Bringing Service Lines to the Science Partners
At Shared Services Canada’s (SSC) inaugural Science Planning Session, representatives from the SSC service lines gave presentations on high performance computing, storage, business requests, workload migration, cloud brokering and enterprise data centres among others.
Jennifer Player, Treasury Board Secretariat’s (TBS) Director of IT Portfolio Strategies, discussed Government of Canada (GC) integrated planning. She suggested that departments work together when undertaking similar Information Technology (IT) projects. Participants, pleased to hear this suggestion, commented that they would like to share more with their fellow departments, from work cycles on high performance computers to best practices in IT implementation.
Other key discussion points included:
- Wi-Fi: Right now, demand for Wi-Fi exceeds capacity. SSC is developing a new prioritization framework to deliver Wi-Fi in a more efficient way (i.e. Multi-tenant Wi-Fi which enables an entire building, rather than piecemeal). More information on this approach will be available soon.
- IT Refresh (Evergreen) Program: There is aging IT infrastructure across the GC and demand exceeds what can be accomplished with available funding. SSC and partners need to prioritize their IT-refresh needs. Partners may also be asked to contribute funds for additional capacity.
- Application Portfolio Management (APM) data: SSC highlighted the importance of having accurate data for each department in TBS’s APM tool. Accurate APM data will allow for informed conversations about application modernization, workload migrations and at-risk mission critical applications.
- End-state data centres: SSC’s state-of-the-art data centres are underutilized by Science. Moving forward, SSC will review intake processes to efficiently evaluate feasibility of end state for major infrastructure requests.
Attendees took the opportunity to ask questions about issues that are important to the GC Science community. The topics discussed included the Government of Canada Science Network, regional data needs, and the possibility of developing a Science Information Management (IM) IT Plan.
The session was so well received that attendees said they were looking forward to the next one. Stay tuned for more details about this event which should take place next spring.