Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for having ITAC participate and comment on your study on e-commerce in Canada. ITAC represents industries in Canada. Many of our members are large companies as well as multinationals, but the vast majority are small and medium size companies in Canada—w

Industry committee  Thank you for the question. The big part of this is that it has to start at a very early stage, down to the high school level at grade 10, because there is not enough awareness and training that kids can go into ICT as a career. So when you look at the ICT community today, it is

Industry committee  I believe that the mobile wallet is here. It is going to come to Canada, and it'll be used very heavily. Essentially there is a bunch of other things that need to happen. Your mobile phone carries your credentials now. So when you walk up to a grocery store and you don't have you

Industry committee  Several issues will need to be addressed. One is managing your credentials. I'll give you one example from an energy point of view. If you have an electric car and I come to your house and plug in my car, who pays for the car? Do you pay or do I pay? Carrying your credentials wit

Industry committee  Thank you. I think the internship or co-op program in universities is critical. It should almost be doled out with all of the science programs in every university and every college. It should be part of the curriculum going forward, because nowadays as the kids come.... I'll g

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, honourable members. With me is Linda Oliver, as you've mentioned. What I'm going to do is walk you through ITAC's position relative to the shared services that have been set up. ITAC, as you know, speaks for the Canadian information and comm

Government Operations committee  I would not comment on Ontario's specific case. To answer your question a little more generically, I think, it would be what kind of competency you have within the government, in the organization that's being consolidated. If you do not have the requisite skills to run a project

Government Operations committee  I would go against my own recommendation and be a little more prescriptive on this answer. If you don't have the skills, go hire the people who do have these skills and spend the money to do it right. That would be my recommendation to SSC. But when you have this large an organi

Government Operations committee  That's a very good question. Thank you. In my personal experience when we did this in the company I was involved with, the biggest issue we struggled with was trying to create one massive project versus breaking it into multiple projects. So you could not track the progress and

Government Operations committee  I do not know what the project structure is in Shared Services. I know that there are three things they're looking at, but I don't know what the approach is. I don't think they're there yet, at least from the information I have, in regard to what kind of project they have, how th

Government Operations committee  I do believe that whenever a project of this nature is undertaken by government, it does allow a huge opportunity for Canadian companies to showcase their technology, and to almost make government one of the first customers to showcase what they're building. That needs to be done

Government Operations committee  Yes, I do believe the SMEs do a lot of the applications, a lot of the work. Some of the applications could be very relevant to the types of services you're going to be delivering to the population, and in any sector, because as a country we are moving towards a digital society. E

Government Operations committee  Yes, I believe so. Cloud computing is a big issue in today's world in terms of the cost of delivery and efficiencies. Just in that context, it should play a big role within Shared Services decision-making. I'm almost certain.

Government Operations committee  Sure. From a private sector point of view, when we embark on anything of this magnitude, there are really two dimensions to it. One is the effectiveness and the other one is efficiency. The efficiency one is a lot more easily understood because you're centralizing things and yo

Government Operations committee  It's an interesting question because there's no clear answer, largely because the financials vary from project to project or from overall program to program on a transformational project, and they come in different sizes and shapes. I can only talk about the one I was personall