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14
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That
Management centralize the Corporate IT Capital budget within a single funding
envelope and ensure that annual IT Capital budgets are presented for approval
on a consolidated basis.
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Management
disagrees with this recommendation.
For the past two budgets (2007 and 2008), the capital budget has been
presented and status reports were prepared by service area. From an IT perspective, this means that if
an IT-related project relates to a specific service area such as Long Term
Care, that project will be presented in the Long Term Care service area. This was recommended and approved by
Council in 2004 in the "It's About Accountability" document
prepared by Plamondon and Associates.
Corporate IT budgets that do not relate to a specific service area are
presented together.
More recently, the Mayor's Task Force on e-Government conducted an external
best-practice assessment of the IT budget, and specifically noted that
combining IT capital funds into one budget confuses accountability. The City's SAP system can easily produce a
consolidated report of IT spending from numerous cost centres and internal
orders.
Since IT exists to make other branches more effective and efficient, it is
important for Council to ensure that departments exploiting the technology
are accountable for the benefits. To
that end, the LRFP Sub-Committee recently recommended to Council that
"staff be directed to incorporate anticipated efficiency savings from
investments in technology in the efficiency column of the budget pages for
affected branches for future budgets".
ITS will support Financial Services to implement this recommendation
for the next budget cycle.
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December 2009:
Requires Resolution.
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