I've lived through similar situations in the US.

In fairness, its a difficult call to get right as distributed IT is so clearly a waste of money, and some services, like email and hosting scale easily.

The problem in a big bureaucracy is that adopting a real shared service model is an incremental process, but that's a slow and difficult march that requires a lot of high level political support.

Ripping off the bandaid is tough, and seems more achievable. Bold action usually gets the bigshots promoted away by year 3. But you end up stealing smart people to big things, and the scrubs are left doing the little things -- but the little things like distributing cellphones are critical too.

It's a harsh reality and difficult to execute -- most of the successful examples are mostly from private sector and are mostly bullshit.

Distributed IT often seems like a waste of money, but having an IT staff and procedures built around the needs of a specific customer may provide better service at comparable or lower cost. Up front, all the analysis is super optimistic, and you can make the case that savings will be huge. The problem is that no one ever does the full ROI calculation including the inevitable loss of productivity, slower response time, and predictable failure to realize economies of scale.

In my experience there's probably a case for both. Having a local IT person you know and trust to take care of your immediate needs is going to be beneficial but it would also be nice if that person didn't have to patch your email server personally. Decentralized IT is great for things like email and shared hosting and generic services but individual teams may be better suited to having more direct control. I don't think its an all or nothing situation.

It actually IS nice when they have to patch your email server personally.

* They're ALLOWED patch it. When the org gets too big, any patch is going to break someone else's workflow. Everything freezes into place behind change management by people who don't know the full system for people who are too busy to read every sub-organization's change management announcements.

* They WILL patch it. They know you, your boss knows their boss, you all matter. In a large company the individual asking for a change is an idiot, and annoyance, and a nobody- no matter how smart the change is.

* They CAN patch it. In the small IT org, there isn't room for someone who doesn't know what they're doing. In the large IT org, there is room for enough people who aren't technical to hide out they can start hiring their friends and crowd out all technical skill, while maintaining a thick smoke screen that diffuses all responsibility.

This really runs counter to my experiences in IT. Generally the larger the company I have been in the more likely my email and printers actually work.

Front-line IT is much more about soft skills than technical skills. Putting paper in printers and showing users how to use google are not hard technical skills but are crucial to the success of an IT organization.

The people who understand how to manage email servers should be doing so for the whole organization because supporting 10,000 users isn't really much more complicated than supporting 10. There's no reason to have 100 email administrators in an organization when it can be done with a handful.

The change management procedures for sub-organizations are irrelevant, the marketing team just gets email from somewhere, they shouldn't have to know or care where it comes from or how it is managed as long as the SLA is met. Let them carry on with what they are good at instead of struggling to find a competent email administrator.

I agree the team that manages email should be small, just like the team that manages the printers or whatever other IT plumbing but to me that's the benefit of a large IT organization, instead of having to find one guy who is a jack of all trades (and master of none) you leverage economies of scale and get experts in each service to manage them for everyone.

More context: The RCMP had a reputation long before shared services was a thing. For decades they never adapted their recruitment and training, continuing policies that drove tech-savvy individuals away from the force. (Google around. In recent years they've dramatically lowered recruitment standards to bring in younger blood. You don't even need to be Canadian any more.) The result is a force that seems to never get along with technology. Phones and radios just never seem to work properly.

I've taught more than a few cops (IT law / forensics) and have attended many lectures by RCMP officers claiming to be tech "experts". They aren't. The RCMP live in a very tight knowledge bubble.

For reference: The Vancouver police department recently hired 16 out of 2500 applicants. This is even with a large number of baby boomers retiring. You pretty much need a 4 year degree from a good school to be hired, they are quite selective. Whereas the RCMP will take almost any reasonably fit, under age 35 person with a high school degree and clean criminal record check.

Joining the RCMP is a crap shoot because you have no control over where you will be posted after finishing the academy. It could be 8 years of purgatory in Moose Jaw.

I'm laughing pretty hard at your last comment. Around here, there are much worse places to be posted than Moose Jaw. Rural isolation (entire RMs with populations of 200 people) plus significant substance abuse and domestic violence problems.

The point still stands though. Joining the RCMP is likely going to result in you going somewhere no one wants to be for a few years, because anyone with seniority transfers away as soon as possible.

That is the policy that drives tech talent away. It isnt just the location but the work you do there. Everyone had to do a decade of traffic enforcement before any chance of transfer to a tech-related post like forensics or "technology crime" ie child porn investigations.

I have heard that they are going to let west-coast recruits opt for west-coast postings ... but that still might be dawson rather than vancouver.

Ontario started this years ago, but phased. So clustering of like ministries at first. It is far from perfect, but the trajectory has been positive. Standards and homogeneity of the core services and base layers have made for far more reliable computing. Not fed in size, but still 100,000 users in addition to the public facing stuff is still large.