Unveiling the strategy in Sydney, NSW Commerce Minister John Della Bosca said the overall aim of the program, dubbed "People First", was to improve the delivery of government services.
NSW Government chief information officer Paul Edgecumbe said that consolidation of systems and purchasing across agencies, particularly on back end systems such as human resources, payroll and email, would mean cuts in the state's IT workforce.
"There will be a reduction in ICT personnel and ICT contractors over time," he said. By the fourth year of the program job cuts were expected to total $20 million in savings, or around 200 positions.
Total annual capital savings of $50 million had been forecast for 2006-07, along with a reduction of $20 million in recurrent spending. Savings would grow to $125 million on capital and $80 million on recurrent spending by 2009-10, the government's implementation timeframe says.
The four-year plan announced today was the first phase of the project, Mr Edgecumbe said. There were 17 working groups, each chaired by a government agency chief information officer, assigned to manage portions of the project.
Some steps had already been taken, he said. Prior to the recently issued request for tender for PC supply for the whole of government, agency chief information officers had for the first time agreed on a common set of specifications for PCs. Consolidation of payroll and finance systems had also started, he said.
NSW Department of Commerce deputy director general Paul Hopkins said the measures contained in the strategy were "common sense".
But the government will be fighting against a history of delayed and over-budget technology projects in the state, including developments at Energy Australia and Sydney Water that are now the subject of legal action.
The state's T-card transport smartcard and electronic health records projects have also suffered widely-publicised setbacks.
Oversight by the working groups, Government CIO Office and by the NSW Treasury would help ensure that the "people first" project stayed on track, Mr Edgecumbe said.
Despite the reluctance of some larger agencies to participate in whole-of-government programs in the past, all arms of government were "on-board" the new program, he said. "Collaboration has been exceptional … and very professional."
The entire strategy had been developed within government and the project would be conducted using the government's own resources.
Smaller agencies understood that their IT budgets would probably be cut and money passed on to groups like education, police and health as back-end systems moved onto common platforms, Mr Edgecumbe said.
But small agencies could use their remaining resources to concentrate on systems that affected their main services to the public. At present, about 70 per cent of the government's ICT resources went to back office systems, Mr Edgecumbe said. "We need to change that ratio."
Consolidation also fed e-government service improvements. It was impossible to deliver multi-agency services without consolidating the infrastructure behind them, he said.
"It's difficult to deliver e-services to the public if you have 380 different websites,"
Nevertheless, proliferation of online services from commercial organisations and the ready availability of cheap broadband meant that the public now expected to be able to deal with the government online.
"Products such as eBay are developing the expectation that government has to live up to," Mr Edgecumbe said.
E-government systems would be made available to all agency public servants and call centre staff, as part of efforts to have a "single face of government" for the public to deal with.
For example, a parent using an online form to enrol their child in a school should also be able to sort out any related health and transport arrangements at the same time, without having to hop between agencies, he said.
Consolidation of back-end systems was not a matter of picking a single supplier, throwing out what ever was in place and using the new system across the board. "To make that judgement up front would be very costly," Mr Edgecumbe said.
Instead consolidation would be done around existing systems, while reducing the variety of implementations throughout government. "Happy with four vendors, not happy with 40 implementations," was the philosophy guiding the changes, he said.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Chris Jenkins
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 27.07.2006
