IfG.CC - The Institute for eGovernment

Town council debated the merits of making a list September 26 after receiving a request from the Municipal Joint Services Board.

That board, which currently only oversees waste management, asked the three participating municipal units for a prioritized list of services they "would like to see investigated" for possible movement.

A shared services committee, including council members and CAOs from Pictou County’s six municipalities, has been meeting every two to three months for the last year and a half and have talked to recreation directors from all the towns to see how they could work together.

“It came out of the mayors and wardens meetings,” says New Glasgow councillor Troy MacCulloch who chairs the committee. “The idea was to start looking at things that as a county we can start sharing.”

The towns of Trenton, Westville and Stellarton will be hiring one building inspector and one planning development officer while Pictou and New Glasgow will be hiring one person for each position as well to be shared between the two towns.

The Municipality of Pictou County will be looking after hiring fire inspectors that will cover five areas.

Today, June 20, the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg, the Town of Bridgewater and the Town of Mahone Bay announced that they are partnering to explore options to work more collaboratively to deliver municipal services to residents.

“All levels of government are looking for ways to live within their means while still delivering the services and programs that families depend on,” said Service Nova Scotia and Municipal Relations Minister John MacDonell. “Partnering to provide shared services has potential to keep our communities sustainable, and we are pleased to support this review.”

The Treasury Board wants a consultant to do a shared services review, which the government expects will result in options for saving money and improving services, programs and accountability.

Besides information technology and human resources, the review will also examine financial services, and building infrastructure and asset management. A request for proposals issued Tuesday said busing for school boards is included.

The News has hired Corporate Research Associated to survey residents in an effort to find out if people support the idea of a governance study, amalgamation, sharing services or keeping the status quo when it comes to running the municipal units.

While the issues do get complicated, here are some simple notes about each item.

Governance study: This has been initiated by municipal councils, supported by municipal councils, defeated by municipal councils for various reasons but mostly they all focus on the cost and how much each council and the province should pay.

The three councils did not endorse the report, District of Lunenburg Mayor Don Downe emphasized — rather they accepted it so that residents can look at it and say what they want.

The Regional Governance and Shared Service Delivery Review was carried out for the District of Lunenburg and the towns of Bridgewater and Mahone Bay by Marathon Human Resources Consulting Group Ltd. of Dartmouth.

Sault Ste. Marie MP Bryan Hayes announced Monday $466,492 in federal dollars for a host of projects, including $185,000 for the Sault Ste. Marie Economic Development Corp., to attract businesses in the information and communication technology (ICT) and digital gaming sectors, as well as gauge the feasibility of establishing an ICT hub and shared data services facility.

City Coun. Vince Bucci was the lone vote against the only recommendation to come out of last week's first meeting of the joint committee.

After an hour of opening remarks, which saw all six members of the committee discuss their expectations, a majority agreed to ask for a staff report listing the services each municipality provides, which will be presented at the committee's next meeting in January.

The municipality will hold an information meeting on shared services on Sept. 26 at 2 p.m. at Woodford Hall.

Meaford Mayor Francis Richardson said the meeting will gather information only, similar to what Grey County did when it brought the county's municipal leaders together to discuss corporate structure.

The County Information Systems department has been providing daily IT (information technology) support to the Town of Tillsonburg since October 2012 while the Town assesses its long-term IT needs. The technician serving Tillsonburg will be recruited by the County to provide on-site, day-to-day support to Town staff, although the Town will still retain the benefit of the different areas of expertise represented in the County’s Information Systems department. All IT services delivered under the shared services agreement will be provided to Tillsonburg on a cost recovery basis.

A federal agency has launched the next phase of a massive project to consolidate hundreds of thousands of government email accounts under one umbrella.

The initiative will begin to herd some 640,000 email boxes, spread across hundreds of servers, in a bid to rationalize a balkanized system that's inefficient, costly and vulnerable to cyber attacks.

While it's been more than a year since the federal government created Shared Services Canada and announced plans for a massive consolidation of IT service delivery and IT procurement, members of the government reseller channel say they remain unclear what the changes will mean for them.

On Aug. 4, the federal government announced a new agency, Shared Services Canada, charged with cutting government IT costs by rolling more than 100 e-mail systems into one and more than 300 data centres into 20 across 44 federal departments. The agency’s $2-billion annual budget equals about 40 per cent of Ottawa’s yearly $5 billion in IT spending.

Consolidation and standardization seem like good ways to reduce IT costs. But the plan, announced by Treasury Board President Tony Clement and Minister of Public Works Rona Ambrose, is still vague.

Health Shared Services Saskatchewan (3sHealth), on behalf of the 12 Saskatchewan Regional Health Authorities (RHAs), has teamed with GHX to help consolidate and streamline its members' supply chain operations, setting the stage for sustained cost reductions. 3sHealth estimates the provincial health sector can save at least $5 million per year using a combination of GHX e-commerce and related supply chain technology solutions.

Shared Services Saskatchewan, which will be known as 3s Health, takes over a big chunk of the work formerly done by the Saskatchewan Association of Health Organizations (SAHO) and was approved by SAHO members this week.

Although the Government has claimed the new agency would save between $100 million ($A98.4 million) and $200 ($A196.8) million annually, the Ministry of Public Works, which assumed responsibility for the new Agency, could not say how this would be achieved.

In addition, the launch of Shared Services Canada caught Public Service unions off guard.

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.”

The federal government won't be creating a new agency to buy electronic hardware for federal workers, electing instead to give the job to the IT super-agency it officially created last year.

Government documents posted online Wednesday show that the Conservatives have given Shared Services Canada the mandate to buy end-user hardware and software for workers in the 43 federal agencies it serves, along with a handful of parliamentary watchdogs and other federal agencies. In all, Shared Services Canada will be in charge of buying end-user devices such as laptops and mobile devices, and software, including security software, for 106 federal organizations.

SSC – the newly formed federal agency tasked with consolidating the government’s IT portfolio – now has the authority to procure hardware and software to 106 federal departments and agencies.

“(This initiative) is part of the government’s overall strategy to achieve better value for money with respect to IT and builds on SSC’s mandate to modernize and transform the government’s email systems, data centres and networks,” SSC executives stated in a release issued April 9.