The Coalition came into office in September and the following month established the National Commission of Audit to assess the role and scope of government, and run a ruler over taxpayer-funded initiatives. Released as a precursor to the May federal budget, the audit commission’s report called for the adoption of a mandatory, cloud-first policy among a list of 86 recommendations.
The commission said a cloud-first policy, particularly for low- risk, generic ICT services, should be clearly articulated and enforced by the government. Over three to five years, it could progressively reduce ICT costs as cloud computing becomes the default option, the report said.
It said public cloud computing offered the “greatest savings by amortising costs over millions of users globally”.
“It can produce significant savings in the total cost of ownership, estimated at estimated 20 to 30 per cent of infrastructure costs. Private cloud facilities are more expensive but offer benefits such as increased security.”
The report said the government had been slow in adopting cloud computing technologies in an environment where “bespoke, legacy systems, concerns about the security and privacy of placing public data in the cloud, and general risk aversion all impede progress”.
The Finance Department, which has carriage over much of the digital economy initiatives, declined to comment on the commission’s cloud first policy proposal. The government has refused to publicly state its position on a cloud-first policy although it is understood to be quietly working behind the scenes on executing the Coalition’s policy for e-government and the digital economy, unveiled in the lead-up to last year’s election.
Details are scant but Finance is conducting a secure government cloud trial of a new, internal management system scheduled to be completed in December.
Finance and the Australian Government Information Management Office are undertaking an audit across all agencies’ spending and outcomes generated by ICT investments over the past three years. It is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2014. AGIMO provided a briefing to Finance Minister Mathias Cormann in mid-October on the implementation of the government’s election commitments outlined in the e-government and the digital economy policy.
The government is expected to release an updated policy later this year to support the adoption of cloud services as outlined in Canberra’s e-government and the digital economy policy.
Industry figures and analysts say delays in acting on major Commission of Audit initiatives such as mandating cloud first are hurting both government service delivery and opportunities for Australian IT service firms.
Ovum global public sector chief analyst Steve Hodgkinson says delaying the transition to wider adoption of cloud services has three negative impacts.
“The first is delayed organisational learning where agencies are slower to develop the mindsets and skills required to accelerate digitally-enabled policy and service deliver innovation using cloud services,” the Melbourne-based Dr Hodgkinson said.
The second is the delayed development of Australian-based cloud services that are tuned to the needs and priorities of Australian government agencies, he said.
The third impact would see a delayed appreciation of the benefits of cloud services as ‘‘proper’’ arms-length, commercially provided, shared services, Dr Hodgkinson said. “This may turn out to be the biggest unintended adverse consequence.
“If federal agencies actually do start to implement internal ‘socialist economy’ shared services arrangements instead of consuming cloud services from the capitalist economy, then the resulting disaster will be partially laid at the door of the fact that agencies failed to educate themselves about the cloud services ‘art-of-the-possible’ in the period 2013-14,” Dr Hodgkinson said.
The Australian Information Industry Association wants to see the adoption of a cloud-first policy and other digital economy issues sped up. “The power of cloud is that you can buy individual services to deliver services for a citizen at a transaction level and pay by transaction rather than having to buy an entire system. And you can have more than one provider for those services,” said AIIA board member Robert Hillard.
AIIA chief executive Suzanne Campbell says little has happened on the current government’s pre-election promises to create smarter, e-government. She points to an address by the Department of Communications, back in June which underlined the inefficiencies in federal government info-tech.
In the address, the department said almost 35 per cent of government transactions were still carried out manually and that of those carried out digitally, it was unclear what percentage were completed fully online.
It also said just 17 federal government agencies provided smart forms to assist with client interactions and that only four agencies provided customer services through digital video engagement. The commonwealth still sent some 250 million letters a year.
Ms Campbell said the response so far from the government to the AIIA over the audit commission’s recommendations and other digital economy issues was that “these matters are being considered”. “But nothing is happening,” said Ms Campbell.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Fran Foo & Stuart Kennedy
Quelle/Source: The Australian, 29.07.2014
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