Ms. Forand made the observation at GTEC, the annual Government Technology Exhibition Conference, held at the Ottawa Convention Centre. The event brings together some of the country’s top technology firms and their public-sector clients.
“I remember being up here on this podium over a year ago,” Ms. Forand said during a keynote speech on Wednesday morning. “We were brand new, we hadn’t finished the transition of staff, and we threw up a booth. It was orange. We attracted a lot of people to our booth.”
Many had questions and concerns about the processes involved with consolidating more than 63 e-mail systems into one and reducing the number of data centres from 300 to less than 20.
“A challenging mandate? Absolutely,” Ms. Forand said of the job of the department created in August 2011.
Over the past year, SSC has been journeying the “challenging path from good intentions to strong results,” as Ms. Forand put it.
The department has recruited 6,000 employees from the 43 federal government departments. SSC has hosted town hall meetings across the country to provide information and receive feedback.
Currently, the e-mail transformation is the furthest along. The new e-mail system should be in place by 2015 with consistent naming standards, increased security and reliability, compatibility with desktop and mobile, and at a cheaper cost, Ms. Forand said.
A procurement process has begun to find a solution for the e-mail system, with a bid solicitation to be launched in early 2013 and awarded that spring. The system will then be implemented in waves over 24 months.
SSC is also working with partner departments to clarify business requirements for data centres. That will lead to a procurement process at an unspecified date.
But despite the transformation that has been taking place, SSC’s mandate has always been to keep the IT lights on for around 2,100 mission-critical government programs.
“Government runs on IT infrastructure,” she said. “If IT infrastructure doesn’t work, government doesn’t work.”
Earlier, Ben Stewart, B.C.’s minister of citizen services and open data, discussed his province’s successful 10 years using a shared services model.
“We have less resources to work with,” he said. “It’s a great way to do things. In an ever-changing world, we can all learn so much about each other.”
More than 7,000 people are expected to attend the conference, with around 200 companies exhibiting their various wares. Companies with a local presence include Telesat, Maplesoft Group, Bell Canada, Research in Motion and IBM Canada Corp.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Courtney Symons
Quelle/Source: Ottawa Business Journal, 07.11.2012
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