Canadian Government Executive - Volume 25 - Issue 02

10 / Canadian Government Executive // April/May 2019 Leveraging Managed Services You can’t beat competition – it provides the best solution 95 per cent of the time. Trying to do everything yourself means you eliminate competition and become very constrained by your own options. Due to the absence of competition in government, there is little incentive for overachieving on performance and no severe penalty for poor performance. The nature of the IT environment is that services will always be a hybrid of internally and externally sourced work. Taking the emotion out of the discussion makes the choice clear: use competitive forces among service providers and the Government options to provide the best solution . Government leadership, starting at the DM level, needs to embrace a policy of working down the service-stack. For ex- ample, if Government can buy a business service from a market of proven world class providers, why would the Govern- ment create and provide the service it- self? The majority of Government busi- ness processes conducted are not unique to Canada or governments. To use the payroll example, why doesn’t the Govern- ment have a world-renowned company like ADP doing payroll as a service? (This is not to be confused with the NextGen HR & Pay project, which is only looking for a “software as a solution” component – basically doing Phoenix twice.) The financial aspect is a very key and compelling point. Leveraging industry’s resources provides an opportunity to le- verage non-Government funding sources. Managed service providers will self-fund, through various means, the investments of a contract in order to achieve overall financial success of the contract. This is an opportunity for the Government to achieve objectives where the investment funds to invest in the service itself are not readily available or can be otherwise in- vested. While unions may balk at more part- nering with industry, they need to under- stand there is plenty of demand for their memberships. However, employees may be employed differently. This is simply DIGITAL GOVERNMENT It is vitally important to have a cadre of public servants highly adept at managing services. This is particularly poignant given the vast majority of Government needs can be accommodated in the market, and in many cases are a commodity. Inevitably during my time at SSC, I per- sonally negotiated with vendor leader- ship on all of our key or highly visible contracts. Typically, it was with business unit or country leadership of our vendor partners, and sometimes it was with CEOs of multinationals. Some may not fully appreciate the value of good relationships or recognize the positive results which may come from strong relationships, so I offer the follow- ing example. A department found itself in the posi- tion of having to unexpectedly refresh a costly system, which had come to end of life and was to be replaced by another system which had become unavailable. On their behalf, SSC had to quickly pur- chase the current generation system for this customer Department. Funding had not been planned for this unexpected pur- chase. SSC staff negotiated at length to get the best price for the replacement system; however, we were still concerned given the magnitude of the purchase. I had a relationship with the CEO of the multi- national firm from whom we had to buy the system, and I called the CEO explain- ing our situation and helping him to un- derstand that every dollar mattered (this call is not a normal practice). The next day, they took $3 million off of the approxi- mately $20 million price. Yes, relationships matter. I am grateful for the understand- ing and support of this CEO and vendor partner. To be clear, there was no quid- pro-quo for consideration to the CEO or this partner in any way, shape or form – it was based entirely on a good relationship. In general, the Government needs to drastically improve its view of and rela- tionship with industry. Specifically, for IT, and starting at the most senior levels, the Government should begin a program of relationship development with industry partners. Obviously, as SSC is the Govern- ment enterprise IT service provider, it should take the lead in such a program so that its benefits and experiences can be leveraged by other organizations. It is impractical to think every Government organization can achieve the highest lev- el of relationship and trust with vendor partners. It is also confusing for vendor partners to try maintaining multiple rela- tionships across the Government. Lastly, it is appropriate for there to be oversight over these relationships, which is why consolidating the leadership for these re- lationships in one organization (i.e., SSC) is important.