I hope Chris feels better, but well done, well said.
I was there at the very beginning. With respect to the planning that was done prior to the creation in November—I moved over there on November 22, 2011—I was not involved in the consultation or in the administrative service review. I was asked, because of my experience and some of the success I'd had, to move into the operational role and, because of the relationships I had with people like Chris and within the community, to work with them to basically keep the lights on in the legacy systems. That was my role operationally, but I also had a role to deal with the people who work for us within the organization.
From a planning perspective, I think Chris's point was that there wasn't a lot of consultation, and I would support that point. I think that is valid. Often when we pull these things together and make large machinery changes in government, there's some secrecy around that, so it was a bit of a culture shock for organizations to find out that their back-office folks would be moving to a new organization.
The way that was meant to be mitigated was that those people would actually stay within those organizations. One has to understand that no HR plan had been created when SSC was created. In fact, there wasn't even an HR management system when we arrived. With regard to most of the systems we leveraged, we had agreements with people like Chris and the 43 departments that were involved, such that they would continue to pay and manage the people who were still within their buildings, supporting their former data centres. It was more of an ownership issue. They continued to work in their operational environments, but they now wore a T-shirt that said, “I work for some other new entity that I don't know a lot about”. I just want to say that as well.
From a legacy perspective, Chris waxed on a lot about some of the success he had as a CIO, and he was recognized with a long-time service award for outstanding leadership in this field. I have to say that in many of the departments whose back office I became accountable for, that maturity level, if you will, with respect to understanding the assets that they had.... I don't want to leave an impression that there was a detailed service level agreement within each CIO organization, because that's completely untrue. For the more mature organizations like Transport Canada, which had moved back offices almost a decade before the creation of SSC to ITSB and GTIS, as you mentioned, there would have been a service level agreement, but the only departments that had done that were Transport Canada and—Chris can correct me if I'm wrong, since I'm going on recall—Canada School of Public Service, but they were small entities and they represented about a couple of 100-million dollars' worth of operations on a day-to-day basis.
There was no financial system when we arrived either, so we continued to use departmental financial systems. Where we were managing contracts and had taken responsibility for contracts, we were still leveraging the community to help us manage those contracts in the legacy systems as well.
I'm trying to answer your question around HR transition consultants. You need to understand that I looked at it as a leadership opportunity. I believed the enterprise approach was the right way to go, and I think all of us did. It was the right thing to do. Chris's point was that if we could do this again, would we put more time into planning it, getting a coalition of the willing, starting small, etc.
I'm sorry if that's—