Government Operations committee  Nobody has jumped far ahead. Surprisingly, the municipalities are doing a pretty bang-up job of this, but they're smaller and more nimble and they're ready to engage directly with industry. A lot of it is around the smart city solutions. The vendors are going straight to the ci

Government Operations committee  It will depend on whether it's a simple or commodity-based procurement as opposed to a more complex procurement. If you're looking at a broader IT platform for a department or multiple departments, you get into the longer, more prescribed tech specifications. On the smaller end,

Government Operations committee  Most of them would be under $50,000.

Government Operations committee  Most corporations are engaging in hiring chief risk officers to be able to evaluate both sides. You could shut off the Internet and have 100% security; however, at the end of the day, you're only going to get to 97% or 98% security on the Internet. What do you do with the other 2

Government Operations committee  It's that side of the equation. You have to be able to balance. Do we take a little more risk to get more business, or do we take less and less risk and shut down the door to business?

Government Operations committee  There are firms with head offices in the United States that will set up a small shop of five or six employees in Canada and attempt to sell technology solutions north of the border. They aren't solely large multinationals, but some smaller firms as well. However, when there are l

Government Operations committee  It depends—

Government Operations committee  Yes, and if they're building on a legacy system that was instituted by that company, they don't have a lot of leeway or wiggle room to change from that.

Government Operations committee  I think you get around it by—and we've talked about it already—renewing the focus not on the technology or the platform but on what solution the government is looking for. You ask yourself what the problem is that you're trying to solve by going about this procurement and then en

Government Operations committee  In terms of the platforms that could be leveraged, we're migrating to the cloud. The cloud could be leveraged like an app store on Apple or Google Play Store. A number of SMEs develop applications and solutions that they sell via these platforms. In the U.K., they use the G-Clou

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

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  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—