Shared Services Canada will help transform Canada’s federal government, reducing costs, securing government networks and better preparing it to offer new services to Canadians, says Diane Finley, minister of public works and government Services.
Speaking at the second day of the Government and Technology Exhibition and Conference (GTEC), Finley said Wednesday that the ongoing rollout of Shared Services Canada is one of the government’s most important initiatives.
The creation of the new department, which has been in operation for a little over a year now, aims to cut the number of federal government data centres from 300 to fewer than 20, combine more than 100 email systems into one and reduce the 3,000 overlapping computer networks that now exist.
“Savings was at the heart of the mandate that Prime Minister (Stephen) Harper gave Shared Services Canada two years ago and it still is,” said Finley. “Shared Services Canada generated savings almost immediately, just from taking a government-wide approach and integrating IT infrastructure. Email transformation will result in $50 million of taxpayers’ dollars saved.”
Benoît Long, the department’s senior assistant deputy minister for transformation service strategy and design, said the past year has been spent preparing for one of the most massive technological undertakings the federal government has seen. The department has been given three years to unify the government’s networks and amalgamate its software and hardware purchasing decisions.
“It’s like a carpet that is rolling under our feet. Once we get on, we can’t get off,” said Long. “We are pushing very hard because we have to. This is a very big deal.”
Long said the federal government has more than 377,000 employees working in more than 3,500 buildings across the country. Shared Services has already started to roll out a unified email address to all of those employees, and a secure government-wide wireless network is in the works. He also said that under a recently announced deal with Bell Canada for data warehousing, the government will soon consolidate all of its server needs and data warehousing with private-sector server farms.
Bell and Rogers, as well as industry heavyweights Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have been spending billions of dollars to build secure server warehouses aimed at allowing companies and governments to do away with in-house server rooms. The move allows organizations to save money, since they don’t have to buy and maintain their own computer networking and archival equipment.
“Shared Services Canada is making a point of drawing on the immense private-sector expertise in IT transformation that exists across Canada,” Finley told the crowd. “And if the private sector has something off-the-shelf that we can buy instead of build, we will do that too.”
The government’s move to consolidate its information technology needs under one umbrella organization was applauded by Ken Corless, senior director of Accenture’s CIO organization. Corless said that in 2001, Accenture, a multinational management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, moved to consolidate all of the technology purchasing decisions for its 275,000 global employees under one division. The company also moved to outsource its servers and data centres, resulting in a 64-per-cent drop in information technology expenditures over the past 12 years. Thanks to new technologies such as video conferencing and collaborative social media platforms, the company is saving millions of dollars in travel expenses.
“Leave the past behind,” Corless told the audience. “We’ve been able to save millions of dollars ... and we’re getting more productive hours by not having people stuck in seats on an airplane.”
He likened the move to outsource a corporation’s data centre needs to the turn of the century, when many factories were attached to their own power plants and generated their own electricity. It wasn’t long before they realized that creating a public electric grid and sharing the cost of energy generation was better for everybody.
“Our coal burning power plant is the data centre,” he said.
The one big concern shared by government and the private sector is in securing the treasure trove of data that will be created by consolidating all of the government’s information in a central location. International hackers are becoming more sophisticated than ever, and many are even honing in on previously banal details such as requests for proposals from various government departments.
Scott Jones, director general of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) — the government agency responsible for combating hackers in Canada — said hackers are going to great lengths to get a leg up on the competition. In one example, hackers tracked a key figure involved with a request for proposal for a new government service. By examining his Facebook profile, Twitter feeds, LinkedIn profile and other publicly available information, they managed to discern that he was a fan of a specific website that offers recipes. They then sent an email, that appeared to come from that site, offering a new recipe, to the person’s home email address. It just so happened the bureaucrat checked his home email at work, giving the hackers access to the government’s computer systems.
“There is no single fix to the problem we face,” Jones said. “If you are a high priority target, you are likely to be targeted by several of our adversaries. They are focused on particular information and long term access. They want to keep their access going and they will work very hard to maintain it.”
Shared Services Canada is working with CSE to secure the government’s new information technology infrastructure. It’s a process that the federal government wants to see completed by 2016.
The move toward modernizing the federal government has been the main topic of discussion at GTEC this week. The three-day show is expected to have attracted more than 7,000 public servants and private-sector technology workers to the Ottawa Convention Centre by the time it wraps up with closing remarks from Corrine Charette, the federal government’s chief information officer, on Thursday at 11:30 a.m.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Vito Pilieci
Quelle/Source: Ottawa Citizen, 09.10.2013
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