A Single Federal Email System is Interesting, but Unlikely
By
Joseph Marks
Federal CIO says he’s curiously watching Canada’s plan for a single government email, but that isn’t the right answer for the U.S.
Friday marked the second time in as many weeks Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel has publicly pondered a major Canadian initiative to pull the government’s entire information technology staff into a single agency and, perhaps most impressively, launch a single governmentwide email system.
VanRoekel first mentioned the Shared Service Canada plan while introducing his own Shared Services Strategy at an Information Week event May 3. He mentioned it again during a Northern Virginia event with area lawmakers and technology contractors Friday.
The U.S. government has been pushing to consolidate email at the agency level, often connected with a move to cloud email storage, but has never seriously discussed a governmentwide system.
VanRoekel raised the Canadian system both times as a sort of curious aside, noting that he doesn’t think the U.S. government would or should make the same move.
His main explanation is that the U.S. government is such a large email purchaser it would skew the market and damage competition if it used a single provider.
The government would also likely weaken its bargaining position if it only worked with a single email vendor and it might make the system less secure.
“I’m actually curious to see how Canada is going to play out,” VanRoekel told Nextgov after Friday’s event. “In Canada the model is just different. They don’t have as many major IT vendors. I think our focus has to be inside agencies themselves, getting departments to streamline activities.”
The idea of a single government email system is interesting to ponder, though.
Officials tasked with consolidating the government’s Web footprint have spoken approvingly of a British government project that resulted in just two major domains for its public-facing websites.
They haven’t endorsed the British model as the ultimate goal, but they haven’t disavowed it either.
The difference is that external-facing websites are much less dependent on the private sector than email systems. The only outside party is usually an external host, such as a cloud provider. A theoretical governmentwide website might also be based inside a government-owned cloud and so not even have that outside link.