Shared Services Canada

Shared Services Canada (SSC; French: Services partagés Canada (SPC)) is an agency of the Government of Canada responsible for providing and consolidating information technology services across federal government departments. It was established in 2011 to combine services such as email and data storage that were at the time duplicated by each agency.

Shared Services Canada
Services partagés Canada
Agency overview
Formed2011
TypeAgency responsible for IT Service Delivery across Government Departments.
Employees5,596[1]
Minister responsible
Agency executive
  • Paul Glover, President
Websitewww.spc-ssc.gc.ca

Mandate

The SSC mandate came into force 4 August 2011 as part of the passage of the Shared Services Canada Act, which established SSC as an agency responsible for consolidating IT Systems across the Canadian Federal Government. The Act provides for a minister to oversee the agency and report toParliament, currently, Joyce Murray, the Minister of Digital Government.[2]

SSC provides support for 42 separate Departments and Agencies across the Canadian Federal Government.[3]

Key initiatives

As part of SSC's mandate, a number of key projects were identified in order to consolidate and modernize the Canadian Government's IT infrastructure

Email Consolidation Initiative

SSC is working to consolidate the email systems of its partner agencies which include over 550,000 mailboxes into a single system.[4] The project has been met with multiple delays due to its large scope and complexity.[5]

Data Centre Consolidation

SSC began the process of consolidating the Canadian Federal Government's approximately 800 Data Centres down to 7 newly designed Enterprise Data Centres (EDC). As of April 1, 2017, SSC has closed 92 data centers across the Country and had begun to migrate applications new EDC's located in:

  • Borden, ON
  • Barrie, ON
  • Gatineau, QC
  • Montreal, QC

SSC estimates that current legacy systems comprise over 56,000 m2 of Data Centre space, over 70 PB of computer data storage and over 14,000 applications.[6]

Telecommunications Transformation Program

SSC is working to consolidate Canadian Federal Government Networks down from 50 separate Wide Area (WAN) Networks down to a single network for all departments. Another initiative is to consolidate Centrex phone lines through the use of VoIP and Mobile Phones. On 5 October 2017, SSC signed a $176M CAD contract with Telus to consolidate over 80,000 phone lines and expand desktop video conferencing and instant messaging.[7]

Criticism

SSC has been criticized for slow service delivery and for putting the mandates of key federal agencies at risk due to poor support. Former RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson criticized SSC for outages including access to key databases such as CPIC and for outages of the Agency's BlackBerry service.[8]

In August 2016, Chief Statistician of Canada Wayne Smith resigned to protest the effects of Shared Services Canada on Statistics Canada.[9]

gollark: I do by divine right, but that's not relevant.
gollark: Why would you think that?
gollark: I don't know of any functioning governments which actually do offer that right.
gollark: It probably does in practice, but I don't think that's really what they meant.
gollark: Sounds like a great amendment!

References
  1. Canada Shared Services (9 November 2017). "Departmental Results Report 2016-17".
  2. Nov 27, Marco Vigliotti Published on; 2019 5:30pm (2019-11-27). "Murray handed responsibility for Shared Services Canada". iPolitics. Retrieved 2020-02-16.
  3. Canada, Shared Services (2017-03-14). "Partners - Canada.ca". www.canada.ca. Government of Canada. Retrieved 8 June 2018.
  4. Canada, Shared Services (2012-09-07). "Email Transformation Initiative". www.canada.ca.
  5. "Government email project still stalled after five years, $100 million spent". Global News. Retrieved 21 December 2017.
  6. Canada, Shared Services (2012-09-07). "Data Centre Consolidation Initiative - Canada.ca". www.canada.ca. Retrieved 20 December 2017.
  7. "Investments in Modernizing Telecom Services for Federal Organizations - Canada.ca". www.canada.ca. Shared Services Canada. 2017-10-05. Retrieved 21 December 2017.
  8. "RCMP again complains about Shared Services Canada's performance". IT World Canada. IT World Canada.
  9. "Ottawa's IT system overhaul yet to show any cost savings". CBC. 2016-09-19.


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