Government Operations committee  I don't know what the next step would be, but the question that's always on the table for government to consider is that government should do what they do best and let the private sector do what they do best, which is manage the technology, and deliver the latest technology, and

Government Operations committee  Thank you. The risk is always there, depending upon how you plan it. The risk is always there. It really comes down to the execution of the plan, which pieces of the competency you must keep within the government and which things you could get outside. A certain level of compete

Government Operations committee  Thank you. I will answer this question slightly differently. It is not something you're doing new: you have an existing cost that the government is already incurring in running its IT and delivering the services, right? So the issue is where you go from here. Unlike a new proje

Government Operations committee  I believe the overall IT needs to be centralized. There is no other way to move forward for any institution. For any institution of any size and scale to have completely separate organizations running IT infrastructure is, in today's technological sense, really unheard of. So in

Government Operations committee  ITAC is all private sector. Our total membership is somewhere near 400 companies. It's fully funded by the industry.

Government Operations committee  Anybody who touches IT would be our members. From a carrier point of view, it would be large carriers to small and new carriers. From a technology supplier point of view, it could be from IBM to small software companies. They're all over the place.

Government Operations committee  Globally, I think the IT market is still showing reasonable growth year over year. If you were to talk to most of the multinationals operating in Canada, they would probably say that the Canadian market outperformed in terms of year-over-year growth for their financials compared

Government Operations committee  I believe the small and medium companies, and particularly Canadian technology and Canadian innovation, could be showcased here, even through the big organizations. A lot of the big organizations source some of their technologies from younger companies. I will give you one of my

Government Operations committee  I'll make two comments on this. One, the project scope is well defined, and when industry has lined up to quote something, I assume and I would believe most of my members will deliver within the price they put out. The risk is always that the scope keeps changing, and the buyer w

Government Operations committee  I think that varies. Often they are fixed-cost, but that does vary by project.

Government Operations committee  Having the public sector running this complex IT organization over this long has yielded a very significant pool of talent that resides as government employees. That talent pool is probably not readily available to a lot of small and medium companies if you look around today, so

Government Operations committee  I think on this one I'll respond that it's probably more a myth, to some degree, than it is real. When you have a smaller system, you are more vulnerable, in large part because most of the time you are on an older version of software. If you have a hundred different e-mails, I ca

Government Operations committee  Thank you. There are a few things. I think I mentioned them as I went through my comments and the questions and answers, so I'll start from the top.

Government Operations committee  The issue is that the major risk at the beginning, obviously, is not having proper planning put in place. There's a very significant amount of risk that is run if you don't have a plan. The other risk along the way is in terms of how you measure the project and how you measure th

Government Operations committee  Thank you again for having me here.