Added context. This is what happens when you take 6000+ staff from 40+ departments and create one large centralized IT department with little to no up front planning. An absolute meat grinder. Everything is on life-support until the fire is so large that you have a near national incident and then it becomes top priority. Cycle repeat.
In fairness, its a difficult call to get right as distributed IT is so clearly a waste of money, and some services, like email and hosting scale easily.
The problem in a big bureaucracy is that adopting a real shared service model is an incremental process, but that's a slow and difficult march that requires a lot of high level political support.
Ripping off the bandaid is tough, and seems more achievable. Bold action usually gets the bigshots promoted away by year 3. But you end up stealing smart people to big things, and the scrubs are left doing the little things -- but the little things like distributing cellphones are critical too.
It's a harsh reality and difficult to execute -- most of the successful examples are mostly from private sector and are mostly bullshit.
Distributed IT often seems like a waste of money, but having an IT staff and procedures built around the needs of a specific customer may provide better service at comparable or lower cost. Up front, all the analysis is super optimistic, and you can make the case that savings will be huge. The problem is that no one ever does the full ROI calculation including the inevitable loss of productivity, slower response time, and predictable failure to realize economies of scale.
In my experience there's probably a case for both. Having a local IT person you know and trust to take care of your immediate needs is going to be beneficial but it would also be nice if that person didn't have to patch your email server personally. Decentralized IT is great for things like email and shared hosting and generic services but individual teams may be better suited to having more direct control. I don't think its an all or nothing situation.
It actually IS nice when they have to patch your email server personally.
* They're ALLOWED patch it. When the org gets too big, any patch is going to break someone else's workflow. Everything freezes into place behind change management by people who don't know the full system for people who are too busy to read every sub-organization's change management announcements.
* They WILL patch it. They know you, your boss knows their boss, you all matter. In a large company the individual asking for a change is an idiot, and annoyance, and a nobody- no matter how smart the change is.
* They CAN patch it. In the small IT org, there isn't room for someone who doesn't know what they're doing. In the large IT org, there is room for enough people who aren't technical to hide out they can start hiring their friends and crowd out all technical skill, while maintaining a thick smoke screen that diffuses all responsibility.
This really runs counter to my experiences in IT. Generally the larger the company I have been in the more likely my email and printers actually work.
Front-line IT is much more about soft skills than technical skills. Putting paper in printers and showing users how to use google are not hard technical skills but are crucial to the success of an IT organization.
The people who understand how to manage email servers should be doing so for the whole organization because supporting 10,000 users isn't really much more complicated than supporting 10. There's no reason to have 100 email administrators in an organization when it can be done with a handful.
The change management procedures for sub-organizations are irrelevant, the marketing team just gets email from somewhere, they shouldn't have to know or care where it comes from or how it is managed as long as the SLA is met. Let them carry on with what they are good at instead of struggling to find a competent email administrator.
I agree the team that manages email should be small, just like the team that manages the printers or whatever other IT plumbing but to me that's the benefit of a large IT organization, instead of having to find one guy who is a jack of all trades (and master of none) you leverage economies of scale and get experts in each service to manage them for everyone.
More context: The RCMP had a reputation long before shared services was a thing. For decades they never adapted their recruitment and training, continuing policies that drove tech-savvy individuals away from the force. (Google around. In recent years they've dramatically lowered recruitment standards to bring in younger blood. You don't even need to be Canadian any more.) The result is a force that seems to never get along with technology. Phones and radios just never seem to work properly.
I've taught more than a few cops (IT law / forensics) and have attended many lectures by RCMP officers claiming to be tech "experts". They aren't. The RCMP live in a very tight knowledge bubble.
For reference: The Vancouver police department recently hired 16 out of 2500 applicants. This is even with a large number of baby boomers retiring. You pretty much need a 4 year degree from a good school to be hired, they are quite selective. Whereas the RCMP will take almost any reasonably fit, under age 35 person with a high school degree and clean criminal record check.
Joining the RCMP is a crap shoot because you have no control over where you will be posted after finishing the academy. It could be 8 years of purgatory in Moose Jaw.
I'm laughing pretty hard at your last comment. Around here, there are much worse places to be posted than Moose Jaw. Rural isolation (entire RMs with populations of 200 people) plus significant substance abuse and domestic violence problems.
The point still stands though. Joining the RCMP is likely going to result in you going somewhere no one wants to be for a few years, because anyone with seniority transfers away as soon as possible.
That is the policy that drives tech talent away. It isnt just the location but the work you do there. Everyone had to do a decade of traffic enforcement before any chance of transfer to a tech-related post like forensics or "technology crime" ie child porn investigations.
I have heard that they are going to let west-coast recruits opt for west-coast postings ... but that still might be dawson rather than vancouver.
Ontario started this years ago, but phased. So clustering of like ministries at first. It is far from perfect, but the trajectory has been positive. Standards and homogeneity of the core services and base layers have made for far more reliable computing. Not fed in size, but still 100,000 users in addition to the public facing stuff is still large.
For those like me who are unfamiliar with what RCMP is - it's the Canadian police. The article is about the Canadian police commissioner raising concerns about the quality of IT support provided to them
RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) are a pretty unique police service. Depending on the area of the country they can operate as everything from federal law enforcement right down to local police services. In many rural places they operate as all levels of law enforcement all at once, something you wouldn't find in the US. The vast territory and mandate they cover makes for some unique challenges.
They're mostly equivalent to the FBI, except they have personnel which handle local police services in counties or regions which would not otherwise have local police services.
I worked on contract at this department and was declined a contract renewal when I was reprimanded for identifying a DOCUMENTED zero-day in of our scripts that managed some lofty systems. I was also reprimanded by the same manager for suggesting configuration management tools since he couldn't bill out the build time for that service vs. my time building each machine by hand.
I've heard of similar issues with the pay system where people haven't been paid in months and needed urgent pay issued, or others who received extra money and were then asked to pay it back.
I can only imagine how hard it must be for the government to pull off modernization. It's the poster-child definition of "big slow bureaucracy" and it's asked to pull off high complexity feats at large scale, with little, uncompetitive money to offer to recruits (in comparison to the private sector), while juggling with politics and policies that make you buy IBM and Microsoft.
Pretty happy I don't work in this. Yet, I'd join a "shock troop" if the government was to pull off a Digital Service kind of thing with acceptable pay, although the idea of working in all that big government crap makes me feel a bit sick inside.
> It's the poster-child definition of "big slow bureaucracy" and it's asked to pull off high complexity feats at large scale, with little, uncompetitive money to offer to recruits (in comparison to the private sector)
If you have good reasons why you cannot offer so much money, there are still options available to attract smart people for the job: Just give them a lot more intellectual freedom to do "the right thing" (instead of having to implement political compromises) and give them the authority to be really allowed to do so. Also not every smart person who can, say, program really well "is a startup guy". There are people who prefer a "more safe, plannable career" - here public service has something to offer. Also it might be a good idea to have the job at still attractive places that have a very low cost of living: What is interesting is "salary minus cost of living". So these jobs can still enable a higher standard of living than, say in SF or NY, while paying much less.
TLDR: There are lots of other ways to attract smart people if you have serious reasons why you cannot offer so much money. But you have to be willing.
Just give them a lot more intellectual freedom to do "the right thing" (instead of having to implement political compromises) and give them the authority to be really allowed to do so
That's exactly the one thing that working in the public service CAN'T provide you. If you screw up, you and everyone in the chain of responsibility right up to the people who directly report to your ministry's cabinet member have their necks on the line; public service employees typically enjoy very posh pensions and no one is looking to lose that by getting sacked.
I think we incentivize public service employees to do the safe thing rather than the right thing when those two things are not the same. Losing a public service pension is a terrible cost for failure, and I don't think we equivalently reward the success-side of risk for these people.
It would be interesting to know what government could accomplish if the public service gave compensation that was more in line with the private sector.
> That's exactly the one thing that working in the public service CAN'T provide you.
Counterexample: In Germany university professors are part of the public service. They (as probably every tenured university professor nearly anywhere worldwide) do have lots of freedom in the research they do etc.
"Right" is usually a matter of opinion in IT. In my experience IT professionals often have passionate opinions on the right technical approach which aren't based on any actual hard data and fail to account for critical business issues. So just giving people intellectual freedom is unlikely to produce good results in the long run; there has to be a structure and process in place to prevent serious problems.
Please consider joining a for-profit organization in the private sector that provides Software-as-a-Service to enterprise government customers.
I am the co-founder of one such company, Binti. We are making a distinct positive impact on government IT, without needing to be employees of the government.
I upvoted you because I feel it's a legitimate question. One thing I've found in my various experiences with the RCMP is that they generally seem to take a lot of pride in their work and role. The ceremonial events involving the horses and red uniforms are pretty impressive.
This, I think, spills over into their day-to-day work too. I've been pulled over for traffic offenses and have only experienced the utmost professionalism. All very "matter of fact" with no bullshit. Road-side stop checks for impaired driving have gone very smoothly. I called once to report a collision I had with a deer and she ribbed me a little: "when did the accident occur?" "around 9pm" "great, thank you. I've got you all written up here for hunting without a license and hunting after dark. Do you have a pen handy for writing down the file number?" And recently I was at a remote beach and found a woman who had clearly ingested a substance of some kind and was pretty messed up. We talked and she was alone and a long way from home. RCMP dispatch handled it well, and 10 minutes later the officer handling the case called me back to ask for more specific directions and to thank me for taking the time to help her keep people safe.
Do they have an impeccable record? No. But in general they are vastly different than the police forces generally covered in the media.
Here's another example for CBSA: http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/politics/shared-services-canada-...
Here's another example for DND: http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/politics/shared-services-canada-...