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Many federal departments are using email to archive key documents that have to be shifted to the new system in a separate time-consuming step. Complicating matters, individual departments also employ vastly different rules for retaining such data – from 30 days to seven years.

Much of this was known when the government launched the project, one of several information technology consolidation programs currently underway. But Shared Services Canada has been under enormous political pressure from its inception to deliver significant savings and to do so quickly. The Conservative government promised that consolidating email systems would save $50 million annually.

But the Email Transformation Initiative has proven more difficult than expected.

First, Shared Service Canada was created only four years ago by stripping 43 separate departments and agencies of their computer services personnel, more than 6,400 in total. While many of these workers were experienced in buying information technology, they had no history of working together.

Then, when SSC invited dozens of high-tech firms to bid for the right to develop and run the single email system, it ran the competition in a novel and confusing way. Instead of the usual top-down exercise, in which federal departments set out exactly what they want, SSC held industry conferences and workshops, and one-on-one meetings with potential key suppliers.

While it sounded good in theory – the companies floated lots of ideas and more flexible ways of building the email system – the result was a competition whose requirements were interpreted quite differently by the four tech giants that made it to the final round: Bell Canada, IBM Canada, HP Canada and Dell Canada.