Shared Services Canada’s 2024-25 Departmental Plan at a glance

Key priorities

SSC has launched Delivering Digital Solutions Together for Canada (Digital Together), a strategic approach that will guide the department’s activities. It focuses on working transparently and collaboratively with clients and partners across the whole GC, as well as industry, to achieve the government’s digital ambition.

A key feature of Digital Together is the development of strategic roadmaps that outline the planned initiatives and trajectory for major business lines:

• Connectivity Services
• Hosting Services
• Cyber Security Services
• Digital Services
• Innovation and Service Evolution

These strategic roadmaps will be at the center of how SSC advances its operations, service delivery, and collaborative approaches. Through the implementation of Digital Together, SSC will focus on the following in 2024-25:

• Working together with its partners to innovate and improve SSC’s services
• Investing effort and resources on optimizing hosting solutions for its partners
• Continuing to improve infrastructure monitoring and security

Refocusing Government Spending

In Budget 2023, the government committed to reducing spending by $14.1 billion over the next 5 years, starting in 2023–24, and by $4.1 billion annually after that.

As part of meeting this commitment, SSC is planning the following spending reductions.

• 2024-25: $83,608,000
• 2025-26: $92,054,000
• 2026-27 and after: $113,347,000

SSC will achieve these reductions primarily by doing the following:

Professional services and travel

Reductions in professional services will focus primarily on management consultants as SSC relies on external professionals for the highly technical skillsets that are required to support the ever-changing IT environment. Canada’s IT operations also require that SSC employees travel for equipment deployment, installations and incident responses. Reductions for travel will focus on less critical operational requirements and discretionary spending related to training.

Eliminating non-standard and legacy services

SSC will accelerate work on initiatives that address legacy services. The older legacy environment is inefficient and costly to maintain. As such, key areas for modernization include:

• Disconnecting non-essential fixed telephone lines and deploying softphones to better meet the telecommunications needs of a modern workplace
• Improving digital communication and collaboration by migrating from vendor-managed and in-house email services to a cloud-based email solution that is more easily maintained and updated
• Closing legacy data centres and moving applications and data to modern hosting solutions such as enterprise data centres or the cloud

Operational efficiencies

SSC’s ongoing efforts to make operational improvements and gain efficiencies will generate cost reductions in a number of key areas:

• Secure Cloud Enablement and Defence (SCED): Flexible pricing models for service offerings that provide security controls for data in cloud environments, optimal implementation strategies using technology advancements, and effective use of resources
• Small Departments and Agencies (SDAs): Increased collaboration, use of common solutions, and connectivity improvements
• General operating efficiencies: Small contributions across the organization that will improve efficiency through consolidation, streamlining, and modernization
• Reduced funding for some initiatives that are no longer required due to advancements in technology

The figures in this departmental plan reflect these reductions.

Highlights

A Departmental Results Framework consists of an organization’s core responsibilities, the results it plans to achieve and the performance indicators that measure progress toward these results.

The core responsibility and departmental results from SSC’s Departmental Results Framework are as follows. See GC InfoBase, for the full framework and program inventory.