“That’s why the data piece is difficult. There is a whole public perception piece about having people understand that it is being done for genuine reasons with their best interests at heart.”
Streamlined
Where legitimate reasons exist for data sharing, he said, services can be streamlined, made more efficient and effective, allowing more resources to be deployed on frontline services instead of administration.
Identifying what data can be shared in this manner is a potentially challenging prospect too.
The first step, said McGrath is data classification, which will be informed by the CIO Council.
“We will work with the CIO Council to try to establish … what constitutes the different levels of classification of data.”
He said that there will always be data that is non-sensitive and can be hosted in a public or a private cloud, but then there will be other data that would require increased protections and will be limited on where and how it can reside.
McGrath said that having spoken to other agencies, they all went with the approach of having the data classification determined first. With the classification determined, he said that it can then be brought to the Data Protection Commission for approval.
With the classification set, further determinations can be made as to which data can be shared and how best to do it to achieve maximum value.
External examples
In relation to both data sharing and the shared services model, McGrath cites several external examples of success and best practice, with whom the office of the Government CIO (OGCIO) has been in contact.
Northern Ireland and Australia he said both have good examples of what the OGCIO is trying to achieve. Northern Ireland in particular, he said, has much to offer as shared services have been in operation in government and the public service there since 2007, arguing that this not only showed what can be done, but also what stages can potentially be skipped to forge ahead.
McGrath said that while the specific details of the physical implementations are still being determined, work is well underway and there has been a broad spread of support from industry.
“We have to figure out the logic of how all of this will work, but we know we want this hybrid cloud/private cloud model where you can procure these services, and they can be on government premises or they can be in a private cloud and there’s probably a public cloud piece to it as well. But we haven’t got into the detail of it yet.”
“I’ve been very clear from the start that this is a big journey we are on. It is a five year transformation programme and we won’t do it on our own. It will require input and support from the private sector.”
The vendors are “very receptive, very supportive and more than willing to help. They have all given us good case examples of where they have done this before. They can do it, the technology is there,” reports McGrath.
SitRep
In terms of a status update, the current major effort is on the build to share infrastructure, said McGrath.
“Over the next few months the big priority is on the build to share piece. That has three legs to it. It has the application piece around common applications, and some of that we already have in place because we have built a number of common government applications like parliamentary questions (PQ) systems, and we are starting to look at how we can share those with other departments.
“We have done a lot of work, which probably isn’t well publicised, around the government networks, which is the second piece. There is a very fit-for-purpose, high speed, government backbone network connecting all departments, agencies and major urban areas around the country which has been put in place at speeds of up to 10Gbps. In terms of the infrastructure to allow us to do build to share, a lot of that is in place.”
A key aspect of these efforts, he reports, is around planning the infrastructure and the services it will support, such as the compute power, storage email and other common infrastructure features. McGrath said that he hopes to have this completed within “the next couple of months”.
“But there is a lot in that and you have to start with the services catalogue and work backward as to what services will we provide, who will the consumers be, how they will consume them and how will we pay for it.”
Despite the daunting task ahead, McGrath is pragmatic about the likelihood of success.
Transformation strategies usually fail for three reasons, he said, where they don’t have the resources and funding, they don’t have a credible implementation plan or they can’t bring people with them.
“We have the funding and the support to do what we need to right now,” said McGrath. “We certainly have everybody aligned with where we want to get to, and we have, at this stage, an implementation plan that says this can be done.”
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