Government Operations committee  That is why, in the fall of 2014, we wanted to review the whole transformation plan and all the hypotheses we had made to see what changes were necessary. Then we made some changes. From what I have read of other witness testimony, that will happen again in 2016, and that's norma

Government Operations committee  Thank you. I'll be brief and let my colleagues give this a shot as well. I would just say, in thinking of this ahead of time, actually, my best advice to Ron and to the government and the support they can provide him is not to lose sight of the tremendous prize that's at the end

Government Operations committee  —it's moving in the right direction, and the value of what this will create is worth the time and the investment that it's going to take. I didn't travel a lot on the job, because I was very busy here, but occasionally I would see people from other countries—the U.S., Israel, th

Government Operations committee  I will start and perhaps my colleagues would like to add to my answer. The exercise is always very valuable, to the extent that there are benefits over and above the financial ones. Human resources are very important. We inherited staff who were able to maintain the current sy

Government Operations committee  I wouldn't qualify anything as necessarily a mistake. I said that the due diligence piece, I thought, was—

Government Operations committee  I think the other thing that we came to realize two or three years in was that it was absolutely essential to have enterprise IT planning for this to succeed. We started off, we had this great big program, and people tended to think of it as the SSC program, but really it was for

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  I would concur with Grant's view that the impact on the whole system was probably not as well appreciated as it should have been. I say that just to say that the perspective of a CIO—

Government Operations committee  —in a department through this whole exercise would have been very different from our perspective. Let me just add one more little piece in terms of how we were created. One of the ways we were created was that, obviously, we inherited 6,400 people or FTEs from departments. Depa

Government Operations committee  Some departments did a very good job of that; some departments, not so much.

Government Operations committee  From one department we received more than 1,000 people, with three executive positions.

Government Operations committee  If that's true for IT staff, you can imagine what it was for admin staff. If you can imagine a single organization ever transferring a really crackerjack finance person, or HR person, or auditor—

Government Operations committee  Well, everyone was anxious for this transformation to be done expeditiously, but not in a hurried way. We were of the view that when we brought forward our plans—what we created in 2011—we were aiming for 2020. That was a reasonable period of time, based on what we had heard. Som

Government Operations committee  We tabled our initial transformation plan with cabinet in June 2013. We did a first wholesale revision of all of the assumptions in the fall of 2014.

Government Operations committee  Yes.