Evidence of meeting #16 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 nicholl.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Yes.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
When you did your service agreement, how did you do it with different clusters? What did you do? Was it the type of service or the complexity of health or complexity of community and social services? What did you do?
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
They'll all have very different wants and needs. Even within a ministry, as you know, there are different wants and needs.
If you look at Service Ontario, they run 24-7, and they expect their services to be up. If you go online to renew your driver's licence, you want it to be there at 8 o'clock at night or 4 o'clock in the morning. We would have a very different service level agreement with Service Ontario for driver's licence renewal than, let's say, what we would have for our payroll run. Our payroll run happens once every two weeks. It's hectic for a shorter period of time. Once it's done, it's done. Then they're into maintenance until the next payroll run.
It very much would come down to a business requirement, what is required per application.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
How would you conduct your needs analysis? Sometimes you're given a system, and you do not do your needs analysis and you deliver something that's not utilized properly. How did you do your needs analysis within those arenas?
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
The shared services organization would always work in concert with a cluster—
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
—so you would never have a separation. When we're doing an enhancement or doing an upgrade or doing a brand new system, the team consists of both infrastructure as well as cluster. There should never—I shouldn't say never, there always will be—be a gap between what infrastructure is providing to applications and what applications are providing to clients.
Liberal
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
We're a great price.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
No. Is it based on usage? I understand there was a glitch in one of the community and social services systems. When a glitch occurs, and there is price that the politician pays, nobody else pays, how do you—
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
We paid, too, trust me.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
I'm sure you did.
What do you charge, and how is your cost...? I mean, we're looking at moving forward, and that's a good model, but we don't know whether it will move that way. How do you do that? What sort of service agreement do you have with them?
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
What we do is to have a price based on whatever infrastructure is required to run the application. If there's an application that needs this quantity of server, this quantity of data storage, and this amount of network connectivity, there's a finite math you go through to come up with what that costs on an annual basis. That's what the ministry as a customer will pay for that service.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
I'm afraid we don't have time for the last question.
Mr. Nicholl, thank you so much for being here.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
You're very welcome.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Your testimony has been very helpful. You're excused.
Colleagues, we'll suspend literally for no more than two minutes. We'll get back as a committee. I have a brief point of committee business I'd like to deal with before we adjourn.
[Proceedings continue in camera]