Official opposition in Montreal is calling on the Plante administration to “clean up” its information technology (IT) spending, believing the city has “lost” control over the financial management of projects.
“There are three problems. There is a lack of fiscal discipline, a lack of vision at the government level when we don’t know where we are going and there is nobody who has been sanctioned or questioned about these mistakes,” explained Abdelhaq Sari, IT spokesman for the official opposition, in a telephone interview.
Last September, our Bureau of Investigation revealed that a computer fiasco would cost the city $50 million, changing its employee computing suite for the second time in four years.
In January, a report by the City of Montreal’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) pointed to “major irregularities” in the award of a contract to Onix Networking Canada for the purchase of a “cloud computing solution.”
The opposition also denounced the obsolescence of the city’s Lotus Notes software, which the city still uses, and an explosion in cost estimates for migrating the SIMON payroll and purchasing system to another platform. The same applies to the modernization of the personnel management system.
“The city should stop this bleeding. We stop investing until we have a much clearer vision.
All decisions should not be made piecemeal in a silo, but should be part of a global vision,” said Mr. Sari.
For its part, the Plante government accuses the opposition of speaking “with both sides of the mouth”.
“On the one hand we are being asked to speed up the system change, on the other hand we are being asked to stop investments. In the digital age, technologies are evolving rapidly, we can’t wait to update our web infrastructures,” said Marikym Gaudreault, spokeswoman at the Mayor’s Office.
She explains that the city’s systems are in “catch-up mode” due to the pandemic, which has imposed new ways of working.
“As for the issues raised by the WG, we have taken note of its recommendations,” she added.
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