The Shared Services Centre
The necessary environment for the efficient management of the Shared Service Center is lacking The department's administration of the Shared Services Centre (SSC) has been effective for sharing resources between the departments and delivering selected back-office services to a small client base. However, the governance arrangements established to oversight the SSC have not positioned it well for the future and the departments have not yet determined if the arrangement is efficient and resulting in savings. ANAO found instances where the advisory board of SSC was not consulted or involved in decisions relating to the strategic direction, financial arrangements and expenditure priorities. Information reported to the board did not focus on areas of strategic importance and the quality and completeness of this information could be improved. The mechanisms established for setting out responsibilities and obligations and ensuring transparency for services delivered by the SSC was weak. Service standards and levels were not fixed and can change. The delineation of responsibilities between the SSC and its clients was not clear and there was no commitment by the SSC to certify the quality of its control framework.
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Electronic Health Records - VA Needs to Identify and Report Existing System Costs
Difficulties after 30 years of decentralized development The US Department of Veterans Affairs provides health care services to approximately 9 million veterans and their families. However, the IT system they use is more than 30 years old, is costly to maintain, and does not fully support exchanging health data. The US GAO, analyzed the system's modenization plans and found serious problems with definition and cost estimation.
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Has Public Administration Used All Opportunities for Efficient Management of ICT Infrastructure?
Efficient Management of ICT Infrastructure Centralised management of ICT services and infrastructure would allow the institutions to optimise in long run their resources – financial, human, material and technical. However, we observed during the audit that the move towards ICT centralisation and single data centres has ceased. The different ministries and even the institutions subordinated to the same ministry do not cooperate sufficiently with each other regarding the ICT management, maintenance, and infrastructure placement. They rather choose to maintain their own, sometimes even several, data centres.
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Cost-intensive data centres stood idle for years
Idle data centres As found by the German SAI, some of costly Federal data centres stood largely idle. The Ministry failed to adequately assess the project risks. The Ministry needs to avoid similar shortcomings in the proposed federal IT consolidation project.
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