Government Operations Committee on May 31st, 2016

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

[Inaudible—Editor]

[Liseanne Forand]

—it's moving in the right direction, and the value of what this will create is worth the time and the investment that it's going to take.

I didn't travel a lot on the job, because I was very busy here, but occasionally I would see people from other countries—the U.S., Israel, the U.K., France—and they were all very impressed with what this can deliver. They knew it was going to be hard but they said, boy, for IT and cybersecurity, for modernizing the work of government, this is absolutely essential.

Grant?

[Grant Westcott]

I might just add to what Liseanne mentioned earlier. I'd gone through a similar exercise in the private sector. One of the conclusions as we approached the end of approximately six years of very much the same type of work was that as we went through the work—we didn't know this would be the result—things became much less complex.

Today, if you think about what you had under the old regime, you had 500 data centres delivering information to people located in 3,000 places across some 62 networks, etc. There was an unbelievable complexity to try to understand and then to manage all that. When you think of it, an end-of-day model essentially says, hang on, we'll connect those 5,000 people across one global network to five data centres that are properly constructed to withstand all kinds of peril and are resilient both for security and from the perspective of being able to withstand any number of different perils. It's a much simpler place to run and operate, thereby enabling much more. It's easier to do work in a world like that.

The issue is that you have to persevere. You have to realize there are going to be bumps in the road. On top of that, unforeseen things are going to happen to you, because it is over a period of time in an area that in fact can be quite turbulent. There are always things that happen and, nine times out of ten, IT is involved. You just have to persevere and stick with it.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Mr. Long.

[Benoît Long]

I think Mr. Westcott has been quite eloquent.

I go back to perseverance. The mandate, I think, remains the right one. Mr. Parker and his team are engaging the full community across the government quite actively. He now has a group of deputies and a group of ADMs that are focused on helping to prioritize and address some of the challenges from the demand side, which I think is going to be helpful to their mandate and their mission going forward.

I would certainly encourage them to go as quickly as possible towards enterprise services. Only a few have been released. Procurements have taken quite an amount of time to get done, but now that they're available and will become available to many departments, I foresee that the demand for what they're doing is going to increase quite significantly. So we're close, but not yet there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Mr. Blaney.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

The witnesses have shown us today that, in some cases, even when we think the glass is half empty, it is half full.

Thank you very much for your work on this process.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much, colleagues, and thank you for your questions.

Madam Forand, Monsieur Long, and Mr. Westcott, thank you so much for your appearance here. You've been extremely helpful. Your testimony has greatly helped this committee in its deliberations. You are excused.

Colleagues, we will suspend for about two minutes, and we'll hear next from Mr. Nicholl.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Ladies and gentlemen, I know some are not back at the table yet. We are somewhat pressed for time. I would ask that we convene the meeting immediately.

Mr. Nicholl, welcome. Mr. Nicholl, you are the corporate chief information technology officer for the Province of Ontario.

[David Nicholl]

I am.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you for being here, sir.

You do not have an opening statement, so we'll get right into the questions.

My understanding is that from the government side, Mr. Whalen, you will take the first seven-minute round.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Thanks, Mr. Nicholl, for joining us today.

As has been previously said—you were in the room—we're looking for ways to respond to some issues regarding how Shared Services Canada has been working toward meeting its goal of providing a unified service of information technology across all departments in government, and to some complaints in the Auditor General's reports in respect of that.

Can you describe your role within Ontario's version of shared services, and how your organization operates in relation to the other departments?

[David Nicholl]

First of all, thanks for having me. I'm happy to be back here.

I am the corporate CIO. I run a fairly large shared services organization from the infrastructure, security, policy, and strategy side, as well as nine clusters of application groups that support our 28 or 29 ministries within the Government of Ontario. We are what we call a federated model, where we have nine CIOs that are looking after business solutions on behalf of ministries, and who have reporting lines both into deputies, as well as into me as the corporate CIO. I also control the central hub, what you call Shared Services Canada, as well. We're a federated model, and that's how it works.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Great.

This is a two-part question. Is there a plan to further consolidate those clusters, and as part of the process of developing Ontario Shared Services, how did the number and the style of the clusters come about?

[David Nicholl]

We are committed to clusters. We think that it makes a whole lot of sense to group like ministries together, because there's so much sharing that can be done between ministries. If I look at the justice ministries, for instance, there's so much integration that can happen there, that it just makes sense to have a single solutions applications group to look after them. We've had this cluster model since 1998. It works extremely well. Gartner have reported on it as definitely being an excellent model, from a delivery perspective and a service perspective. The clusters will change over time, and ministries change over time, as you're all aware, and we may make adjustments. We have seven, and now we have nine, and we can go back to eight, but, generally speaking, that cluster model will stay much the same way.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

In terms of asset management, we've heard a lot about the asset management being a problem and the inputs into Shared Services Canada being difficult to tabulate. In Ontario's experience, was the asset management plan put in place before the transformation and the grouping of the clusters occurred? Does it continue to be a challenge for Ontario? What teachings can you provide us on how to properly do the asset management trends from departments into a shared services model?

[David Nicholl]

From a historical perspective, we started with clusters back in 1998. Clusters still had a fairly strong semblance of infrastructure within them. In 2006, that's when we did what you're all talking about here, which was to create that shared services organization and to pull all of the infrastructure out from the clusters into a central group.

I'd say that asset management is an ongoing challenge. You're big. You know that. You're very big. We are around 63,000 people. It's a hard enough job keeping track of what 63,000 people are using—and that's right down to a BlackBerry, a PC, a tablet, a server, or a mainframe. As you move into the data centre, you absolutely know what you have 100%. You know how old it is, how long it's been there, when it needs to be refreshed, and what version of software's running on it. You have to. If something goes wrong, you have to fix it. I think when it comes to our ability today, from an asset management perspective, I think we're in good shape. I'll never say it's perfect, but we're good. Prior to 2006, I would say that individual clusters, which had accountability for asset management back then, had a reasonably good handle on what they had. It was probably not perfect, but I think it was reasonable.

Asset management from a future perspective is something that we are always talking about and always challenged by, but that's far more on the software side than the hardware side. Software is where it's tough. Software worries me a lot more than hardware does, to be honest.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

In terms of procurement, again, I'm not familiar with how the Ontario government model works. Is there a centralized procurement for everything other than IT?

[David Nicholl]

No. Everything goes through SCO, Supply Chain Ontario.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

You don't engage at your level in procurement. You engage SCO to do the procurement on your behalf.

[David Nicholl]

We would be the subject matter experts. We would help to write RFPs, but they are all issued from Supply Chain Ontario.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

With respect to the human resource concerns, we heard maybe a bit of conflicting testimony from the previous group, in that they said they had all the experts, but then also that they did not necessarily receive—maybe it was alluded to—the experts they wanted at the administrative level. How does Ontario address human resource concerns with its information technology staff? In terms of the cluster model, is there still an issue of pulling people over from other departments into your group, or have you worked through all those issues?

[David Nicholl]

We're done. We did this back in 2006 and 2007. We moved 1,200 people from eight or nine different organizations into what we now call ITS—analogous to your Shared Services Canada.

I totally sympathize with some of the comments I heard. Again, I go back to how the people you have running boxes and wires are quite different from the people who are supporting or developing applications. The difficulty becomes sometimes the support staff. Maybe that's where they were going a little bit on.... Did you get all the right finance people over, or did you get the...? Some of the support side can get more difficult.

Yes, people don't give things up willingly; you have to go and dig it out. It's why we felt it was very important to have baselining exercise. These baselining exercises that we've run over the last 10 years or so have been critical for us. We've invested a lot of time in digging out detail, because that's what you really need to do. We've looked at our baselining as core components. Every time we've taken a transformation step, we've been very specific in our baselining. That's an important part of what we've done.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Monsieur Blaney, please.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Welcome, Mr. Nicholl, to the work of our committee.

I understand that it was in 2006 that you launched this big merger, but you said it was a federated model. Is it different in any way from what we are trying to achieve at the federal level?