September 24, 2011
GoC’s Shared Services Represents Only Part of the Solution
The Government of Canada announced an initiative to centralize services across the government, to develop consistency across departments, and most importantly cut costs by reducing redundant systems and contracts.
On paper, it makes sense. To improve efficiency and lower costs by consolidating services centrally and reducing contracts. Solid argument, seems very reasonable.
In 2006 Tokyo’s Department of Recreation launched their “Swimming Pool shared services” initiative resulting greater efficiencies and lower costs for pool administrators by combining the pools (and their staff) together and reducing pool hours. “Pooling resources” is always the right solution.
Sadly and unsurprisingly, in practice, there is no direct correlation between simply centralising services and realising cost benefits. Despite many attempts before to centralise services, the result hasn’t always been savings in cost, but instead the opposite.
The Government of Canada is currently reliant on proprietary file formats and proprietary software applications, which lock it into a licensing bind with a single software manufacturer — Microsoft. There is not only a question of cost — as we pay a monopoly corporation for per-seat licenses to run software that already dominates the market — but more importantly, there is the question of future access to our own data. In this post, I’d like to share my thoughts on both issues.