 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California, doing the remote interviews. During this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative Connect deployment, we have Accenture of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as ESDC. Guys, congratulations, Joel Marchilden, Accenture Canada Managing Director and Benoit Long, ESDC of Canada Chief Transformation Officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on and congratulations on the award. Thank you. Thank you. And that's a pleasure. So honestly, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services, but the citizens and people need to still do their thing. You got a business got to run and you got to get things going, but the disruption has caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this Connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the Public Sector Summit with Degrisa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution that is deserving of the award? Maybe I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit, but I think the solution is a Amazon Connect Days Virtual Contact Center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of a benefit that the government of Canada was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end, it's a fully functioning, featured contact center solution, includes an IVR, and we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents. So that's the crux of the solution and maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to how it came about so quickly. Yeah, I'd be happy to actually. We are obviously like every other government facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need. The jaws were being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age and their archaic nature. And so the challenges was quickly, how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, that we had to support clients directly. And so people turned to the transformation team of all teams, if you wish, during a fire storm to say, well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of our system integrators, including Accenture. And we were able to run a competition very rapidly, Accenture One. And then we deployed in, as Joel said, in a matter of four days. What for us was an exceptional and high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in a pandemic of all things, but with the uncertainty that comes with loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody real, a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality was pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that we're talking through here are talking, we're speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to accept the payment rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally is a technology solution, it would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. And well, that's a great point. One of the things that you see with the pandemic, it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing, unforeseen, right? So like other things, you can kind of plan for things. You got hypothetical, you got scenarios, but this is truly a case where every day counts, every minute counts, because humans are involved. There's no ROI calculation. It's not like, well, what's the payback of our system, the old kind of way to think, this is real results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick? And you did it with a partner. Okay, this is like not like normal. Like in the new, it's like unheard of, right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room. As you guys knew this was here, take us through what happened. So I think I can start, as you can imagine, the set of executives that were overseeing the payment process was an exceptional, it was like a bunker, frankly. For about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations of the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized in order to deliver the funds quickly. So you can imagine it's a war path, if you wish, because the campaign is really around timing. Timing is fundamental. People are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There is no funding, money for them to be able to buy groceries and the trust that people have in the government is pretty much at risk right there and then. In a very straightforward, but extraordinarily powerful magic moment, if you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard of on all fronts, when it came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support in a service context the clients that were desperate to reach us. And we're talking hundreds of thousands of calls a day, right? We're not talking a few thousand here. Ultimately, at some point, we were literally getting in our overtaken by volumes call centers because we had our regular ones still operating over a million calls were coming in a day with the capacity to answer tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the call center that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular call centers. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it. And I have to say, it's maybe unheard of. It may be difficult to replicate that the conditions to lead to this are rare. But I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often. Why can't we operate with that kind of speed and agility? So I think what you've got is a client in our case under extreme circumstances, now realizing the new normal will never be the same that these types of solutions and technology and then their scalability, their agility, their the speed of deployment is frankly something we want, we want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under normal timeline conditions, but even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us, well, I can actually tell you because I was the lead technologist to deploy at scale for the government Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it, two years to procure it, and five years to install it. That's the last experience we have of call center enterprise scale capabilities. And in this case, we went from years to literally days. Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say, why didn't we do this before? You know, the waterfall meetings, getting everyone arguing, kind of gets in the way in the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation, Benoit in a minute, because I think that's going to be a great success to her in this some learnings and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel, you know, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months and the message we've been hearing is, we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that, you know, a consulting firm taking our times, trying to get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example, in my opinion, of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to Accenture. So take us through how you guys reacted because one, you got to sync up and get the cadence of what Benoit was trying to do, sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. Yeah, I mean, so it's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly. And, you know, we've had to look at, to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that, we had to get pretty agile ourselves internally on how we go through approvals, et cetera, to make sure that we were there to support Benoit and his team. And I think, you know, we saw this as a broader opportunity to really respond to help Canada in a time of need. So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally even for our organization would have taken, could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps, it forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to hopefully change the way, it illustrates the art of the possible and it hopefully will change how quickly we can look at problems and we reduce deployment timeframes from years to months and months to weeks, et cetera for solutions like this. And I think the AWS platform specifically in this case, Benoit touched on a lot of things, speed the market, scalability, but just as the benefit itself was, you know, has to be simplified to do this quickly, I think one of the benefits of the solution itself is, it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we, you know, we trained, as I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend. And we're able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who were furloughed from other jobs potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training, but they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours. And I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well to have something that people could use to answer those calls that we knew were going to come. So, Benoit, this is the transformation dream scenario and the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic and you guys did solve a big problem really fast and saved lives and helped people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute. And the, also the people equation, people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This is kind of the playbook. You know, Amazon came in and said, hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together, the solution quickly, you were close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said, and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This is the playbook. To share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're thinking about all the time and it actually is playing out in real time. Well, I would definitely endorse the idea that it's a playbook. It's, I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook. It's a bit like showing up on a basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically. It is exactly that. So a lot of things had to happen quickly, but also correctly because you know, you can't pull all these things properly together without that. I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental and I have to applaud the work that Accenture did, particularly I think as Canadians, we were very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team. I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond and quickly do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change was shocked into existence. I mean, I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off. You know, this was change readiness at its best and so I think from me, from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental, if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly, then the best plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of spontaneous, driving, change, acceptance and adoption is really what I would aim for and so our challenge now will be continuing that kind of progression going forward and we now found a way, and we certainly use the way to work with the private sector in an innovative capacity and in innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and scalable, to be able to pull all of the organization all at once very rapidly and I have to admit that it is gonna shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformations because some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways, we support people, about 8 million Canadians a month depend on the benefits payments that we deliver and they're the most marginal needed, needing and requires our support from seniors to the unemployed, to job seekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have or it's just unsustainable, but the new technologies are clearly gonna show us a way that we had never forecast and I have to say I had to throw out my 10 year plan and now I'm working my way down from 10 to 9 to 8 year plans going forward and so it's exciting and nerve-wracking sometimes but then obviously as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible so the benefit of all of these solutions can make a difference in people's lives. What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also freeze you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time to leverage the people and the resources you have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that needs to be refreshed, you can always be on that bleeding edge and this just brings up the DevOps kind of mindset, agility, the lean startup, the lean company. You know, this is a team effort between Amazon Accenture and ESDC, it's, you know, pass, shoot, score really fast. This isn't the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass, shoot, score combination because you got speed, you got agility, you're leaner which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? Yeah, so my perspective on that is most definitely, right? I think what we were able to show and what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate, getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously security and privacy, those things are of the utmost importance as well but it's ability to get stuff out there quickly, test it, change it, test it again and just always be iterating on the solution. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today but we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from NICE and we added some other ISVs to do outbound dialing from Aquian and things like that. So the solution has grown from that MVP and I think that's one other thing that's going to be a big takeaway is if you're not going to do anything until you got the final end product out there then it's going to be yours, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. Ben, well, I'll talk about that dynamic because that's about building blocks, foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic I had lunch with Mark Schwartz which I believe you are quite familiar with and I spent an hour and a half with him. We were talking and he was so exciting and energized by what the technologies could do and I was listening to him and I used to be the chief technology officer for the governor of Canada, right? And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, well, that's really exciting and I'm sure it's possible in some other places and maybe in some other countries where they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon I'll have to apologize for not believing him enough. I think the building blocks of Agile, the building blocks of Sprints and MVPs, I mean, they're now fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest, hairiest and scariest problems technologically. And then from a business perspective Service Canada itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that new method is not only a different way of working it's a completely revamped way of assembling solutions. And I think that the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor but the building blocks are going to be assembled. We now, I'm working, I'm saying this in front of Joel, he doesn't know that yet. As part of our solution, partners, we're going to be assembling MVP maps of an entire long program. And it's going to be iterative. It is going to be design built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, as much as we can govern it because, you know, the government is, we may have changed a lot but the government is not necessarily caught on through most of these approaches. But the reality is that that's where we're heading. And I will say, I'll close perhaps on this, on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that, apart from we've proved it, is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of mobilization and speed and solutioning and being engaged rapidly, you just can't take that away from an organization. Once they've tasted that, if you let them down, well, they'll remember. And frankly, they do remember now because they want more of us. And it's going to be hard, but it's a better hard, a better challenge than the one of having to do things over a decade than to go fast and to kind of iterate quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the other comment I would add is most of this was driven by a client need. And that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to a common focus. If it had been just about, well, you know, we need to get people on site and solutions in place just to make our lives better as providers. Yeah, it wouldn't work perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilization that comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus. And then we drive everyone to that solution. You know, shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride it, the new wave you, oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, not as just look and feel, it's success and performance. So as people in business start to adopt cloud, it becomes a nice synergy. This is key. Joel, take us home here on Ascension, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. Yeah, I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have had the opportunity to help. And it was a complete team effort and continues to be. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background doing this, the commitment from everyone to get this in place and to continue to improve. But from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been paramount to the success. So it's been a fantastic if world win like experience and look forward to continuing to build on it. And as Benoit said, I think one thing that's done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with Benoit on team. Well, congratulations for the most innovative Connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, they have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know, it's contagious. Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and congratulations for winning the award. Thank you. Take care. Thanks Benoit, take care. Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award Show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.