I'll take a crack at that initially. Grant or Benoît may want to add to it.
We were created in 2011 and we received our procurement authority in 2012, when the legislation was passed. As I mentioned, one of our priorities was engaging with the industry. It was one of the first things we did through the fall and winter of 2011-12. We did it by approaching all seven national IT industry associations in Canada and talking to them about the relationship they had with government and how it was going for them.
We had some knowledge of it. Grant in particular had worked extensively in that area. We knew that it was checkered. We knew that there were big issues; that there had been big issues with large-scale IT investments in government over the years and lots of finger-pointing. There was lots of litigation. We wanted to avoid as much of that as we could.
We thought a way of doing it was really to ask them how we can make sure we have a relationship that works, that we're all working together towards something.
Among the other things that we heard from them was that we need to involve them early in what we are doing, that we couldn't sit back and write up an RFP, drop it over the transom, and then they would get it and it's something that is impossible to do. We need to work together on what their needs were and to find a way of doing that. We had looked at that also.
We concluded, through this exercise and through other thinking that we did, and by looking at other jurisdictions and how they had proceeded, and at the private sector and how it had proceeded, that it was really important to be able to develop a strategic relationship with the industry. I don't mean by that being friends with them and going for lunch; I mean just having a relationship in terms of what our needs were, what they could provide.
We established a round table with some advisory committees, but we also came to the view, given the area in which we were purchasing, which was in a pretty narrow band—it's IT infrastructure, not pencils, not F-35s, but just that IT infrastructure band—that we could be very deep and skilful in that area. We had now all the experts in government in our department. They were not anywhere else anymore.
We could work with the subject matter experts and make sure that our procurements were aiming to get the best result—not the cleanest. We wanted a clean process, but the process wasn't our objective. The objective was to get the best quality at a good price for the whole government. We were able to make a good and convincing argument to the effect that we could do that more efficiently, but more importantly more effectively in terms of the results, by working directly on our own procurements.
We only achieved procurement authority for IT infrastructure, not for anything else. For everything else, we were like any other department and purchased through Public Works.
To us, that was important.
Also, there was a time factor. We'll come back to what went wrong or what's not working as well as we'd hoped. Time is a really difficult factor in government. There are lots of things that suck up time. Procurement had the potential to do that. There was no way we could do the transformation we were planning to do over the period we were given, if we were not able to manage procurement as effectively as we could.