The management accountability framework is simply that. It is a framework that has been adopted now by all departments and agencies in the Government of Canada to manage their organization. It has 10 areas of management, and we at the board undertake on an annual basis an assessment of performance along those areas of management. In fact, there are 21 different areas of management within those 10 broad management categories where we undertake our assessment.
The purpose of that is to have a dialogue with the executive team and the department to determine areas where we can see improvement. For each area of management, we assess five areas from very strong to needing improvement, and in undertaking those assessments, our so-called policy centres—in Rod's area in financial management, he will determine what is required to basically achieve “strong” versus “acceptable” and what various processes or systems or approaches need to be put in place to achieve a good, solid score. That work is largely done by what we call our policy centres working with the individual departments. In order to look at financial management, it's Rod working with the chief financial officers to say what is a good level of excellence for financial management. Then we try to measure on that basis.
We do that in each of the areas. How do we use it? As I said, we use it to work with departments to determine areas where they can improve. We can also use it, since we do it right across government, to look at what areas of management we are relatively strong performers in and what area we may need to look at more horizontally to improve the overall level of management. For example, right now information management is not as strong as financial management. Then we work with the community and ask how we can improve our performance overall in that area.