Health Canada Enterprise Architecture

The government of Canada is making great strides in consolidating and streamlining the business operations of government. Central agency initiatives are driving the move to fewer national data centres supporting standardized platforms and shared solutions. Health Canada (HC) has been at the forefront in moving to new standard corporate platforms. The department now is continuing this momentum by taking the same approach to the next level. As described above, HC has a multi-pronged mandate. By clearly articulating its enterprise architecture, HC will be well-positioned to streamline its business operations, move to common shared operational business platforms / solutions and identify and prioritize its investments across the organization. There are three key phases: Phase I – The Contractor will act as a facilitator to lead the HC senior management team through a series of sessions to validate strategic and operational priorities and current challenges in meeting them, and then to capture the key enterprise architecture components to transform its operations. Phase II – The Contractor will work with executive champions and his/her team, to translate areas of common approaches into a holistic enterprise architecture strategy that will allow both the business and IT strategies to cohesively enable and drive each other – a roadmap that will guide a transformational investment strategy. Phase III – The Contractor is to provide final enterprise architecture framework and the methodology to support the sustaining of the architecture and the prioritization of key investments. This initiative intends to transform HC’s operations to make them more efficient and effective, and to fulfill services in a more streamlined and responsive fashion. Whether totally changing the delivery model or consolidating similar services and systems into common solutions, HC management wants to strategically position the department to continually improve its operations, while having the dexterity to respond to significant environmental change and staying abreast of advances that can contribute to operations that continually improve. In an era where technology solutions and social networks are rapidly changing the way in which government business and services are conducted, it is the opportune time to undertake this critical exercise to align the business vision, strategy, and processes of an organization to its IT strategy, and documents this using multiple architectural models or views that show how the current and future needs of an organization will be met in an efficient, sustainable, agile, and adaptable manner. This exercise must include a proven approach for large public sector organizations to produce this series of results. The Contractor is expected to outline the highlights of the proposed approach and range of recommended sources of information to be included in this exercise. The expectation coming out of this exercise is that there will be an enterprise architecture framework defined, to transform HC business operations to make them more efficient and effective, and that the enterprise architecture is establishing the parameters of HC key initiatives and who is going to own them going forward.