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The NSW Department of Health has spent 15 years struggling to develop an electronic purchasing catalogue that is still nowhere near completion.

The e-catalogue is just one of a long list of projects that have been riddled with problems since the department first began efforts to implement a standard procurement process that includes a single IT system for state-wide data collection and information sharing.

A report into the e-government performance of nine industrial countries has highly commended the Australian federal government's work on information and services integration.

The report, Beyond e-government: the world's most successful ICT-enabled transformations, released by the head of the UK's e-government unit and CIO Ian Watmore, highlights the achievements of the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and Centrelink for their integration with JobNetwork and other welfare agencies, and the Australian Taxation Office's electronic taxation services.

Release of a new five-year federal e-government strategy, originally planned for late this year, is now likely to slip to early next year, according to government sources.

While the Special Minister of State, Senator Eric Abetz, is still striving to release the strategy this year, a heavy and controversial legislative workload scheduled for the next parliamentary sitting is likely to frustrate efforts to secure all necessary signoffs and approvals by the end of the year.

An Australian researcher is calling for stronger governance of the way public sector health data is used. Dr Anni Dugdale, a sociology lecturer from the University of Canberra's School of Business & Government, says public agencies responsible for collecting public health data are under growing pressure from private sector organizations keen to commercialize the information.

At the same time, she told a recent seminar hosted by the Centre for Research in Public Sector Management at the University of Canberra, there is increasing pressures from citizens for access to information such as their own medical records.

Local governments, determined to hold a future fully-privatized Telstra's feet to the fire over services to rural areas, have developed their own blueprint for assisting regional councils to improve service delivery through the use of ICT, and especially high-speed broadband.

The Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) last week delivered a draft of its Better Rural Services report to the federal government and has since held discussions with a number of departments. It plans to submit a final report to the Australian Government Information Management Office in mid-October.