Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 05

10 / Canadian Government Executive // October/November 2018 than one in a year. It is this caliber of expe- rience the Government must obtain when needed. It is more risky for GC to take a do-it-yourself approach than to leverage a market of experienced providers. To continue the construction metaphor, enterprise IT projects can be viewed like the recent completion of the West Block of Parliament, which was a massive under- taking. The GC used a competitive pro- cess to award a contract for the design to a reputable firm with qualifying experience to do such architecture work. Likewise, the Government awarded a contract to perform the construction and associated project management, including a transi- tion to Government management, to a reputable firm with qualifying experience for such work. The Government defined the requirements, managed the contract, and prepared to receive and manage the facility once the work was completed. Saying we should have experimented our way through the work of West Block does not make sense, a la ‘Agile’. Large projects can be done, even in IT, providing appro- priately experienced people and organi- zations are engaged. SSC was established to be the central provider of IT services and should continue to build its capacity to manage complex projects as the center of this expertise for the Government, and not have it distributed across several orga- nizations. A topic for another time…. I am not saying all work should be taken to industry. My view at SSC was and con- tinues to be that all decisions should be based on valid business cases where the GC option is the baseline for comparison. There have been cases in GC IT where this was not the approach. Two Scenarios Email Transformation Initiative (ETI) The objective of ETI is to move ~550,000 mailboxes of 43 partner organizations from 63 email services to a modern, con- solidated, secure, more reliable and cost- effective email system. Yes, the program suffered problems. The point here is to understand how the approach fared when things went wrong. Some key points: • The GC contract was a performance- based service contract where the vendor is the systems integrator and paid for outcomes. • As the vendor did not initially achieve the contracted outcomes, they worked for two years without being paid while bringing additional resources to bear at the vendor’s expense. • Eventually, the vendor produced the majority of the service, and the GC used and paid for the service while also gain- ing credit for missed capabilities or mile- stones from the provider. • If the Government had attempted to de- liver the service itself: • GC would have assumed significant risk as its employees did not have the expe- rience developing and providing such a service of this complexity and scale. • When something went wrong, there were no other resources to replace or supplement the workforce. • If the GC option failed, GC would have provided additional funds to recover the project, although employees may not have succeeded, they still have to be paid. • GC had contractual and financial levers to deal with the situation -- not available when the Government pursues such projects on its own. • To put the risk factor in perspective, I know at the time this project was initiat- ed there were maybe a half dozen com- panies on the planet capable of provid- ing an email service of this complexity and scale. Phoenix (Please, don’t cringe) It is not my intent to dissect Phoenix here. The only point I will make is that the Gov- ernment took on the role of systems inte- grator and thereby most of the risk. The Point One of the key themes here is about risk GOVERNMENT Experienced CIOs and CTOs of large enter- prises know full well the risks of doing their own development, to the extent they often have policies stating in-house development will be the course of last resort. jump to conclusions on solutions without first defining the need and requirements. Many delays, failures and overruns can be attributed to this tendency. Public servants can go their entire ca- reer and only be involved in one or two transformational programs. Asking these people to participate in or lead some part of a Phoenix-type project is not realistic or fair. Contrast this with the world class firms whose employees do these types of projects every year and sometimes work on more