How Shared Services Canada is mining for gold with data services
Three years ago, Mr. Gilles Dufour, Director General, Business Planning and Client Support Division, saw that Shared Services Canada (SSC) was sitting on a goldmine of data. However, silos of data systems across the department limited his ability to provide accurate analytics.
Looking back, the journey to what he calls “one source of truth” started with the need for collaboration across the department to improve data sharing.
A newly formed Analytics, Benchmarking Transformation Program Office worked with IBM to evaluate our analytics capabilities. On a scale of zero to five, we rated zero.
He explains the action plan:
“We developed and presented a business case and plan to senior leaders. Seeing the importance, they provided the funding for a three-year surge program to develop our data and analytics capabilities, in partnership with the SSC Chief Information Officer (CIO).”
Why is this important to SSC?
Ms. Shannon Archibald, SSC’s CIO, explains:
“With the work we are doing, SSC will be able to decrease our reliability on spreadsheets, and provide meaningful information for decision making. Information that is consistent and accurate—through reporting and analysis that is repeatable and fast.”
Mr. Dufour adds:
“One of our goals is to take what we’re developing, and make it accessible to other departments, so they too, can gain insights from our data.”
“SSC needs to be able to show partners how many service and business requests we are delivering per year, and how long is it taking us to deliver these requests,” he continues. “As you start gathering more data, you can proceed to root cause analysis, concrete action plans and in the end, help improve SSC service delivery. This level of reporting is important.”
From ground zero to level three
A year ago, Gartner reviewed the program’s progress with encouraging results: in just 18 months, we advanced from zero to two!
Considering only 8% of organizations reach a five-out–of-five-maturity level, Mr. Dufour notes that “getting to level three in only three years would be a success.”
Next steps
Over the next 12 to 18 months, the program will continue to transfer data into the newly created Enterprise Data Repository from across the department.
The end goal is to have one source of accessible, integrated and trusted data at everyone’s fingertips. Stay tuned for future updates on this ongoing journey!