Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to speak to the committee and answer your questions concerning the Auditor General's report focused on call centres.
As I'm sure you are aware, Shared Services delivers a wide range of IT services to departments that support the delivery of government programs and services, including call centres.
Since arriving at Shared Services, I've had the pleasure and opportunity to meet with employees from across the country who are doing amazing work delivering those services. Through their hard work, we've been making important progress.
Over the last number of years, we've closed over 200 outdated data centres and opened three new, large, state-of-the-art ones that are more efficient, more reliable and more secure. These modern, enterprise data centres provide our clients with modern IT infrastructure that improves their services and program delivery.
Just last month, Shared Services Canada announced a renewed agreement between us and Microsoft Canada on a new suite of modern digital communication tools for public service. Through this agreement, we will provide over 400,000 federal public servants in over 100 departments with a suite of Office 365 tools that will enable them to deliver timely and citizen-centred services to Canadians.
We're putting a renewed focus on strengthening our IT infrastructure to ensure that it is secure and reliable and that it responds to the needs of Canadians. These initiatives will help improve the services we provide to departments, including the topic we're here to discuss today.
We acknowledge, as the Auditor General reported, that Shared Services is responsible for providing and maintaining the IT infrastructure, including the call centres for all 221 federal departments. This includes call centres internal to government and those that service the public.
Through the hosted contact call centre project, we are making critical citizen-facing call centres more flexible and accessible. We are currently migrating eight contact call centres that make up nearly 50% of all the calls the Government of Canada receives. Seven out of these eight contact call centres have been successfully migrated, and we're continuing to work with the departments to ensure that the service is working for them and for the people who call them.
Turning to the Auditor General's report, we accept the recommendation in the report, and I am pleased to say that we are already hard at work on the items noted in the report. Allow me to provide a few updates.
We agree with the Auditor General's recommendation that Shared Services Canada should consult with the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada to ensure that our call centre modernization initiative is in line with the secretariat's government-wide approach to services. Supported by a third party assessment of the hosted contact call centre solution, we determined that not all of the 221 call centres require a full-featured, high-availability system that can handle sensitive information. In short, different call centres have different requirements. That is why we've revised our strategy, from implementing a single solution that will address all contact call centre requirements to one that ensures a best-fit solution in terms of cost and requirements.
The assessment concluded that the hosted contact call centre solution would meet the requirements for the government's most complex contact centres. The Canada Revenue Agency and the Employment and Social Development Canada call centres were chosen to migrate first, as they are the most complex public-facing contact centres and the systems most urgently in need of attention.
To ensure that moving forward we have a clear understanding of the requirements for the remaining call centres, we are working with our partners to provide information such as call volume as well as the security profile of the information they are exchanging with Canadians. This is an important part of our next steps, to help us understand which systems will be right for which call centres and to ensure we provision the appropriate technology. We expect to have all of this data collected by the end of June.
At the same time, we are assessing options to modernize centres that are running on older technologies or with contracts that are expiring in the next few months. The updated plan will take into consideration contract end dates, end-of-life technology and departmental readiness to ensure that migrations are prioritized appropriately and executed successfully.
We are working with federal organizations to support existing services while modern solutions are being implemented. We are also working with departments to update their inventory for the remaining contact call centres and their requirements to identify the most cost-effective solutions for modernization. We are well on track to deliver this strategy by next month.
By the fall, our goal is to have established a prioritized list of contact call centres to be modernized based on the factors I have explained today such as the age of the centres, the number of outages, the call volumes and the sensitivity of the information they deal with.
Our goal is to provide technology supporting improved customer response, improved experiences and more reliability, including for those with accessibility requirements.
This concludes my opening statement.
I would now be happy to take questions from the members of the committee.
Thank you.