To be honest, the scale of what happened here is just so different. I got to know Liseanne well. I got to know Grant and Benoît well. We had lots of discussions.
You talked a lot about it here today: the understanding of what existed is very important. You have to know where you are starting so that you don't get caught in this treadmill of not knowing how you are doing. Are things are okay? Are things moving? Are things not moving? I think they all said it. Probably, if SSC had taken its time at the beginning to really baseline what existed—not just from an asset perspective but from a service-level perspective, because it is service levels that will get you—it would have been very different, because expectations could then be set reasonably, as opposed to perhaps some people not being reasonable.
I look back at what my bible was, because for two years I ran the integration project for what we did with our shared services. I had a book of our baselining data, which was very detailed, so I knew everything that had come across from clusters into what we call ITS. I knew the service levels that were provided, and I knew the cost that went with that. We did not bring any money over. We very purposely implemented a chargeback facility, so we didn't take budget from ministries. We left the budget out there. We wrote service-level agreements, and we billed. Certainly, looking back on it, I have no regrets. In fact, we still do that to this day, where our shared services organization has zero budget. It has no base funding whatsoever. It charges for its services. There is an overhead to that. It is weighty at times. After 10 years of doing this, I think we can probably start to look at moving off that rigid zero-based budget and maybe going to a more mixed, hybrid mode. In clusters we do that. We have some base funding: salary, wage, benefits, and core maintenance. Non-discretionary work is put in the base budget, but for anything that is discretionary, ministries still hold that money.
I think that, for our shared services organization, it makes sense that it would be coming somewhere into the middle ground between where SSC is and where we are now. I can't overemphasize baselining. You can't do without it.