Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, honourable members of the committee.
I did a little research on the procurement side of SMEs before I came. My expertise, as you know, is more around Agile, and the adoption of agile methods.
With respect to a small and medium-sized enterprises, when I looked at the Public Works website, whether it's correct or not—I believe it is—it says that 40% of all the current procurement business in the government goes to Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises. I'm not sure what segment that is. Right off the bat, rather than the seven-minute presentation, I have a question for the committee. I would like to understand the specific problem the committee wishes to address. Three years from now, what would be the perfect outcome the committee wants to get?
The first thing we do in agile is say we need to understand the problem. I distributed the Amazon HQ2 RFP. It's for a very large investment from an Amazon perspective, in the billions. It's an opportunity for the winning city, and the RFP was written in eight pages. The RFP doesn't get into much detail about specifics, about how they want buildings made, or all the details around the construction; it just says they want a new headquarters, and they have this investment opportunity they're going to make. It's going to create this kind of employment opportunity for you. They articulate their problem and then they clearly articulate the opportunity for the bidders, and then it goes out. They don't get into all the detail.
Once we get into detail in a government procurement, the government is responsible for ensuring that all the detail is in the RFP. If you miss a detail, the government's accountable. This is what's happening in the bids. If we put a large bid forward, $40 million, there's a lot of risk in it just by the size. I have a procurement that might be 200 pages. I have a specification and a specification matrix that's laid out in a spreadsheet that might be four or five pages of details laying out exactly what I want.
What if I miss something, because the world's a little more complex than it used to be? The contract is based on this very complex spec. If you miss something, that's your problem. You didn't ask for it. What if you turn that around and tell the the vendor your problem, and then ask them for their solution?
The culture of the government is that as soon as they say RFP, they need a detailed requirements definition. That's in the culture. It's ingrained. The culture has to switch to saying they need business owners, not particularly IT, to say this is what the problem is, this is what you're trying to solve from a business perspective. It's not that you want a particular vendor's solution, but this is the business problem you're trying to solve, in the same way Amazon laid out their business problem.
There's no commitment on anyone when you lay out your business problem. Look at the last line in the Amazon RFP, which says they have no commitment to do business with anybody, although that is a standard clause in most of the government terms.
Then we have all these people coming to the table around an enormous opportunity. Everybody wants to get that bid because of the economic value. The government has those kinds of opportunities. They have a huge benefit opportunity for the private sector, so they will attract the best if they articulate their problem and its size. That's it. Don't do anything else. Don't put anything else in the bid. Put in your legal requirements. Take the policy and park it. Policy is over here.
Legal is required. It's compliance. As for policy, policy is supposed to drive the outcome you want. Let the vendor come back and tell you how he would do it. If no one responds, or no one is capable of responding, it's an indication that the skill set does not exist in the industry.
If the industry comes back with an extremely detailed response, it shows you their capability, and it should be part of your evaluation criteria, not whether they checked off everything on the....
The other thing is that the government would be off the hook from the point of view of accountability. It would hugely de-risk your procurements.
There's another point I want to make. There are some vehicles in the government that exist today. They're not perfect, but they could be renovated. They could be reworked. There's a procurement vehicle that PSPC has called the SBIPS, the solutions-based informatics professional services procurement vehicle. It's a standing arrangement for solution-based, outcomes-based procurements. The challenge, I think, is that most of the culture of the government doesn't know how to write that kind of bid. They don't know how to write a problem statement bid, so there's a capability issue, from what I can see, and this is early on.
The other part of the SBIPS thing that I think could be renovated.... I'm assuming this is about addressing the problem. Again, at your level, what is the desired outcome? It could be from a political point of view. It doesn't matter. What is it that you want to get at the end of the day? If it is to renovate the procurement vehicles for small and medium enterprises, the initial cut-off point for SBIPS is $2 million and under, so there's a lot of small....
I have a friend in Vancouver. His name is Colin McWhinnie. He runs a small company that helps start-ups get off the ground. One of the specialties he has is dealing with how to leverage government to get some benefit for a start-up to get going. He said that what used to be a 200-person company is now a one-to-10-person company. It's a totally different dynamic. A one-to-10-person company doesn't have time to spend three weeks filling out forms. A one-to-10-person company doesn't want to bid on a $2-million opportunity—$100,000 is fine. Something under the NAFTA limit would be great for them. If what you want to solve is to engage the micro-segment, the one-to-10 segment, it seems like the SMEs are getting a pretty good share of the pie, although you'd have to look at the details. If that's what you want to do, maybe you want to have ultralight procurements. Maybe you can renovate some of the existing things instead of starting from scratch. Just renovate what you have and make it work.
From an agile point of view, we would say you need a few people on the team. You need your procurement person; you need legal and policy on the team; you need your business owner, because the business owner has to define the problem; and you potentially would need IT if it's a technology solution. Then the next one you need on the team is the SME. You need to get more immediate feedback on what's working. You put a small team together for a very small-value bids, such as $50,000 bids, for a period of six to 12 months. It's almost like a sole source for that small vendor, but what they have to do is be on the team. They have to give you feedback, and then you can use that feedback to find out how you write the bid, how you lighten the process to make it work. Is that possible within the policy constraints of government?
That's my nine and a half minutes, I guess.