.m.
As an Individual
Sure.
I think the question was around a senior level of support. Part of what Chris is talking about is an integrated planning regime among communities. I was going to get to the issue of trust. The way SSC was formed, it was difficult for us from a trust perspective. You can imagine: departments were losing money, losing people, losing resources, almost losing ownership of their operational elements. It became somewhat confrontational.
From a speed perspective, if you want to move faster because you believe this enterprise approach is the right way of doing business, which we all believe it is, somehow from a community perspective we need to build that trust. It can't be just the sole responsibility of those at Shared Services Canada. It has to be a very prioritized, wilful movement towards more enterprise approaches to systems.
Look at what Ontario is doing, or at what Northern Ireland is doing. It took them quite a bit of time to move forward, but the approach was slower and more paced. Clear results and outcomes were identified prior to making movement. I would just suggest a focus on rebuilding that trust and having demonstrable action around speed. In the end, I think that will bring the cost savings we are looking for as an organization.
The savings component is an issue of trust. We definitely leveraged the power of economies of scale to negotiate unprecedented rates, and competition to get a lowering of the price for very good equipment, to maximum advantage. The problem is that we assumed, for instance, that in some of the services, such as cellular telephony, the quantity would remain constant. We assumed that on what we inherited, let's say 20,000 smartphones, the queue would stay the same, the price would come down, we'd be able to leverage that service, get those savings, and invest that money in voice over IP or whatever investment initiatives. When the quantity went up to 80,000, it made it somewhat difficult and redundant, no matter how much better the price of the contract was.
I guess I remain very hopeful, but hope is not a strategy. I think what we need is a reset. I was here on Tuesday when deputy minister Ron Parker was here. He spoke to some of his plans and his intention to come back with a more fulsome strategy. I echo Chris's comments that the community should be brought into that strategy early, and it should be presented as an integrated approach and plan to uplift IT enablement across Canada.
This is a large nation and a wonderful nation. I served in the Canadian Forces for 20 years. I'm a big believer in the public service. I guess I would just say that we're a large country but we're small enough as an organization that we can work together and make this happen. I believe we have the leadership in place to do that, and the will; we just need the plan. We need it actioned and we need to follow it. We need to be somewhat flexible and agile with that plan when things come up, e.g., fires in Fort McMurray or cyber-attacks, but the most important thing is to re-establish that trust.
4:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much.
Madam Shanahan, I have you next on my list.
4:30 p.m.
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
In fact, I'm fine.
Thank you very much for your testimony today, but I think Mr. Whalen has some questions.
4:30 p.m.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
Maybe I'm the last person with questions for you guys. I'm glad I extended it for a few minutes for my own sake.
4:30 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
4:30 p.m.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
Your recommendations were very interesting. I tried to take notes on some of them. I envisioned the teams that are there to support the existing systems.
Of course, in each department those existing systems are continually evolving to meet the new standards, criteria, and technologies that people are expecting to have. Then a whole team will also be in place for the new mode of operation and some type of communication between them to ensure that new systems as they come on board are going to meet the new standards and criteria that one envisions for the harmonized, consolidated services being provided.
Of course, as individual departments then transport over, we need a plan to transition those employees who had been operating on the legacy systems, assisting with their maintenance and also the day-to-day customer service, to then transition to the new systems. It's very complicated. There are a lot of moving parts here.
Layered over this is the notion that we want to be able to measure success. Our government is interested in evidence-based policy. We want to make sure that services are being delivered at a high quality, at a good value, and at a good cost.
Mr. Radford and Mr. Molinski, what types of service level and financial metrics would you guys envision we could use to measure success going forward? If we do find ourselves in this position in five years, we can be speaking about numbers, data, and results in a more qualitative way rather than about performance, which unfortunately doesn't necessarily lead to the best decision-making.
4:30 p.m.
As an Individual
You can do some performance indicators, for example, cost of data centres and things along those lines, which are measurable based on the dollars. We need to drive down transactional costs, for example, volume on a wide area network. You drive the cost down and you measure per unit of cost. Over the years the number of units may go up because people are doing more, but the overall cost has gone down per unit. Those are the kinds of metrics that you need to establish up front: what does it cost the Government of Canada to delay; what kind of investment do we need to get to tomorrow; and what do we expect we'll be paying in the future?
As Kevin indicated, hardware costs are going down continuously already; cell costs are going down. Government has done a wonderful job of negotiating enterprise agreements for some of these things, for software as well. Lots of good work has been done doing that.
The message is, it's not always about cost. Cost tends to drive people down to the lowest common denominator. Sometimes you need to pay to get a value-added service for what you're delivering. On infrastructure, for example, can you drive down the cost because you need to maintain what systems need to do? Sometimes systems aren't the cheapest because they deliver things that you have to invest in to make that happen. There's always that trade-off.
The issue is you develop your performance indicators up front, and you measure against them. It's not just low cost, because overall, when you measure it from an end perspective, it needs to be best value. Inherently, from a business case perspective, you look at 45 departments delivering their individual things or one corporate enterprise that's bringing all that together. Inherently, the one corporate enterprise makes perfect sense, but you need to put the right governance around it, and there are indicators of how you manage that and measure that to move it forward.
4:30 p.m.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
Mr. Radford, under your tenure, how far along the road did the department get in developing some of these metrics that we could use?
4:35 p.m.
As an Individual
How far along did we get under my tenure? We focused on incident management and supporting problem management in that space.
If I could get away from the traditional cost per terabyte, etc., and a pricing strategy—and I'm going to leverage where I am now, and as the committee knows, I look after all federal infrastructure across the country—I think there is an opportunity here to look at the workspace, and technology, and the environment, and greening, and at some of the outcomes we want around alternative working arrangements, and mobility, and people being able to work from any place, anytime, anywhere. Chris mentioned some of the success they had with this at Transport Canada.
I would try to measure success against those types of parameters. How much workspace is available that's collaborative, that allows any public servant or official to go into a space, work collaboratively, hook up a VPN into a Wi-Fi system, be available in the cloud, and be operational, whether they're a police officer or an inspector who is in the middle of a farmer's field and they need to pass information back and forth; I would really encourage measuring the go-forward position for those kinds of things.
Another example could be alternative working arrangements and teleworking. Right now when we build workspace for individuals in the public service, we look at one-to-one ratios. Many of you who visit our departments know that as you walk down the hallways, there are lots of empty spaces and under-utilized space, because that's just the way we do it today. Imagine more of a place where we can reduce GHG and the 40% of GHG associated with infrastructure simply by reducing the footprint, while also allowing that mobility and flexibility so that someone who is coming from Kanata into the downtown core and hits a traffic jam can pull off and move to the Carling campus and work from there and be mobile and free. I think those are the kinds of things.
The traditional IT way of doing it is around a service catalogue, around clear service levels, around how many outages you have. That's another way of doing it. I believe Shared Services Canada has made quite a significant movement in that space, but I'm not sure about the maturity level now. I've been out of there for about nine months.
4:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Gentlemen, on behalf of the committee, I want to thank you so much for your presentations. As I mentioned, your candour at the outset was very much appreciated by this committee, and I think it's going to help our committee very much in our ongoing study of Shared Services, and whether or not they will be able to meet their objectives as set out by this government.
You are excused.
We will suspend for about two or three minutes and come back to do committee business.
[Proceedings continue in camera]
