I won't claim to be the benchmarking expert, but I'll try to cut through a lot of the consultant-speak and describe it.
A company like McKinsey has clients all over the world. It runs surveys in these companies. It can ask a variety of questions. The ones we're speaking about here are mostly around information technology, such as the maturity of an organization's information technology processes and procedures, as well as its culture. In this context, it will select what it refers to as its “solutions”. There are nine different solutions it offers to the Government of Canada.
It will administer a survey within the organization. It will receive the responses. It will do the analysis of those. It will compare those results against information within its proprietary database and then it will provide a report back to the government organization that issued the contract.
That's how it's supposed to work, in a nutshell. I think what we saw is that it ended up being a lot more than that.