About 8,000 public-sector tech workers are being wrapped into a new $2-billion federal agency in an effort to streamline Ottawa’s sprawling and disjointed information technology systems.
In a move the Conservative government calls “long overdue,” a hodgepodge of e-mail systems, data centres and networks will be consolidated under one virtual roof.
The payoff, says Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose, will not only be a more efficient and secure information technology system, but also a cheaper one.
“To be clear, there is no new building, no new employees and no new spending,” Ms. Ambrose said Thursday at a news conference in Ottawa. “This is about standardization and consolidation.”
The federal government through its various departments and agencies currently spends about $5-billion a year on IT, of which $2-billion is to be transferred to the oversight and control of a new agency called Shared Services Canada.
“This is a whole new way of doing business for the government,” said Tony Clement, the president of the Treasury Board.
He said the government anticipates saving $100-million to $200-million annually under the new agency.
The goal is to streamline a system that currently uses more than 100 different e-mail formats, over 300 data centres and more than 3,000 “overlapping and unco-ordinated” electronic networks.
Ms. Ambrose said the government “has been working on this kind of initiative for years.”
She said federal departments are “ingrained in their silos and they have a way of doing business, their very custom-created niche network systems that they’ve been reliant on for many years, that they’re comfortable with.
“So this is a real shift for some departments.”
The information technology system has come under sharp criticism from the federal auditor general, who last year found that aging IT systems represented a serious issue for the government and required billions in new spending in just three departments alone.
Then-auditor general Sheila Fraser also found there were no government-wide perspectives or proposed solutions to the problem.
Ms. Ambrose and Mr. Clement both referred to Ms. Fraser’s 2010 critique – but not to her concerns about under-spending on aging IT infrastructure.
In fact, both ministers stressed the initiative will have no net cost. They said the effort is part of the Conservative government’s commitment to trim billions in federal spending and balance the books by 2014.
The announcement came as federal employees at Environment Canada learned that more than 700 jobs, about 10 per cent of the department’s work force, will be chopped.
The new IT agency and the job cuts at Environment Canada are separate from an across-the-board program review which seeks budget cuts of 5 or 10 per cent in every federal department and agency – including Shared Services Canada.
Ms. Ambrose tried to play down the prospect of job cuts among the IT workers transferred to the new agency.
“Cost savings do not have to come exclusively, obviously, from job losses,” she said. “We have to look at ways … in how the government does business for cost savings. In this instance, we see substantial savings.”
