Situation All Canucked Up: Canadian Mounties boss blasts blundering government IT merge The head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has blasted his IT staff, claiming the number of computer outages hitting the force has more than doubled – and that cockups take twice as long to fix. In a memo leaked this week, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson slammed the performance of Shared Services Canada (SSC), the …
If SSC isn't working for the Mounties, maybe they should do business with CSC instead. Within a year or two, that should have Canada's Finest begging for a return to the shared services model!
Likewise, I'm sure that some of our British Reginistas would be happy to put the Mounties in touch with Capita, assuming these Brit Reginistas have somehow developed an irrational hatred of Canada.
At the same time tens of thousands of government employees were being overpaid, underpaid, or not paid at all by the super duper Phoenix payroll system, and two provinces worth of year end tax statements are being replaced as we speak.
Never should have let the Conservatives near a pocket calculator, much less real computers.
Yup!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/psac-pay-pheonix-foote-1.3545583
They're assholes.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/public-service-payroll-problems-1.3553381
I'm sure McCoy felt like saying, said 'beam me up, Scotty'. The employee surviving off emergency cheques out of Health Canada's petty cash, I'll wager the MP's were paid on time.
Trudeau's liberals have been in power long enough by now to no longer have the right to this excuse (I realise Harperites were still blaming the liberals for everything after ten years in power; however the liberals were supposed to be responsible adults rather than the spoiled brats the conservatives were).
The liberals had enough time to dismantle the Shared Services. They did not. They also had enough time to fix the Phoenix - and, in fact, they had the opportunity to smother it in the craddle before it burned anybody. They did not. They had enough time to fix the veterans affairs. They did not. They also had enough time to reform the electoral system as they promised. They did not, and instead pulled back from the unconditional promise they made.
At the present rate, it looks like the only promise the liberals are going to keep is legalising marijuana; at least that one appears to be right on schedule. It will certainly make quite a few people happier, at least for a while - so there is that.
And after all this politicians still act surprised when almost nobody trusts and respects them. Well color me pink and tickle me senseless...
"Trudeau's liberals have been in power long enough by now to no longer have the right to this excuse"
This comment portrays a profound ignorance of large gov't IT projects. Regardless of the political party or even the country, once a behemoth one-size-fits-all IT project comes live, it is almost impossible to correct. Phoenix was a classic big-bang train-wreck in the making.
Shared services has been a disaster from the beginning. It has already led to the resignation of the Chief Statistician in protest against SSC effectively sabotaging Statistics Canada and its census operations. SSC has gutted the computing capabilities of the National Research Council and Environment Canada, which have to rely on out-of-warranty and out-of-production systems for their work. The government-owned E-mail system SSC was supposed to implement is now four years behind the schedule, more than 100% over the budget, and will likely never work as intended. For the first two years of SSC operation, all travel by the employees of that department had to be processed manually, on pieces of paper passed around through the mail: the government's computer and networks nerve centre wasn't able to convince their SAP installation to do what they needed to happen.
Nonetheless, it looks like nobody has the political courage to pull the plug on that monster.
s/goverment-owned/government-wide/g
It's also government-owned, of course - or at least government-allowed-to-continue-to-use-it-while-the-licence-ransom-payments-are-kept-up - but it is the government-wide bit which is material.
P. S. I hate auto-correct, and the way every stupid program re-enables it after each major version update, despite the bloody thing being turned off with extreme prejudice in the version they are updating.
This may well be true in the private sector. In government IT megaprojects, 20 minutes spent on a halfway serious cost-benefit analysis will almost invariably tell you that you will put in more money and resources to get a worse IT service. Logically then, the project should be killed - yet it just as invariably proceeds, greatly advancing the careers of those behind it. These people then move to pursue other opportunitities at a higher level, leaving somebody else to hold the can.
If you have ever been anywhere close to government IT, I am sure you can supply your own examples.
greatly advancing the careers of those behind it.
Its staggering that thats the case really , yet i do believe it is the case
I just dont know how they manage to turn "I was running/designed the multi million $$$ project that was a complete fail" into a positive CV entry
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