That's a good question. It's all a balancing act.
I think certain things lend themselves to shared services a lot more than others. For example, if you look at basic desk-top services, we talk about email, office automation, business analytics, and we talk about electronic document management; those can all be done. I firmly believe no matter what department you work in, you should have the same services wherever you go unless there's a requirement for something different. There are certain things you can do.
Throwing all the eggs in a basket, technology does exist where you can build disaster recovery through automation. The tools are there so that you can certainly minimize any risk by doing consolidation. I don't like the word “centralization”; I tend to do consolidation where it makes sense.
The interesting thing, if I may, is every department went through what Shared Services is going through. When I started at Transport in 1980, everybody had their own IT. I think there were seven different email systems at the time and different networks and the whole thing, and we went to what we called the “rules of one” where we funded it, established it, understood the business, and rolled it out. At the end of the journey, we had one email system, one wide area network system, and one financial system where we used to have multiple before.
We lived all that and we invested, so we knew. Then when we went to Public Works as part of the data centre consolidation when we transferred the facility over in the wide area network, we had background in that. I firmly believe that if SSC at the senior levels would have listened to some of that.... And I know people use secrecy and they do these other things, whatever it may be, and as a line department CIO that was a big aggravation for me, because we had lived a lot of these issues already and we were continuing to live them again.