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ARCHIVED - Management of Large Public IT Projects - Canada


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1.4 Funding

The majority of government IM/IT projects are funded from the budgets of their sponsoring departments. Departmental budgets are established and approved by Parliament through the government's Budget and Estimates process.

Certain IM/IT applications used by more than one department, typically financial management and human resource management systems, are designated Shared Systems. The Chief Information Officer Branch of the Treasury Board Secretariat oversees the whole Shared Systems program, including the acquisition of system licences for multi-departmental use. Each system is managed by a Cluster Group made up of representatives from each department that uses the system. The Cluster Group is responsible for managing the common maintenance and enhancement of the core system, although departments can still make their own individual enhancements to the core. The activities of the Cluster Group are generally funded from individual departmental budgets, by contributions from the cluster member departments.

In some cases, government-wide IM/IT initiatives, which apply to all departments, are funded centrally. These initiatives are normally administered by Treasury Board Secretariat, and departments can get access to funding via a Treasury Board submission (as described in the next section) demonstrating how their proposed expenditures meet the objectives of the government-wide initiative. A current example of a government-wide initiative is the Strategic IM/IT Infrastructure (SII) Initiative. This is an interdepartmental program that will design and deliver a common information technology and policy foundation to government departments and agencies. It will act as the backbone for Electronic Service Delivery and will support key service improvement initiatives such as Government On-Line.

Departments receiving funding from Treasury Board Secretariat for IM/IT projects as part of a government-wide initiative are normally required to set up a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with TBS, which sets out the objectives of the projects and identifies how project success will be measured. The MOU specifies how often and in what form departments must report back on project progress to TBS, so that the value obtained for the funds disbursed can be monitored.