November 2007 report pointed out that this £1.4bn figure lacked a clear baseline of costs and contained several uncertainties, such as the initial expenditure required and the time frame for the savings. There are reports of UK government shared service centres failing to realise savings, such as the Department of Transport's project, described as 'stupendous incompetence' by the Parliament's Public Accounts Committee. The Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS), has implemented shared services for a number of departments and functions. For example, IT Assist (the ICT Shared Service Centre) provides common infrastructure and desktop services to NICS staff in the office, at home or when mobile working. Canada The government of Canada instituted Shared Services Canada on August 4, 2011, with the objective of consolidating its data centres, networks and email systems. This follows a tendency to centralize IT services that has been followed by the provinces of British Columbia, Québec, and Ontario, as well as the federal government of the United States of America and some states like Texas. PriceWaterhouseCoopers recommended integrating government data centres in a report ordered by Public Works and Government Services Canada, revealed in December 2011. Ireland In the Republic of Ireland, the health service nationally has been reorganized from a set of regional Health Boards to a unified national structure, the Health Services Executive. Within this structure there will be a National Shared Services Organisation, based on the model developed at the former Eastern Health Shared Services, where procurement, HR, finance and ICT services were provided to health agencies in the Eastern Region of Ireland on a business-to business basis. New trends Organizations that have centralized their IT functions have now begun to take a close look at the technology services that their IT departments provide to internal customers, evaluating where it makes sense to provide specific technology components as a shared service. E-mail and scanning operations were obvious early candidates; many organizations with document-intensive operations are deploying scanning centers as a shared service. Many large organizations, in both the public and private sectors, are now considering deploying enterprise content management (ECM) technology as a shared service. See also Integration competency center Offshoring Outsourcing Offshoring Research Network Portable employer of record Shared services center References External links Shared Services Outsourcing & Consolidated Centers of Excellence Business economics Service-oriented (business computing)