Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 05

management, which is how to mitigate risk AND deal with problems when they arise. Not all projects will perform as ex- pected. It is not a matter of ETI not per- forming as expected — the point is GC was in a much better position when something went wrong. Also, leveraging industry provides an opportunity to leverage the service providers’ ability to self-fund the work. The Government should embrace SSC’s ETI approach by default. By the way, these risks are not mitigat- ed by the current trend to ‘agile’ or only pursuing small projects and then scaling them later as GC is still assuming the risks by conceiving and doing as much of the work as possible. Next Steps The Government of Canada should take immediate and strategic steps to mitigate its risk posture in digitization and IT proj- ects and services, e.g.: • Formalize a policy whereby GC will no longer play roles such as developer or systems integrator. • Pursue COTS solutions and commercial development with GC development as a last resort. • An appropriate level should be estab- lished above which this policy would be in effect, e.g., projects with a total cost above $250,000. • This policy must accommodate SSC’s role given it is a systems integrator and managed services provider. • GC needs appropriately experienced leadership and staff to provide digitiza- tion and IT services for Canadians and itself. • Proper business cases should be used to guide decision making with GC options as a baseline. • Departments should stick to their core competencies. SSC is the only depart- ment where IT is its core competency; to this end, the Government should continue the consolidation theme of the Shared Services Act to achieve better ef- fectiveness and efficiency. OK, Another Word on Phoenix I have been asked many times about Phoe- nix and what should be done. Given my varied background, including military service, I would like to clarify something: payroll is a commodity service. You have labour categories, rates, types of employ- ment and payroll rules. Saying the world class payroll providers or solutions won’t work for the Government of Canada, and the Government therefore must create its own, is factually incorrect. Companies like ADP do this on an exponentially larg- er scale than the Government, e.g., ADP services 35,000 businesses in Canada, and 650,000 businesses and 34 million people globally. Other companies, such as Oracle, successfully provide such services as well -- there is a robust competitive market to leverage. If a new system is necessary af- ter Phoenix is stabilized (hopefully, based on a well vetted business case), the best thing for the Government to do is procure it as a service. I think the question for GC employees is, do you want a system prov- en year after year over thousands of cus- tomers or one developed in a hackathon? A final note. While most of my focus is on IT, many of the issues also apply to non-IT areas, making the issues here much more pervasive than just the IT arena. Reference 1. Systems Integrators (SI) are ex- perienced organizations working from collaboration on require- ments through analysis, design and deployment of complex, of- ten enterprise solutions typically using off the shelf software. Key to their abilities are exceptional change and project management. J ohn G lowacki has the distinction of having held key roles for delivering and procuring solutions within the Governments of Canada and the United States, most recently as COO of Shared Services Canada, as well as during his time in the private sector as the Chief Technology Officer of one of the larg- est IT firms in the world. https://www. linkedin.com/in/johnaglowackijr/. October/November 2018 // Canadian Government Executive / 11 GOVERNMENT Public servants can go their entire career 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.