It's a good question. There's some nuance, and I don't think there is a clear rule yet on what the ratio is between in-house versus outsourced. There are different approaches. As I mentioned, some governments really emphasize a fluid back-and-forth. Their focus is on a core of IT expertise in particular roles. The product ownership role is one, so it's something that is regularly cited to me as something that needs to be brought in-house.
Taking senior leadership and empowered proven technologists who've produced high-quality services and putting those folks into deputy minister-rank positions where they can actually influence how the rest of the work in their department unfolds seems to be an area where focusing on in-house is really important.
There's scope to think about this across departments. We work right now with the Canadian Digital Service, and that's something we haven't talked about yet today, but that is an important tool we could use more across the federal public service to bring in tech talent.
Many governments start out this journey of re-skilling or upskilling by creating these small digital service teams at the centre, and then, over time, departments create their own digital service teams with the idea that they can pass on these methods and try to retrain internally.
However, there is no golden rule for how much of the work should be sent out to others to do and what should be kept in-house, with the exception, as I said, of how regularly the product ownership role comes up. The other one that regularly comes up when I speak to public servants about this issue is they feel very strongly that policy, vision, strategy and the objectives of a digitization initiative should be internal, and then the footwork can be fruitfully outsourced.
There are certain other areas where it's just not going to be reasonable to keep that expertise on hand, like the latest expertise in artificial intelligence or cybersecurity. This might be something where we want to turn more to external advisors and have a sufficient base of knowledge internally to be able to ask good questions and really scrutinize the advice they provide.