Government Operations Committee on May 31st, 2016

[Grant Westcott]

I understand, so I'll do the sound bites.

I think the most fundamental issue of all is that the creation of Shared Services Canada had a huge impact on all of the people who work in IT in government—not just the folks who were transferred to Shared Services Canada, but also the CIOs and their organizations that were left behind.

In many respects, we did not do, as a government writ large, enough work on understanding the HR consequence and what it actually meant to the CIOs. Many CIOs lost huge amounts of their organizations as we created Shared Services Canada, and there were many CIOs of whom it was the case in many respects, and I don't mean to say this in a callous way, that for the most part all they did was work on infrastructure. When you transferred all the infrastructure to Shared Services Canada, many of them were actually left with a very marginal mandate. That has consequences. I don't think we understood that as well as we could have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Mr. Drouin for seven minutes, please.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

I know some of you are here on your own time, or all of you. Some are in other departments.

I want to get back to the creation of Shared Services Canada in 2011. There was an order in council. In previous testimony, we've heard some arguments for having procurement within SSC, and then we've heard from another witness an argument for having procurement outside SSC. I'm trying to understand, given your testimony as to all the things you have to do, what the rationale was for bringing procurement within SSC at the time.

[Liseanne Forand]

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.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

You have mentioned, and I heard Mr. Long say, “Time was not on our side”. What was the motivation for not having the time? Was it just trying to get savings, or was it actually achieving a solid IT infrastructure? What was the timeline?

[Liseanne Forand]

Well, everyone was anxious for this transformation to be done expeditiously, but not in a hurried way. We were of the view that when we brought forward our plans—what we created in 2011—we were aiming for 2020. That was a reasonable period of time, based on what we had heard. Some in the private sector would say that they could do it faster; others said that this was just about right. But it's in the implementation that, in government, and I'll say this quite candidly, “speed to delivery” is very difficult to achieve. I'm quoting my friend Grant Westcott, who was very focused on trying to achieve speed to delivery.

It's hard to put your finger on why that is. Is it the process? Is it the culture? Is it the decision making? What is it? We had difficulty with speed to delivery, I would say, just incrementally, and we were pushing all of the time. We did think it was a reasonable amount of time for us to get the work done, but as other witnesses have said to this committee, as you adjust the money, you also have a tendency to adjust the time as well. As money became scarcer—and I'll stop after this—there was a bit of a vicious circle. As you're not going as fast as you should, that means that your old equipment has to last longer, and so you have to invest more in your old equipment, which leaves you less for your transformation, which slows you down, and then it's a bit of a vicious circle.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Was SSC revising their plans, because they knew that they wouldn't be able to achieve their objectives at the time, to ensure that they were investing in their legacy systems?

[Liseanne Forand]

We tabled our initial transformation plan with cabinet in June 2013. We did a first wholesale revision of all of the assumptions in the fall of 2014.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Okay. Was SSC also subject to the deficit reduction action plan?

[Liseanne Forand]

Yes.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

While you have to implement new IT systems, then, at the same time you have to find savings....

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

You're out of time, but thank you very much.

We'll now go to the five-minute rounds. We'll start with Mr. McCauley.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Thank you for joining us. I appreciate it. We appreciate the information.

Ms. Forand and Mr. Long, do you generally concur with Mr. Westcott's comments about the main issue, the main problem? Is there anything that briefly you'd like to add?

[Liseanne Forand]

I wouldn't qualify anything as necessarily a mistake. I said that the due diligence piece, I thought, was—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

It was not a mistake. It's a huge process, so what we could have done slightly differently....

[Liseanne Forand]

I think the other thing that we came to realize two or three years in was that it was absolutely essential to have enterprise IT planning for this to succeed. We started off, we had this great big program, and people tended to think of it as the SSC program, but really it was for the whole government.

But at the same time the Treasury Board Secretariat had a big program that they were doing. They were consolidating websites, they wanted to consolidate financial systems and consolidate HR systems, and do all of this.

Meanwhile, the DRAP process, which a member mentioned, meant that a lot of departments were re-engineering their own things, which meant that they had a lot of IT projects in order to do so. When we did an inventory of the projects that were in flight, were underway when we were created, there were more than 1,000 of them across the 43 departments.

There was no process, no governance to ask what the priority was. If Shared Services Canada is doing email transformation, should departments be investing in supporting that, in the first instance, or should they be supporting the consolidation of HR systems, or should they be supporting their own initiatives? It was an endless kind of dispute along those lines.

Enterprise planning, I would say, is something that should have been in place from the beginning.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Have you read the previous testimony from the other shared services committee meetings?

[Liseanne Forand]

Yes.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

We heard, I think two weeks ago, a gentleman from Transport Canada who was quite pointed in his comments. Are you in general agreement, or...more pointing out huge flaws in the system or more just pointing out that problems will happen, but these are the ones we ran into?

[Liseanne Forand]

I would concur with Grant's view that the impact on the whole system was probably not as well appreciated as it should have been. I say that just to say that the perspective of a CIO—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

People protect their turf.

[Liseanne Forand]

—in a department through this whole exercise would have been very different from our perspective.

Let me just add one more little piece in terms of how we were created. One of the ways we were created was that, obviously, we inherited 6,400 people or FTEs from departments. Departments identified the people to transfer.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Yes.

[Liseanne Forand]

Some departments did a very good job of that; some departments, not so much.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Yes. We have a term for that—