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.
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
In their entirety? I ask because I understand that there were amounts removed.
As an Individual
For a CIO branch, if you consider their budget in any department as 100%, about 40% of that was transferred to us to reflect the infrastructure component of what they had. But, yes, in 2011-12, there was a process in government called the strategic and operating review, and as part of that, in our first months, we were asked to identify potential savings of 10%. These were to be taken over three years.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much.
Unfortunately, I'll have to interrupt. I'm sure that this line of questioning will continue.
We will now go to Mr. Blaney for seven minutes, please.
Conservative
Steven Blaney Conservative Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I would like to thank the witnesses who are appearing here today, especially since they are here of their own accord. I have the greatest respect for public servants, in particular those who had major responsibilities.
Ms. Forand, it is fascinating listening to you. You are describing the start of this adventure to us.
My question is very open. I will let you continue talking about implementation and the lessons learned. If any of my colleagues would like to add something, please go ahead.
As an Individual
Thank you very much.
It is true that we are passionate about this. We spent four years together setting it all up. That said, I will return to the third priority, the implementation of a transformation plan.
First, we had to determine the state of what we had inherited. There was no inventory as such in the departments, unfortunately.
I accept what you said about lessons learned. The first one that occurred to me over time, and which I have often thought about since then, is as follows. In a similar context in the private sector, if there had been an amalgamation as is the case with mergers or acquisitions, the first thing that would have been done before things were set up would have been a due diligence exercise, with solid teams of highly qualified people. This exercise would not have been assigned to just anyone.
The company tasked with this exercise would have brought in its best people. It might even have set up shifts so that work was done around the clock, for a month or two, or however long it took. We did not have that advantage and over time we saw the resulting difficulties. Service standards and procedures were not written down anywhere. Our employees' point of view was very valuable and that is all we had. There was nothing at all on paper.
We wanted to re-create the way things were done in the private sector, but we could not always do that. For me, that was the first lesson learned.
Benoît Long As an Individual
If I may, Mr. Chair, I would like to add something to what Ms. Forand just said.
As she stated, I worked for Privy Council before the organization was created. The data available to us was very important. If we had had access to that data through the departments, that would have given us an advantage and helped us develop somewhat more detailed plans. We had permission to look at global data from all departments, but it was highly variable. The data from some departments was very good data, but not so good from others.
Looking back, it is hard to understand why that was the case. At the time, it was spread out everywhere and there were different approaches, different versions of data and different definitions of what IT was. As a result, we could not consolidate the data at the time, aggregate it, and develop much more detailed plans than those that Shared Services Canada had inherited. I'm talking about high-level plans and business cases. The consolidation and standardization approach had been used elsewhere, in the private and public sector alike.
At the time, searching for data was also important. As Ms. Forand indicated—Mr. Nicholl will be able to speak to this since they gathered data—, it took a number of months to do this even though the Government of Canada is not like a private corporation, whose data is less accessible. In any case, it was not accessible at the time. So we expected that it would take a number of months and we did not have much time.
The objective was to develop high-level business plans and implementation plans. Then, once the delivery team was in place—I moved with the team at that time—, more detailed plans would be created. We had to look for all the data, and we searched for nearly a year. We counted every server and every data centre.
To give you an idea, when I was at Privy Council, we thought there might be about 200 data centres in government. We based this number on interviews with chief information officers, officials from each department, and DM and ADM committees. We thought there might be 200 or so, but after a year we had counted 495, and I am still discovering others today.
Conservative
Steven Blaney Conservative Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC
When did you complete your due diligence with regard to creating the organization, which was in 2011? We know what we were getting into, but now we have perspective. Were there grey areas in August 2011?
As an Individual
That is not an easy question to answer.
In the first 10 or 12 months, we had a fairly clear idea of what the big aggregate pieces were. We were confident in the plans we were developing. As Ms. Forand stated, my role was to develop the first transformation plan, together with my colleagues, the private sector, and the chief information officers of all departments. It took 10 months to develop our first business plans.
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
You have about 30 seconds for the question and answer, Mr. Blaney.
Conservative
Steven Blaney Conservative Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC
I think we should move to another member instead.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Mr. Weir, you have seven minutes, please.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
Just to pick up on the challenge you had in accounting for what existed in terms of servers and equipment, do you see that as primarily a problem with how Shared Services Canada was organized, or a problem with how IT was organized in various departments and agencies prior to Shared Services Canada?
Grant Westcott As an Individual
That's a very good question.
Just to recap, I'll go back to what Liseanne mentioned. There were 43 departments that which had been organized that way since the beginning of IT. So for approximately 50 years, there had been largely independent decision-making with respect to how IT was run, how IT architecture was structured, how IT was organized. It was all done departmentally. Some departments were exceptionally well organized in their processes and their administrative prowess. You would in some departments that, yes, knew exactly where everything was, and it was all accounted for, and you could find it.
On the other hand, there were a great number of departments in which that was not the case whatsoever, particularly with respect to such things as service management and problem or incident management. These were things that in some respects, when we first started—this was primarily in my area of activity, and I think Kevin Radford, whom you talked to before, alluded to it.... Right at the very beginning, one of our fundamental mandates was to maintain service. Well, how do you actually do that? We started right from the outset and suggested that the one process intervention we had was to organize, among the groups working with us who had been initially transferred, a system whereby, if anything went wrong, they had to alert us in a systematic way throughout the entire management chain, so that we knew there had been an incident, which we could then in turn track, and which we could in turn make sure that remediation was done and that the metrics started to form.
It was at that point, after about six months, that we started to realize that, my goodness, there was a huge variability in the capabilities of the organizations. Some were very good; some were quite shocking, quite frankly, given the size and magnitude of some of the budgets that we were talking about and some of the people who had been there. This was the start of our developing the metrics and the standards by which we could actually gauge what kinds of problems we were trying to deal with.
That's just the fact. It's just what we encountered. Part of our job was then to figure out how we could normalize this and raise the quality of what we were doing. At the same time—and this is part of the set of inherent issues we had to work with—we knew we had to build a transformation program. Part of our mandate was to figure out how we were going to rebuild the Government of Canada's infrastructure to modernize it and make it suitable for an organization of this size and capability.
At the same time, we had the huge inherent infrastructure that we had to keep running. We could invest in the old or we could invest in the new, and part of what we had to balance was how much investment to put into the old while at the same time reserving sufficient capability to find funding to do the new. We had to find that fine balance.
I hope that answers your question.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
That's very helpful. You described the history whereby different departments and agencies had developed their IT autonomously, and some had done it very well and others were less successful.
Was it the role of Shared Services to, in effect, take the best practices from departments that had done well and apply them to other departments and agencies?
As an Individual
That's what we did, but also, there was a pretty well-developed set of processes in the industry around managing large-scale organizations such as this. There were things such as ITIL and other things. I won't bore you with all the technical terms, but things had evolved after a great number of years, and part of what we were trying to do was to say, let's do these things in a much more standardized way so that we can get standardized measurement and standardized execution and standardized results.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
Yes, I guess what I'm trying to get at a little bit is the extent to which Shared Services was bringing an approach from the private sector into government, or to what extent it was taking best practices from within government and applying them across government, or probably using some combination of both.
As an Individual
It was a combination of both. Some departments had proceduralized things very well. There is no shame in plagiarism, so in many respects, as we were putting it together, we would take the procedures that had already been developed and just change the name to Shared Services Canada, that this how we do it, as opposed to department A or department B. In many respects, that is what we did.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
It sounds as though you're generally supportive of the Shared Services concept, but there were, of course, some problems in implementation. That's why we're having these hearings.
NDP
Erin Weir NDP Regina—Lewvan, SK
I wonder, Mr. Wescott, whether you could tell us what you think went wrong, what perhaps the two or three biggest mistakes were that may have been made.
As an Individual
Thank you for that question. I was hoping somebody would ask it.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Mr. Westcott, just as a quick intervention, as we have about a minute for you to articulate your two or three big reasons.