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.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Do you break out the service results separately by cluster?
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Yes.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Okay, great.
Earlier we were talking about procurement, and you said software worries you.
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Always.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
In what way? Is it security-wise or that someone is going off and buying Windows 10 when they should be buying something else?
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
No. Software, just by its nature, is squirmier than hardware is. Typically, you could plug in a hardware box and it's going to work 99 times out of 100. Software just isn't. It's tougher to test. It's tougher to implement. It's just a harder world.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
I appreciate a lot what you've said. It sounds like a lot of our issues are just so much larger scale than those in Ontario—
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Oh, they're huge.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
I realize you're not going to read through five inches of super-exciting committee conversations. Do you think we're kind of on the right track, considering their scale and...?
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Absolutely.
I did look back at my words from 2012. I said, “What did I say in 2012? I better not completely contradict myself four years later”.
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Back in 2012 I said that as a Canadian taxpayer, I would say this is one hundred per cent the right thing to do.
Look what we've done. We've taken $140 million out of a half-billion-dollar spend in the last 10 years.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
4:50 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Yes, we did.
4:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Tom Lukiwski
Thank you, Mr. Nicholl.
Madame Ratansi, go ahead, please, for five minutes.
4:50 p.m.
Liberal
Yasmin Ratansi Liberal Don Valley East, ON
Did you say that you instituted your SSC process in 2006? Okay.
I used to be with the Management Board Secretariat with the Province of Ontario, which did the BTI, and it was a disaster at that time. That was 1995 to 2000 whatever. The transformation systems were not in place.
Looking at lessons learned, how would you guide us? You're saying that, yes, we are on the right track, which is good. No due diligence was done. Our baseline in assets may have been there, but our baseline in human resources or skilled competency was not there. From the information, I gather we have probably achieved it.
When we chose the service provider, did we make the right choice or the wrong choice? What would you say with the benefit of hindsight?
4:55 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Which service provider do you mean?
4:55 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
Is this for your email?
4:55 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
I honestly have really no insight at all into the email project.
4:55 p.m.
Corporate Chief Information and Information Technology Officer, Province of Ontario, Ministry of Government Services
I can talk about our email project, but I couldn't talk about this one. We kept ours in-house, to be fair. We didn't outsource it. We still run our own email systems.