SSC 45% budget “cut”
March 20th, 2009 at 10:00 am by David FarrarThe Dom Post has a headline about how the SSC is having its budget cut 45%. Now before my friends in ACT have wet dreams about this being the start of the revolution, you need to look beyond the headline.
First of all, the IT delivery function of Government is merely being shifted from SSC to DIA. So there is not a cut of 45%, just a transfer of functions.
Also a large segment of the 45% “cut” appears to be the $28 million saved from terminating the loss making Government Shared Network. It seems almost no Govt Department wanted to use it. So no service is being cut, as Govt Depts will be getting high speed Internet access direct from ISPs – but for a much much cheaper cost.
There are some genuine “cuts” but it is impossible to know from the story how big or small they are.
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March 20th, 2009 at 10:11 am
So what is the DomPosts’s motivation in doing such a misleading headline?
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Phil , they are telling it like it is!
Wellcome to government . You won . Remember
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Is it just me? Or are all SSC initiatives met with similar enthusiasm?
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 10:46 am
next. immigration. next.
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Llew>Is it just me? Or are all SSC initiatives met with similar enthusiasm?
In my IT experience, agencies would rather hang on to their budget and headcount, rather than purchase a shared service from SSC or someone else. IMHO, there are huge savings to be made from sharing IT infrastructure. The government operates dozens of different networks, e-mail systems, enterprise licensing agreements, HR systems, web servers, helpdesks, and desktop SOEs and it costs a fortune. It means the benefits of bulk purchase are lost. It also means that there is pretty variable quality, tending towards poor in my experience.
By contrast, the Aussie state government I used to work for centralised all this stuff. Agencies managed their own business applications while the shared service agency managed the infrastructure. Which was then outsourced, so that everything was run out of two small units that handled strategy and contract management. It worked well.
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Having being involved in the Govts private network I can tell you that no one wanted to use it. The people that did use it (10 or so departments at most) never actually really used it. It was going to be pulled no matter waht.
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Same reason as ‘Youngest killer attacks’ on the stuff homepage today, probably. ‘Read me’!
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
To follow up my previous point on centralised versus agency-decentralised IT, here are a couple of quotes from the Australian federal government Gershon report of 2008. Gershon was asked to review all Australian government IT activity and this was his main finding:
“At the heart of my findings is a conclusion that, not withstanding the work undertaken to date, the current model of weak governance of ICT at a whole-of-government level and very high levels of agency autonomy, characterised by an ability to self-approve opt-ins to existing whole-of-government ICT arrangements, leads to sub-optimal outcomes in the context of prevailing external trends, financial returns, and the aims and objectives of this Government.”
And his primary conclusion:
“My recommendations involve a major program of both administrative reform of, and cultural change from, a status quo where agency autonomy is a longstanding characteristic of the Australian Public Service.”
The full report is on the AGIMO web site: http://www.agimo.gov.au
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
davidp
I agree. Can;t understand why the Govt doesn’t have a centralised buying deal for pcs laptops and standard applications, and for payroll and accounting software. Each agency seems to do its own thing from scratch.
Big thing though is to retain flexibility as I have seen global corporate deals imposing completely unnecessary costs onto small local businesses, all because the global deal was designed to suit headquarter’s needs. So you’d see a $20m accounting and payroll system imposed on a business that didn’t even make that kind of money, which in turn meant it got shut down because it was ‘unviable” – insane.
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Seems Aussie has a Parekura too…..I take it that the State Services Commissioner will have his salary cut by the same percentage, however will he manage.
Mathew HOOTEN seems to have overlooked SPARC in his to be abolished list.
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Insider
You don’t have to do centralised procurement and decentralised operation. You can run most applications and infrastructure centrally too.
Consider government e-mail. At the moment you have 20 or 30 or 50 or however many e-mail systems the government currently run, with different products, versions, and support people in every agency. Some of those people are good. But some of them will support e-mail on a part time basis while they perform other tasks. The alternative is to run up one e-mail gateway and core, with industrial strenth anti-spam, archiving, remote access, and directory integrated with a single government identity management system. It’d be maintained by about a dozen really good engineers who did nothing except specialise in e-mail. You’d build in lots of redundancy. They’d also operate “cache” servers distributed to agency sites as required for performance.
That all means better integration through standardisation and consolidation. It means better services since the setup is maintained by the best people, rather than a lot of average people. It saves a huge amount of money. And it allows agencies to specialise in their business apps, rather than infrastructure. Unfortunately, it also means a loss of headcount in agencies as the move to an outsourcing arrangement. And government IT managers don’t like losing headcount.
Vote:March 20th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Well too fucking bad because they don’t have a choice anymore. The days of tolerating turf-protecting bullshit which results in unnecessary overhead in taxpayer-funded institutions are gone forever, and as the GFC sends tens of thousands onto the streets with no jobs to find, any tolerance for such rationales as will be voiced by the vested interests, will become less and less and less.
And about time too.
I can’t see anyone in govt who knows about IT – I have never rated Maurice W. They could do worse than commission a study group peopled by some of the best CIOs from the private sector. By “best” I mean those who’ve actually achieved measurable results – there are plenty who are arse-covering fuckheads.
Vote:March 21st, 2009 at 12:30 am
It would be good to see some cost saving of this order in other Government departments.
Vote:March 21st, 2009 at 9:18 am
Sounds like ‘Yes, Minister’, when Hacker tells Parliament he reduced the number of administrative staff in his department by 25%, but instead Sir Humphrey had reclassified all computer centre staff as technical, rather than administrative!
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