Was it difficult to establish those meetings? Was there any resistance?

It took a year and a half to get to the point where everyone in the room was having those conversations and didn't feel threatened. Because the first few meetings, everyone wanted this or that and the meetings lasted 10 minutes, because there was no dialogue. But now they last 30 minutes and there is really good value out of that. We'll probably cancel half the requests that come in and we'll solve a bunch of problems.

How difficult is it to tell an executive that a project they want can't be done, for the purposes of simplification?

I have to explain that I'm saying no because there is an additional cost to supporting the project and maintaining it. I'm really up front with those kinds of conversations. And I don't just send an e-mail saying no. Sometimes there are outside pressures, such as things that executives read in airplanes or see other colleagues doing. What I do is say, 'These are the reasons and here are the costs associated with a different solution.'

How important is the buy-in from upper management to be able to say no?

It's very important. I think you have to work at it. When I started here I couldn't say no. I was just building credibility. I spent a lot of time building relationships with senior managers....The buy-in comes from the discussion around the transparency related to the costs of doing some of these things.

When you first applied your simplification philosophy to Palliser, where did you start?

We started with a print consolidation and simplification project. The print technology, copiers and fax machines were all buried in office supply budgets across the entire company. We did a financial analysis and talked with each of the divisions about how we could reduce their print expenses. We showed them the savings and provided a better solution for a much lower cost. That helped me build credibility and it was something I knew very, very well. That's the starting ground to simplification - you have to start someplace where you will be successful.

What elements of your infrastructure are you looking to simplify in the future?

We needed to make the change to the Microsoft platform. We had a number of different operating systems in our data centre and we chose the one that would work a lot better in the future with a lot of other different vendors. We also wanted a platform which had tools that were simpler to use and where the skill set was within the market. We simplified the whole desktop experience, including how you log in in the morning and how the mail servers are configured. On the telecommunications side, we had fibre running between buildings that were built years ago that wasn't being used and we were paying the phone company to do a lot of our stuff, so whenever we wanted to move anything around it was very expensive. We implemented a Cisco voice over IP platform, [partly] because of integration and skill set issues.

What aspects of your business applications are you looking to simplify in the future?

We are going to ask which business applications truly add a competitive advantage. If we don't have a business advantage, why are we customizing it and doing something other than what the industry standard is? A lot of applications are complicated and customized, and [when it comes to using them] I often ask the question 'why?' Why do we have, for instance, a different inventory warehouse locator than the one that came with this application? What did we get out of this?

Greg Enright is a veteran IT journalist. He is based in Toronto.