The United Kingdom and Australia also have launched these kinds of cross-government informatics consolidations. In the U.K., the issue was raised about the independence of the statistical office. Ultimately, the statistical office was given a waiver to not participate because of the issues of independence and confidentiality of respondent information. The same issue occurred in Australia. In Australia, they were given a pass, again because of those issues.
The New Zealand government took a completely different approach to this. Instead of trying to build a government cloud computing capacity, such as Shared Services, they simply said that they would go to the private sector. While there's pressure on the national statistical office in New Zealand to move in that direction, there is provision for an exception if they apply for it—which they haven't yet, but they have full management control. They hold their own budget and they make their own decisions. They have to work with private sector suppliers. It's different in character from Shared Services Canada, because they still have full management control.
There is some discussion in the United States about moving in a similar direction, but it hasn't been acted on yet. In the U.K. system, the general government issue is unravelling to some extent. Other than that, I'm not aware of any other developed country—Dr. Fellegi might be aware—where the national statistical office has been required to turn its hardware infrastructure over to a central agency.