Citing the Shared Services Act, which was passed as part of the government’s Omnibus Bill, Maurice Chenier, assistant deputy minister, projects and clients with Shared Services Canada, said his department’s commitment is legislated.
“We have skin in the game now, we have to walk the talk,” Chenier said a panel discussion on SSC, entitled “Continuity but not status quo.”
Shared Services, created a year ago, the department now includes 6,000 federal government IT professionals.
What the one-year-old department can’t do, Chenier said, is set up the new email interface the way it once did.
Kevin Radford, ADM Operations at Shared Services, was more direct.
“What won’t work is when someone we partner with writes a four-page briefing note on SSC to a Deputy Minister on why 18 months for new email won’t work,” Radford said.
“It’s incumbent on our partners to not spend their energies doing this,” Radford said.
Earlier Wednesday, Liseanne Forand, President of Shared Services Canada said in the morning keynote speech that her department is focused on integrating the government’s data centres and networks, but transferring email to one system was one of the three goals her department had set for itself.
“We have more than 63 email systems in 43 government departments,” Liseanne Forand, President of Shared Services Canada, said.
The fact that the government has so many email systems was met laughter and disbelief in the audience.
“I know,” she said, as the nervous laughter abated. She said procurements for contract for email are to go out in January 2013.
Separate email systems mean productivity slowdowns, she said.
“We cannot have trucks waiting at Canadian borders with products on them because an email server goes down in downtown Toronto,” Forand said.
Forand called the 18-month goal for email transfer “ambitious.”
In the session on Continuity but not status quo, Maurice Chenier addressed the question of prioritizing requests from different departments.
Chenier said there is a tipping point, and at some point supply will not be able to meet the demand. He added that departments need to cluster their requests.
“Departments need to get organized, and cluster their demands together. Not like one-by-one at Canadian Tire,” he said.
Chenier said traditionally departments would wait until “money was sprung on them” in February — before budgets are shifted — and now the different portfolio leads need to look at the full picture.
In the same session, Radford said that Shared Services has to look at what’s coming out from a regulatory standpoint, that high priority and high impact projects will move more quickly through the system this way.
“We’re focused on mission critical, so the little stuff — like my website is fluttering — has to wait. You have to relax,” Radford said.
And technical support can’t be only eight hours a day, Radford said.
“It the system that allows the food supplier to bring food into Canada has a 9-5 IT operation supporting it, and that goes down, the business impact is $100 million a day,” he said.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Melanie Coulson
Quelle/Source: Ottawa Citizen, 07.11.2012
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
