Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 06

December 2018/January 2019 // Canadian Government Executive / 25 DIGITAL GOVERNMENT lic Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), TBS and now the Canada Digital Service (CDS) are also providers of IT services. Government organizations have complained about the confusion by mul- tiple organizations and sometimes con- flicting guidance as to the role of each or- ganization, including when the guidance is different than the law and official man- dates. Forcing customers to go to different departments for infrastructure, software or cloud services based on artificialities makes the customer secondary to a paro- chial division of responsibilities. Most significant projects require PSPC and SSC to be involved in addition to the customer organization, e.g., PSPC pro- cures the applications and SSC provides the hosting, connectivity, security, opera- tions management, and sometimes soft- ware. Some projects only require SSC and the customer organization. Significant projects require briefing up the levels of management for decisions to Deputy Ministers (DMs), and the time can be sig- nificant. While the SSC DM and Associate are en- gaged daily on IT projects, this is not the case for PSPC – which, in fairness, is man- aging a much larger portfolio where IT projects are a minor portion. Add to this additional delay where CDS or TBS in its unofficial provider role are added. This is another reason projects take months and years. Whether insourced or outsourced, the continuing trend of private and public sector enterprises is toward shared ser- vice organizations and maturing those organizations. SSC has demonstrated it can improve service and security, add ca- pabilities, and save money by managing across the enterprise; however, no orga- nization is lawfully mandated to manage the software of the enterprise to this same end. The Government continues to have significant software issues, e.g., being out of compliance in some of its software agreements and missing opportunities to save tens of millions of dollars through GC-wide enterprise agreements. In accor- dance with the Shared Services Act, SSC could easily seize this opportunity. Public Services and Procurement Canada The Minister Responsible for SSC has the authority to define the services pro- vided under the Shared Services Act. The definition includes data centre services, which includes processing and storage of GC data, even in cloud or Software as a Service (SaaS) environments. Therefore, under the Act, no other department than SSC may host (or contract the hosting of) GC data, as it is a data centre service. Government organizations affected by the SSA must obtain their services from SSC and nowhere else (including PSPC), and doing so is a violation of the Act. Yet organizations continue to unlawfully ob- tain these services from PSPC (this defi- nition of unlawfulness was confirmed by Department of Justice attorneys prior to my departure). To illustrate how previous lines begin to blur, let’s look at software currently provided by SSC to GC customers: • Microsoft Office is provided on desktop and laptop devices. • Microsoft Office 365, which is a SaaS service, is also available from the Mi- crosoft Enterprise Agreement, procured and provided as a service by SSC. • Why would management of this agree- ment and of the service change if the Government moved to Office 365? Logically, SSC would continue to man- age both, yet the current environment might cause a change due to artificiali- ties in governance. Treasury Board Secretariat Many may be surprised TBS acts as an IT provider although it is not in TBS’s man- date. TBS is increasing its role as a service provider by providing certain centralized IT and collaboration services. There is an obvious concern regarding what checks and balances exist for TBS initiatives, e.g., contract management, and OPMCA (this is akin to “owning the bank and counting your own money”), and there have been issues. Canada Digital Service Canada Digital Service was based on the UK’s Government Digital Service and the U.S.’s 18F, both of which were estab- lished for different reasons facing those countries. The justification for CDS used examples of ongoing successful projects and the assumption that more depart- ments would have such successful proj- Government organizations have complained about the confusion by multiple organizations and sometimes conflicting guidance as to the role of each organization, including when the guidance is different than the law and official mandates. Forcing customers to go to different departments for infrastructure, software or cloud services based on artificialities makes the customer secondary to a parochial division of responsibilities.