The Privy Council Office needs some new computers — and they want to buy Apple, not Windows

2017/02/06 Leave a comment

Fun piece by David Akin on PCO’s purchase of Apple. As a long-time Mac user, was frustrated by the corporate IT folks who were overly slavish with respect to Windows and Blackberry.

But Macs have generally always had a place in the Comms shop for videos and other creative work:

Between federal government civilian employees and the RCMP and Canadian Forces uniformed members, there must be close to 500,000 people.  Almost all of those folks would need a desktop computer. Many would need a laptop computer. And many would need a government-issued smartphone.

All those devices — not to mention the servers that store government data and software — present one heckuva a challenge from an information technology management point-of-view. The federal government’s I.T. chief has to worry about security, about cost, interoperability, and ease of administration when it comes to training and software updates. For those reasons, the government has for years standardized on computers that run Microsoft’s Windows operating system which means, almost by default, a standard deployment of Microsoft’s Office suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access.

The standard smartphone deployed to government employees has, for years, been a BlackBerry.

But things are changing.

Example: Last night, the government posted a tender for a supplier to fix up bureaucrats who work in the Privy Council Office with 52 computers — from Apple!

Now, maybe the PCO was working on Macs before this tender offer went out. I’ve asked the department if that’s the case and we will update here. I am told, in fact, by a PCO spokesperson that it is not unusual for departments to have a small number of Apple computer in use “for specialized requirements.”

 

…The PCO is the federal government department that supports the work of the prime minister. It is the civil service mirror/partner, if you will, of the PMO — the Prime Minister’s Office. Officials in both the PMO and PCO work closely together. In my personal experience, I have seen many PMO officials using Apple products. And I know via some documents I dug up using an access to information request that the prime minister himself had some Apple products purchased for his use at his home office at Rideau cottage. He bought (if memory serves) an iPad Pro, among other devices and information technology.

But Trudeau is not the only prime minister to have picked Apple. That’s right: Stephen Harper was an Apple guy. The one and only time I ever saw Harper use any piece of information technology, it was his own personal Apple MacBook, which he brought into the House of Commons one night during a long “take-note” debate. Interestingly, the Apple logo that is on the front of any MacBook had been covered on Harper’s device with a family photo.

And it was another Conservative politician — Stockwell Day — who was the first MP I ever saw to bring a tablet into the House of Commons and, you bet, that tablet was an iPad. Nowadays, if you look down upon the House of Commons, you will see a sea of iPads.

But I can tell you House of Commons I.T. had to be dragged kicking and screaming to agree to have iPads on the House network or to agree to support iPads.

And so it may be with the broader government-wide I.T. community, already dealing right now with a very rough transition to some common platforms and computing environments via Shared Services Canada. (And we won’t even talk about the fiasco that is the computerized Phoenix payroll system.)

But at the Privy Council Office — the command-and-control centre for the entire civil service — 50 Apple computers are on the way.

Why are they going Mac and getting off of Windows? Unknown at this point. Again: Questions are in to PCO and we’ll see what they say. But there might be a few reasons.

First, speaking as a guy who used the original Apple McIntosh to paginate my university paper back in the 80s, who used to be a technology reporter and who still has a working Apple G4 Cube at home, Macs are just, well, machines for the rest of us. (See that famous Apple ad, below, which introduced the world to the McIntosh).

But there is also some evidence that, even though a comparable Apple desktop is more expensive versus a comparable Windows box, the total cost of ownership — TCO in I.T.-speak — is actually lower once you factor in how much it costs to provide tech support to users of device and other issues.  Heck, even IBM now buys Macs and encourages its clients to do so because of lower costs. (IBM, incidentally, was widely believed to have been the firm that was mocked in that original 1984 Apple ad.)

Source: The Privy Council Office needs some new computers — and they want to buy Apple, not Windows | National Post

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Sweating the details at Shared Services: What it will take to reset it

2016/11/21 Leave a comment

Good article capturing some of the major differences between the public and private sector, and why large-scale IT projects are so hard to do well in the former:

It’s not just that its top mandarins lack knowledge and interest in IT. It’s that the entire procurement system and its political overseers suffocate rather than expedite the rollout of large IT projects.

This is messy stuff — software underpinning data centres and telecommunications networks evolves constantly. Upgrading applications across dozens of federal departments inevitably produces conflicts. Programmers and their managers must be free to resolve them — and to drop approaches that aren’t working. The job demands constant testing and feedback at a very micro level.

Shared Services’ first chief operating officer, Grant Westcott, had nearly four decades of experience in government and the private sector — where he was instrumental in consolidating IT systems at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. But at Shared Services, nearly every move he made was constrained.

At CIBC, Westcott would have been given a budget, a mandate and left alone to get on with it. Had his projects been late and run over budget, it’s unlikely he would have lasted there nearly a decade. In the event, Westcott and his team streamlined the bank’s telecommunications systems and collapsed 22 data centres into just two, trimming CIBC operating costs significantly.

However, the federal government doesn’t allow for this sort of flexibility. Procurement documents contain page after page of technical requirements for programmers and IT consultants. The projects are over-engineered, in other words, in a usually forlorn effort to mitigate most conceivable risks.

Budgets and timelines are spelled out in meticulous detail — even though relatively little is known during the earliest stages about how projects will actually progress. And, of course, there is often extensive cabinet oversight of projects that are costly, late or affect government websites. Which is to say, most of them.

According to experts hired to do these projects, what is needed are wins — IT projects that succeed. And the best way to make these happen is to start with small steps — manageable projects or parts of projects that work. The more of these that Shared Services can string together, the more other federal departments will be willing to let it handle.

This would also make things much easier for Shared Services president Ron Parker — instead of continually revising deadlines for his agency’s main projects, he would be able to point to services actually being performed. Far more satisfying — assuming his people can get things done.

Source: Sweating the details at Shared Services: What it will take to reset it | Ottawa Citizen

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No excuse for Ottawa’s bungled technology: Barrie McKenna

2016/09/20 Leave a comment

One of the rare commentaries that connects the dots between Shared Services Canada, the Phoenix pay system, and the inability of government to manage complex IT projects (admittedly, some of the most complex around).

It does beg the question, as posed by Donald Savoie in his book, What Is Government Good At?: A Canadian Answer.

One also has to ask the question, in all the decks, analyses, MCs and TB submissions, were the risks clearly stated and assessed? Did the public servants provide ‘fearless advice’ or not?

Maybe you don’t think it’s a big deal that tens of thousands of federal government workers are going unpaid because of the botched roll out of a new pay system.

Most civil servants are overpaid and underworked anyway, right?

Many Canadians may feel similarly untroubled that government data centres are frequently crashing, downing websites and leaving key agencies, such as Statistics Canada, unable to get timely economic information to financial markets.

But it does matter. Canada isn’t some tin-pot country that can’t pay its workers, run a computer or produce timely data. It’s a G7 country, a modern, advanced economy that should be a model of good governance.

There is a disturbing back story to these embarrassing headlines.

Turn back the clock to 2010. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was eager to demonstrate it could wring billions of dollars in savings out of a fat government bureaucracy it neither liked nor trusted.

Two of the signature initiatives that emerged from this effort was the centralized Phoenix pay system and the birth of Shared Services Canada, a $1.9-billion super agency that would consolidate all of the government technology systems.

And for years afterward it would point to these efforts to bolster its reputation as a sound manager of the machinery of government.

Both have been unmitigated disasters.

The fallout from these moves continues to reverberate through the government. Not only have the promised savings never materialized, but Ottawa is now spending tens of millions more to fix the problems.

On Friday, Statscan’s chief statistician, Wayne Smith, abruptly resigned, complaining that the agency’s independence has been compromised by “disruptive, ineffective, slow and unaffordable” technology supplied by Shared Services Canada.

Mr. Smith’s frustrations boiled over July 8 when the agency’s main website was down for nearly eight hours due to a power switch failure, snarling the release of June’s jobs numbers, one of the country’s most important economic indicators. Statscan staff resorted to snapping the document on a smartphone and faxing pages to data users at financial institutions and media outlets.

Statscan’s website routinely goes down on busy data-release days.

The problems at Shared Services, which consolidated the information technology of 43 departments, go way beyond Statscan. The federal Auditor-General concluded in a report this year that Shared Services’ operations are so dogged by hidden costs, delays, security problems and poor accounting that potential savings remain “largely unknown.”

The Liberals quietly boosted Shared Services’ budget by $384-million over two years in its March budget, in part to keep creaky old computer systems from crashing. Critics worry that much more will be needed to fully modernize systems.

In late July, smoke inside a federal data centre in Ottawa forced the temporary shutdown of government e-mail and some websites.

Meanwhile, Ottawa says the estimated bill to fix IBM’s Phoenix pay system has reached $45-million to $50-million, and could climb higher. The government has promised to cover any out-of-pocket expenses of workers who couldn’t pay bills or were forced to borrow money when they weren’t paid.

Just like Shared Services, Phoenix was supposed to save the government money – $70-million a year – by consolidating a myriad of pay systems spanning 300,000 workers in more than 100 departments. Most of the first-year savings have now been wiped out.

A big part of the problem can be traced to a decision by the Conservatives to create a new payroll-processing centre in Miramichi, N.B. Roughly 500 – mostly inexperienced – new hires, would replace more than 2,000 payroll staff from across the country.

Ottawa has since been forced to add pay specialists in Gatineau, Que., and at temporary offices in Winnipeg, Montreal, Toronto and Sherbrooke, Que. – all to help fix the problem of workers getting paid too much, not enough or not at all.

Efficiency was never the main reason for choosing Miramichi. Putting the payroll centre in the city was political compensation for the closing of the long-gun registry, which had been located there.

The Conservatives fed the country a narrative about making government leaner and more efficient.

They delivered something quite different.

Source: No excuse for Ottawa’s bungled technology – The Globe and Mail

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StatsCan says government’s IT agency providing ‘slower, lower quality services’

2016/07/20 Leave a comment

Government IT is one of the most complex areas given the range and scale of services needed. But this report, along with the current problems with the Phoenix pay system, provides pretty compelling evidence that the officials who sold the concept – which I support – did not adequately address implementation issues.

The political level is equally to blame for not having asked the needed questions and likely for under-resourcing the initiative:

Setbacks and shortcomings at the federal government’s tech support agency could delay Statistics Canada’s release of “mission critical” information required by the Bank of Canada, Department of Finance and commercial banks, according to a report.

The document, submitted to Canada’s chief statistician Wayne Smith, is one among more than a dozen reports, drafted at Smith’s request from all of his directors general. Smith asked for the reports in an effort to fully understand the impact of Shared Services Canada (SSC) on his department.

The memos, obtained by CBC News under access to information laws, detail how yet another federal ministry is embroiled in a dispute with SSC over services standards, red tape, billing and the capacity of IT infrastructure to keep up with departmental demands.

SSC was created by the previous government to centralize and standardize information technology services in a bid to save money.

At the end of February, in the run-up to the 2016 Census, Smith shared the results of this report with Canada’s top civil servant, Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick. The correspondence is entirely redacted except for the subject line, which reads Heightened Program Risks at Statistics Canada.

“Numerous challenges in terms of reliability, timeliness, effectiveness and affordability are being experienced, impacting delivery of programs, projects and plans across all program areas,” wrote Lise Duquet, director general of the StatsCan informatics branch.

She said the savings expected from consolidating services under SSC have not materialized, pointing to how ongoing support from the IT Help Desk is now more costly than when StatsCan operated the email service.

Lack of accountability

Despite “harvesting” $38 million from Statistics Canada with the promise to upgrade IT infrastructure, Duquet said StatisCan was told it would have to cover the cost of migrating all information to new data centres — something she said the agency cannot afford without putting its programs at risk.

Governance at SSC has been identified as a problem by other departments. Duquet echoed those frustrations, “Governance is very complex and there is a lack of accountability to deliver on expected outcomes that are critical to programs.”

Another recurring theme that surfaced in the reports is that SSC can’t or won’t meet StatsCan’s IT requirements because it refuses to upgrade computer infrastructure.

Daniela Rivandra, director general of the industry statistics branch at the agency, warned of the risk of a bottleneck of processing capacity this year. “This will translate into many programs having to delay releases and not meeting legislative requirements for providing the data,” she said.

“Having to delay their release would be unprecedented and will impact the ability of key users (e.g. Bank of Canada, Department of Finance, commercial banks, etc.) of making timely decisions, translating into considerable embarrassment to the government of Canada.”

Due to the poor level of service provided by SSC, the corporate services support division decided to self-fund a unit of 3 persons to provide support to our employees and to ensure that some SSC initiatives get done.– Yves Béland, director general StatsCan operations branch

The directors general’s reports also reveal deep concerns about  branches running out of server space. Craig Kunz said the operating system on which the Consumer Price Index depends, is at an elevated risk of failure, yet SSC has frozen procurement with no apparent contingency plans.

‘Slower and lower quality service’

Telecommunications is another persistent irritant.

“Our relationship and experience with SSC with regards to telecommunications have been quite difficult to say the least,” reported Yves Béland, director general of the operations branch. “Due to the poor level of service provided by SSC, the corporate services support division decided to self-fund a unit of three persons to provide support to our employees and to ensure that some SSC initiatives get done.”

Assistant chief statistician Connie Graziadei said service is slower and lower quality, especially on the rollout of cellphones to census employees working in the field.

She described how SSC provided cellphones with the wrong area codes or “incorrect cellphone providers were sometimes assigned to a phone, making it unusable in the geography where the phone was intended to be in operation.”

In one case, an employee had an unusable phone for more than two months. A StatsCan manager sent the woman a spare phone on the Bell network, instead of Rogers. While the employee was thrilled to finally be able to do her job, a long string of emails shows SSC was more concerned about StatsCan overstepping its authority.

“You are not able to simply “re-assign” devices when there is an issue. We have procedures in place to deal with issues like Dana was having,” wrote Todd Mair of SSC on Feb. 2, 2016.

David Kudlovich of StatsCan fired back.

“Two months without a phone [is] far too long when this is the sole device they receive from SSC. Two weeks is actually far too long. There are occupational health and safety concerns when an employee doesn’t have a means of communication and the employee cannot do their job they’re hired to do,” he said.

Yet the documents show the problems continued for several more months.

Source: StatsCan says government’s IT agency providing ‘slower, lower quality services’ – Politics – CBC News

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Foreign workers issue delays trade deals

2014/05/20 Leave a comment

The higher-end of Temporary Foreign Workers. But given that one of the original cases was in relation to foreign IT workers displacing Canadian IT workers at the Royal Bank, not an easy issue for the Government. Particularly given that in contrast to NAFTA and the upcoming CETA, India is a low-cost supplier of IT services:

While discussions have also been delayed in part because of India’s lengthy election cycle, the fact that foreign workers have emerged as a potential stumbling block has implications for other lucrative trade agreements that Canada hopes to realize. It remains to be seen whether the resounding victory by Narendra Modi, a pro-business Hindu nationalist who heads the Bharatiya Janata Party, will help Canada overcome the impasse.

Rentala Chandrashekhar, the president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), which represents India’s IT community, recently visited Ottawa to stress the negative impact Canada’s reforms are having on trade and the potential that further changes could make things worse for both economies.

Mr. Chandrashekhar, a former senior public servant with the Indian government, met with Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, senior officials with Employment Minister Jason Kenney’s department and Don Stephenson, the chief trade negotiator for the Canada-India talks.

“Most important is perception, the perception that the Canadian economy is becoming more closed,” Mr. Chandrashekhar told the Globe. “The perception that walls are being put up … [This] is not something that is very conductive to the kind of environment that you need for pushing forward the idea of a freer trade regime.”

Foreign workers issue delays trade deals – The Globe and Mail.

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