Government Operations committee  Steven mentioned risk aversion, which I believe is probably at an all-time high in the bureaucracy. Nobody wants to be in the newspapers. You have all-time high risk aversion and a calling on the government to start experimenting and piloting. If you want to help an SME, bring

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. We talk about jurisdictions. If we look back, we're seeing some jurisdictions doing this the right way, and they haven't been doing it for 10 years. For Estonia, the catalyst was the fact they got hacked by a neighbouring country. They said, “We real

Government Operations committee  I think the concept needs to be earlier engagement with industry. It's hard for me to set out a procurement to access an innovative product if I haven't engaged with the industry that delivers this innovative product. Sometimes before the procurement process even starts, we've m

Government Operations committee  It is a mechanism that scares away a multitude of firms in our sector. They simply will not bid on the contract. Often they get really upset when they participate in the first couple of phases of an RFP, the invitation to qualify, and they're going through the triple R phase, whi

Government Operations committee  I haven't seen it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Government Operations committee  I've laughed a couple of times because.... We talk about references. I'm waiting for the first government contract to come out that says we need an artificial intelligence platform developer or application developer with 15 or 20 years' experience. We joke around when we have mee

Government Operations committee  You want the best. You're the biggest. You're the government and you want the best possible talent to come in and do this work for you, but there are implications further downstream. There are graduates coming out of Ottawa U., Carleton U., and Algonquin. They can never get work

Government Operations committee  What you want to be doing is calling—

Government Operations committee  With regard to the risks, I think you have to ask yourself what objective the government is seeking to attain. Is its purpose to minimize risk as much as possible and acquire technology? Is it to have the best innovations and the best solutions? Or is it to ensure that procuremen

Government Operations committee  I don't know that it's ever valid. The industry standard—

Government Operations committee  It's the value of the contract. If you contract me for a project that's worth $10 million, the liability clause will be for a maximum of $10 million.

Government Operations committee  The other thing that's interesting about it is—

Government Operations committee  I think what goes on more often than not is that a procurement officer will dust off a similar procurement that happened a year or two ago and cut and paste 80% or 90% of that into this procurement. They'll bring all the terms and conditions from that one into this one. If we t

Government Operations committee  We'll use the example the government likes to tout the most, which was the open-by-default procurement. It's challenge-based. Great. It took three months, A to Z. That's great, but they migrated into it some of these old contractual terms and conditions. The SME that won the cont

Government Operations committee  The principle is that by putting the agile teams together, you at least put the barriers up front. By requiring prescriptive legal Ts and Cs and things like unlimited liability, the overall risk to project success is impacted. The chief risk officer would be able to evaluate all