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.
4:45 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Drouin Liberal Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON
I want to bring you back to 2002. You were a CIO within a cluster.
4:45 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Yes.
4:45 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Drouin Liberal Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON
How much focus was there, when you trained your employees, on ensuring that they had the buy-in, that they had that sharing culture, within your organization?
4:45 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
We didn't start e-Ontario, which was our Shared Services Canada, until 2006. I would say we were pretty independently minded, if I can say it like that.
4:45 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
I think that's just the culture of what things are when you have an organization. In my case, I had two or three ministries to service. I was very focused on servicing those two or three ministries. If a server went down somewhere that impacted somebody's application, I knew who would be fixing it. When we moved into a shared services world, I didn't know anymore.
Culturally, for a CIO, you shake. You lose sleep. You don't know what to do anymore. This is why the process has to be absolutely bang on and the relationship has to be just humming, because bumps do happen, as you well know.
4:45 p.m.
Liberal
Francis Drouin Liberal Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON
How would you address the problems that we have at Shared Services today? Do you see an emphasis on putting a focus on client relationships, as you just mentioned, and making sure that...? How would you get the buy-in from other CIOs in other departments? I think there's maybe a lack of confidence in SSC in some departments. There was a client survey that proved that. How would you go about it?
4:45 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
I don't know what it's like. I'll be brutally honest. I've not read about any of the stuff that has gone on here, but I would fall back on process. I think people need to have confidence in the process, and the process has to be an industry-standard process. It can't be made up. It exists. It's not rocket science. It's there. It works. I think the process of the service you're giving has to be laid out, understood, and accepted by everyone who's using the service.
I think the second thing is outreach. It's ensuring that your Shared Services people understand what the impact is when something goes bump in the night. They have to feel the stress and the worry that a front-line service provider would. They're not in the front line; we know they're not. They're not as close as they used to be. They're a bit further back, but it's important that you make all of your staff in that Shared Services organization directly understand what the impact is of what they're doing. They're not just a shared service. They're actually delivering services to, in my case, an Ontarian or a business. Without that, they have no reason to lose sleep at night....
In my case, certainly, I think back to 2007, 2008, 2009, and even right through to today, where we focus enormously on bringing forward real ministries, real people, to talk to our shared services staff to ensure they know that whatever the service is, whether it's a public safety video, a call to an ambulance, or whatever—it doesn't matter what it is—they recognize that it has a direct impact on someone on the street, or on a police officer or a corrections officer, whatever it is, and that they feel that. That brings it alive, then. They're not some abstract shared service. They're actually delivering a service that means something to somebody.
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you, Mr. Nicholl. I'll have to stop you there.
Mr. McCauley, please, for five minutes.
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Thank you, Mr. Nicholl. It's been very interesting.
You talked about $70 million in efficiencies, about the low-hanging fruit, and the other $70 million.
4:45 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Yes.
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
I know you're not going to know exactly where, but can you ballpark this?
4:45 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
I have my sheet with me.
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
4:45 p.m.
Some hon. members
Oh, oh!
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Can you ballpark where that came from? We heard earlier that when we consolidated to 43 departments we achieved basically zero efficiencies across the board. Where did you generally find yours, both the low-hanging fruit and the more recent ones?
4:45 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
I would say that we chased down contracts. We really chased down contracts. In coming from distributed to centralized system, all of a sudden you get your hands on all the contracts. Really sitting down with your key vendors, talking with them about what this new world is, and renegotiating contracts based on that shared services model reaps huge dividends—huge.
If you go back to our old days, we would have had multiple network contracts. We went for a single network contract. We're now on our third iteration, and every single time we've taken dollars out of that network contract. It's had a huge payback for us.
I would say that on the rationalizing side, we haven't taken huge numbers of employees out of our organization at all. It was never our intent to. It was interesting to listen to the earlier conversation on how you engage people and how you keep people engaged when they're at risk. Certainly, one of the first things I said to our staff when they all came together was that we had—it wasn't official—as much job protection in place as we possibly could because we had to—
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Staff on board.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Absolutely.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
You talked a lot about, as one of those, measuring service, or about the service levels. How do you measure that? Is it the call time? Or do you actually survey the clusters or...?
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Yes, we do.
All of our service desk is completely automated. If you ever come to my office and you walk on our floor, you'll see a big screen up on the wall. We have literally real-time stats coming from our help desk. I know how many calls are waiting and how many calls have been made that day. That's all there for everybody to see, including me. If it goes red, I'll call someone. Basically that's what happens.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Do you do follow-up surveys with the clusters as opposed to just...?
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Anyone who calls gets a follow-up survey. There's a constant go-though between a cluster and ITS with regard to what they're doing.
Don't forget, we're all part of the same team, as well. It's really important. The head of ITS and the head of Shared Services Canada sit at the same table constantly with the CIOs. We are one team. We really are. We recognize that we are a little different from the rest of government in that we are horizontal. But we really do feel part of the I&IT organization within Ontario. We have incredible loyalty to a ministry, but we also have incredible loyalty to I&IT. That's that dichotomy.