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• It was born in secrecy – through an administrative services review conducted on the QT by the Privy Council Office. From the start, people who could have offered additional depth and expertise were shaded out.

• Partly as a result, many experts feel the initial business case was flawed or incomplete.

• It was overly ambitious, conceived as the ultimate miracle fix to decades of neglect of IT infrastructure by successive governments. Aside from hardware issues, some software applications were so old, suppliers had stopped supporting them.

• Government departments lacked the expertise to carry out the highly complex changes planned, and in fact many transferred only second-tier IT staffers over to Shared Services, keeping their best people in-house.

• The government put the cart before the horse on savings: trying to claw back chunks of the Shared Services budget when it imposed austerity across government. Shared Services had hoped any savings it made would be plowed back into IT renewal.

• Contracting out of the email consolidation relied too heavily on price point and perhaps not enough on the ability of bidders to execute the plan.

All of these key findings should help as Shared Services presents its revised plans to cabinet soon. But we also need to confront more fundamental questions – such as what this fiasco reveals about the sprawl of government in general.

We can conceive of the size of government through budgets, deficits and size of workforce, of course. But consider this little nugget, courtesy of committee testimony on Shared Services: PCO struggled to figure out how many federal data centres even existed. “We thought there might be about 200,” one senior official testified. “After a year, we had counted 495, and I am still discovering others today.”

In other words, the government itself had lost track of how all-encompassing its tentacles really are. Therein lies the real problem.