A four-person delegation led by Information and Communications Technology Minister Robert Schwarten visited Seattle, San Francisco, Texas and Toronto and met representatives from tech heavyweights Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Google.
The trip was to assist the design and implementation of the Technology Transformation Project, aimed at consolidating storage and network services across state government departments.
The project will make the Government's IT services arm, Citec, the central provider of government technology infrastructure and services. The work is being done in three phases: the foundation infrastructure project (FIP), the consolidation management project (CMP) and the application rationalisation project (ARP).
The Department of Public Works has started the FIP, which will consolidate almost 60 data centres and servers in just three data centres with tier three redundancy.
The Government has leased 2300sqm of floor space at the newly built Polaris Data Centre in Brisbane and expects to move into it early next year.
The ARP, which will standardise management of all agencies' technology platforms, is being piloted in public works, and five other agencies have expressed interest in being part of the next phase of the project. TTP is expected to be completed by July 2010.
Mr Schwarten said findings from the US trip would help deliver new e-government services announced by Premier Anna Bligh earlier this year as part of the Q2 initiative.
Applications include hospital patient systems, traffic congestion modelling and analysing systems, and managing student performance in schools.
"The technology we have looked at has enormous appeal for a citizenry that wants to remain connected," Mr Schwarten said. "We want people online, not in line, in the next generation.
"The decisions we made previously about shared services and the rationalisation and consolidation of systems are underpinning the future direction of providing more e-government services."
The Government is also close to deciding how to strengthen the role of the state chief information officer, particularly enabling greater authority over agencies' technology governance.
That position would certainly become a very senior one, Mr Schwarten said.
"That's something I'm about to go in 10 minutes to a discussion with the Premier," he said.
"We are certainly going to go ahead with the establishment of that position being a very senior role."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Mahesh Sharma
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 14.10.2008
