In the midst of a review by consultant Ernst & Young that recommends outsourcing most operational information technology services, the Cayman Islands government had a separate review that proposed long-term in-house solutions for the Computer Services Department.
According to minutes of a government chief officer’s meeting held in early August, a consultant’s review completed by accounting firm Deloitte set out a four-year plan for computer services.
Ministry of Home Affairs Chief Officer Eric Bush said the in-depth Deloitte review was commissioned before the Ernst & Young report on the overall state of government services, and focused solely on the Computer Services Department.
Mr. Bush said computer services was transferred to the ministry he is responsible for after the May 2013 general elections and indicated that he needed to get an overall picture of the department’s core functions and services.
“Whilst I had some discontent from a customer service standpoint [with computer services], I didn’t have any feedback from that perspective,” Mr. Bush said. “It is the responsibility of the chief officer to try and improve overall efficiency and effectiveness of any department under his or her remit.”
The Deloitte firm was selected to perform the review following an open tender process several months ago, and provided its information to the ministry prior to the release of the EY report this month.
According to the chief officer’s meeting minutes, the Deloitte report looked at government’s IT strategy, what the future role of computer services might be in the Cayman Islands government.
“Chief officer Bush will continue to work with Deloitte and [computer services] to implement the changes needed to enhance the workings of the department,” the minutes read.
The EY report, commissioned by government in an effort to reduce burgeoning costs of the public sector, recommends no long-term IT plan. Instead, it identifies 18 specific areas in the central government service that could be outsourced immediately, thereby shaving jobs and expense from the public sector payroll.
The Computer Services Department is one of those areas named by EY for immediate outsourcing.
The government employs a total of 54 people in information technology in the Computer Services Department in the Ministry of Home Affairs.
“There is no reason why government should continue to provide IT services in house,” the EY report states, citing the potential exception of IT procurement and strategy areas.
“Many governments around the world are selling or winding up centralized IT departments and outsourcing. [There is an] active IT market in Grand Cayman or [in] the greater Caribbean market.”
Cabinet has not yet decided which recommendations, if any, it will accept from the EY report. According to Deputy Governor Franz Manderson, only those areas that receive Cabinet approval will be implemented.
Technical difficulties
Computerized data corruption and potential loss due to hardware failures in the government IT system that was reported earlier this year by the Cayman Compass “is a serious issue” that could affect the entire public service, Cayman’s information commissioner said.
While he lauded the Computer Services Department and the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service for ongoing efforts to recover trillions of bytes worth of police data following hard drive crashes in October and March, Acting Information Commission Jan Liebaers said in July that government needs to take steps to ensure this does not happen again.
“I hope that some positive changes result from this,” said Mr. Liebaers, an archivist by trade. “[The] Computer Services Department should not let this happen again, and government should be very, very concerned about this, since it could happen to any of our data.”
The latest hardware failures, between October 2013 and March 2014, were responsible for the corruption of a significant number of police records, some of which have been unrecoverable, Computer Services Department officials confirmed.
Computer services records show that a controller card in the police data server at the Citrus Grove building in George Town failed in February 2012. A hard drive in the server failed in August 2012, and another two hard drives failed in April 2013. In October 2013, three more hard drives failed at the same time, causing storage of RCIPS files to “crash,” according to computer services officials. At that time, the server operating system was rebuilt and police data was restored from a tape backup.
Computer services information manager Rex Whittaker said that the total data contained on the RCIPS server – roughly 10.3 terabytes – had to be restored once the physical hard drives were repaired. Ten terabytes of data would hold more than 100 million copies of this story if it were saved to a standard Microsoft Word program.
Related Videos
