Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee.
My name is Steven Poole. I am the CEO of ITSB in Public Works.
I'm here today to assist the Treasury Board Secretariat in addressing chapter 3 of the AG's November 2006 report on large IT projects, particularly secure channel.
Mr. Chairman, I will spend only a few minutes to summarize our involvement in secure channel, the centrepiece of Canada's common information technology infrastructure.
As committee members know, the goal of secure channel is to provide Canadians and Canadian businesses with secure, responsive, and private access to Government of Canada online programs and services. Public Works has been responsible for delivery of the technical requirements since June 1999. The architecture and management of the secure channel project was fully transferred to our department in December 2003.
Governance of the project was shared with the Treasury Board Secretariat throughout, with TBS accountable for strategic governance and Public Works accountable for internal project governance.
A significant investment is required to build a secure common infrastructure that protects the integrity of Canadians' information. This approach is more cost-effective than allowing government departments to build and maintain separate infrastructures. Our estimates in Treasury Board submissions as early as June 2001 were close to the actual costs. In 2006, Public Works negotiated a long-term contract with the service provider, which further reduced the estimated cost. The contract was assessed “an excellent deal” by Forrester, an independent technology market and research company.
In essence, to operate secure channel going forward will cost less than $3 per Canadian per year. We recognize that these are significant costs, and that's why Public Works benchmarked these costs to ensure that they were in line with industry averages.
Mr. Chairman, Canadians are concerned about identity theft and have stated that they do not want their personal information at risk. We are serious about protecting Canadians from security breaches. Secure channel has won a number of national awards, including the Canadian information productivity awards in 2005 and in 2006. In fact, at the international level, the project was instrumental in Canada being rated for five consecutive years, by the international research firm Accenture, as number one among 22 countries for its e-government performance.
We take very seriously the comments by the AG in her report. Though the AG noted that the initial take-up of the secure channel was below projections, I am pleased to say that today Canadians have embraced secure channel in unprecedented numbers. In fact, over five million e-passes, which are used to manage individual credentials, have been issued to citizens to date, including census 2006 online, with more than six million business transactions last year. The growth rate for secure channel has been very significant, and demand rose by 200% from 2005 to 2006.
In terms of tangible outcomes, 95% of federal government organizations use at least one secure channel service to enable their online applications; 61 government programs are using e-pass; over 54,000 businesses use Service Canada's record of employment, which has reduced their business transaction time from days to minutes; Foreign Affairs' passport online helped issue over 310,000 passports; Canadian Forces online recruiting is also going strong, with over 178,000 business transactions since they started their program in October 2005.
While the AG did not audit the privacy and security aspects of secure channel, parliamentarians should know that it is providing the best security and privacy protection available to sustain the integrity and trust of the Canadian public. In fact, in 2006 we had millions of security-related alarms that were addressed without a single compromise of our systems.
The AG noted the challenges of delivering these horizontal projects across many departments and agencies. She noted that “The federal government has recognized that there are complex IT issues that cross departmental boundaries”. We have seen that complexity first-hand.
I am pleased to note that secure channel received full marks for project management, as evidenced by its ever-growing success in enabling other projects, such as the two projects in the report that received perfect marks, namely, Statistics Canada census online and the Canada Revenue Agency's “My Account”.
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I welcome your questions.