Thank you.
Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members. Thank you very much for the invitation. Samantha and I are really pleased to be here to represent Shared Services Canada and answer all the questions you might have.
Let me begin by acknowledging that I'm doing my work today on the ancestral territory of the Algonquin people. I would like to thank them for the possibility of doing that every day here in Ottawa.
Joining me today I have Sam Hazen. Sam is our chief financial officer and assistant deputy minister at Shared Services Canada.
Shared Services Canada continues to play a vital role in supporting government operations by operating and modernizing the Government of Canada’s information technology infrastructure. The department had many accomplishments during the last fiscal year as we played a key role in the rapid transition for thousands of government employees and supported multiple departments on the front line of the pandemic response.
As a service provider to over 40 government departments and agencies, Shared Services Canada’s work across the Government of Canada allowed us to rely on a secure and efficient digital infrastructure to deliver critical online services to Canadians.
Prior to the pandemic, Shared Services Canada was guided by a strategy focused on meeting the needs of government as a common enterprise, while still allowing enough flexibility to address unique departmental requirements. The department had been focussing on enhancing network operations, delivering new digital government tools, and supporting IT capacity for departments.
That focus ensured that Shared Services Canada was well-positioned for service delivery at speed and at scale upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Examples of key accomplishments to support the Government of Canada in response to the COVID-19 pandemic include rapidly deploying Microsoft 365, a cloud-based suite of business and collaboration tools, and increasing remote work capacity allowing public servants to continue delivering services to Canadians.
Shared Services Canada quadrupled bandwidth and tripled remote connections to support the Canada Revenue Agency's delivery of CERB and other emergency benefit programs that followed to support Canadians through the course of the evolving pandemic.
Shared Services Canada helped to develop the ArriveCAN application to support border controls and contact tracing and to ensure that travellers arriving in Canada receive timely and accurate information.
In 2020-21, Shared Services Canada continued to evolve its agile procurement process through improved training for procurement officers on agile and collaborative methods. We also continue to engage with industry regarding our network modernization way forward.
We will continue to advance government-wide initiatives to increase the diversity of bidders so that even more companies have access to government IT contract opportunities.
These are just some examples of the important work being done by Shared Services Canada. The departmental results report provides further details on accomplishments over the past year.
To fund the ongoing work for fiscal year 2021-22, we are seeking an increase of $91 million for Shared Services Canada through the supplementary estimates (C).
One of the main contributors to the overall increase in funding includes the next-generation human resources and pay initiative. This will enable the NextGen team to carry out test pilots to assess the complexity of the government's HR and pay requirements, as well as conduct a feasibility study to identify the resources and level of effort to transition to a new system.
Other contributors to the requested increase include cyber and information technology security initiatives, workload modernization and migration, and funding related to re-profiling initiatives that experienced delays in 2020-21, mainly due to the pandemic.
We are proud of our work and happy to answer your questions.
Thank you very much.