Again, if you go back to that particular example of the budget compared to what IBM said it would cost to build the system, at that point in time, as I have said a number of times before, it was not just a question of needing to respect the budget; it was also saying that if they were going to reduce the functionality in the system by that much, enough to get the budget back from $274 million to $155 million, then they should have gone back and they should have recalculated the business case as well. Remember, when the project was approved, yes, it was approved at a certain budget level, but it was also approved with an expectation that it was going to return $70 million a year in savings. As soon as they decided to reduce it from $274 million to $155 million, to me, that was a decision point at which the department needed to go back to Treasury Board and say one of two things, either that “We need more money in order to deliver all of the functionality and get the $70 million a year in savings”, or “We will do it for less. We will cut back on some functionality and we will not deliver the $70 million a year in savings.” Hopefully in the course of that conversation there would have been some questions about what was being cut back, and whether they were cutting back pilot projects and things like that, which wouldn't have sounded like a good idea.
Regardless, I think there should have been a realization—and, again, I don't know where that failure happened—that this wasn't just a question of the budget; this was also a question of the benefits that were supposed to come out of this system. That's why I use the word “incomprehensible” in this.
At the last hearing, people were talking about the Gartner report. Members were asking about the Gartner report and how it went to only the project executives, and not to other people. I could just see heads shaking when that question was asked. People were asking how they had decided to cut out a pilot project, which is a fundamental piece, and again heads were shaking about how they could have made that decision. So maybe I should have said that it was a “head-shaking” failure rather than an “incomprehensible” failure because, yes, you can understand all the decision points—and you mentioned one, which was the budget—but I'm using the word “incomprehensible” in the terms of people not being able to understand how those decisions were made. When you talk your way through it, all you see is people shaking their heads because they can't understand how those decisions were made.