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Canada's Top Mountie Issues Blistering Memo On IT Failures (www.cbc.ca)
Reader Freshly Exhumed writes: RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson has levelled a blistering memo obtained by the CBC on how critical IT failures have increased by 129 per cent since Shared Services Canada took over tech support for the entire government five years ago. Not only that, the memo says, the duration of each outage has increased by 98 per cent. "Its 'one size fits all' IT shared services model has negatively impacted police operations, public and officer safety and the integrity of the criminal justice system," reads the memo. A list of specific incidents includes an 11-hour network computer outage on Jan. 18 that downed every Mountie's BlackBerry, affected dispatching, and prevented the RCMP and 240 other police forces from accessing the Canadian Police Information Centre database.
Single payer health care does. This has nothing to do with single payer anything. I don't know how anybody could believe that it does. This was a catastrophe visited upon Canada's civil service by the Conservatives under Stephen Harper. It has been a ridiculous screw-up since day one, and will not get any better under the Liberals. There are too many different ministries, agencies and departments with too many different data requirements and laws governing who can be provided with certain information.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I've seen centralized IT work far better than decentralized. It comes down to execution.
After working in Canada IT for several years, I can place the blame squarely on culture. IT is considered below the janitor socially, underfunded, run Command-Control by politically driven management... and those are the good things. It goes downhill from there.