13 June 2008

Canberra mulls IT strike force

| Peter Holland
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THE federal Government is considering using a strike force to drive greater efficiencies in its technology operations.The group could operate as part of the Australian Government Information Management Office.

Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner has asked that Peter Gershon look at beefing up AGIMO’s responsibilities as part of his review of the government’s $6 billion annual IT spending.

So far, the office has largely focused on developing web-based initiatives for the government, such as its Wiki-based platform, GovDex and the $42 million central online portal, australia. gov.au. “The difficulty we’ve got at the moment is that AGIMO’s role is very limited because you’ve got all the decision-making responsibility in individual agencies,” Mr Tanner said.

“I wouldn’t pre-empt the outcomes of the Gershon Review, but a specific thing we’ve asked him to report on is options for a more centrally co-ordinated set of arrangements, and that by definition would involve AGIMO or an equivalent playing a bigger role in technology projects.”

This includes the idea of assembling an IT strike force of experienced IT campaigners to direct projects across the government’s 800-plus agencies.

How cool! a strike force.

just what we need to combat frivolous spending in government departments….

for the full article, see here: (http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,23762858-15306,00.html)

have many of you heard about Peter Gershon and his task to simplify the purchasing and implementation processes for ICT within the federal government? this guy appears to be a one-man committee…

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Kramer said :

We run a mix of Windows and Linux, and have an enterprise licence for each which covers software, support, etc. Linux is almost twice the price per seat compared to Windows – I guess this is what you pay to guarantee that free software works like enterprise software. If you start looking into the TCO (particularly patching) for large numbers of servers the story for Linux gets worse.

That said, if you have a small number of servers and don’t care about support, run Linux.

Seems like you’re getting ripped off, they saw you coming.

Now, at the risk of beating you with a clue-stick I’d suggest you talk to some of the grown-ups, like Sun, IBM, Google etc and see how the Big Boys do it.

If your Windows licensing and support costs are less than Linux then, frankly, you’re living in a world of make believe, or you work for Microsoft,or they fell off the back of a truck, or something.

I assume you’re actually talking about OS licensing?… *hint..trick question* as opposed to application licensing ?

Kramer said :

Sure it will kill off the small businesses, but soon enough they will be bought out by the big companies if they are any good 😉

I vote we make Kramer the Minister for IISR or SBICTSE.

jvb said :

How do you rationalise the transaction processing requirements of the large public facing departments like Centrelink, Medicare, ATO, with web information based requirements of places like FACSIA and the like?

FaHCSIA has a records management system, seen as humourously named by some, since anyone who has ever used it generally says “Imanage without it”.
But the funding contracts & funded client management system is fine, so long as you know what you’re doing.

I reckon there is heaps to be saved around IT purchasing, especially for the smaller agencies who have to go it alone up against the IT vendors, meanwhile the vendors will cower and cut their prices to make deals with the big departments. Setup a panel consisting of the major hardware and software vendors, get them to submit monthly or quarterly pricing for their products, and the little agencies can choose and purchase through this channel rather than all tendering individually. Sure it will kill off the small businesses, but soon enough they will be bought out by the big companies if they are any good 😉

We run a mix of Windows and Linux, and have an enterprise licence for each which covers software, support, etc. Linux is almost twice the price per seat compared to Windows – I guess this is what you pay to guarantee that free software works like enterprise software. If you start looking into the TCO (particularly patching) for large numbers of servers the story for Linux gets worse.

That said, if you have a small number of servers and don’t care about support, run Linux.

caf said :

peterh, I can’t believe you used the hated “Canberra-as-a-shorthand-for-the-Federal-Government” on a Canberra news site – give yourself an uppercut, son.

it was either that, or post the info I found about peter gershon in the uk – massive amount of change there (and really big file). I apologise….

VYBerlinaV8_the_one_they_all_copy said :

It’s a wonderful dream, the I think the industry in general os nowhere near mature enough. People will look back at now in several decades time and talk of the ‘glory days’ of IT.

The IT industry has clawed itself away from the original Panel period contracts, PE50, PE68 etc, etc. The one thing that we don’t want is to go back to these contracts, small resellers will disappear from the govt landscape, and we will be heading for a DESINE contract once more.

will we see the “new” department, the Dept of Admin services??

I am all for simplification of IT procurement and project management, but I was certain that we had moved into the glory days about 10-12 years ago.

I will explain:
end users had a choice as to the type of computer they could buy, there was no internet issues, or multiple providers. The Internet was as fast as your modem and line speed.
if you were on the fringe, you had linux, which looked closer to unix than it does now.
there were 2 defined camps, the Apple users and the PC users.

from a reseller’s perspective, margins were higher. you actually made money on a pc.
there wasn’t as much competition, and if the manufacturers went direct, you just found other ways to compete.

now, there are hundreds of resellers, many of whom don’t last a month. the margins are so small, many people sell their services and not the boxes.

taco said :

They could then employ Australia’s brightest programmers to help maintain the now critical Open Source applications for a fraction of the cost

The government couldn’t afford them.

Cannot see it happening. Every department has its own software platform and preferred organisations for the supply of contractors eg Tax has used Accenture for years with the same result. Centrelink has its dinosaur M204 systems. Immigration has Adabas Natural while Customs is a Advantagegen shop. Different software and different expertise required.

peterh, I can’t believe you used the hated “Canberra-as-a-shorthand-for-the-Federal-Government” on a Canberra news site – give yourself an uppercut, son.

and after a job well done, the It strike force mulls… that’ll calm a few nerves.

i just wanna invent some interface between IT bods and normal people so we can translate each other.

I also think it’s a wonderful dream. Problem is that the issues are too big to be understood in a meaningful (ie, election cycle) amount of time, let alone do something about them.

How do you rationalise the transaction processing requirements of the large public facing departments like Centrelink, Medicare & ATO, with web information based requirements of places like FACSIA and the like? How do you rationalise very specialised defence requirements with a broad fiat like “use open source”?

What do you do about midrange server proliferation, where every new good idea requires its own new unix/linux box, because this project has money and the project manager wants his own toys/kingdom? Then, oh bugger, we’ve suddenly got hundreds and hundreds of disparate boxes to upgrade and manage and monitor.

Well maybe you take horizontal slices like document management, and HR, and finance, and say ‘you will use this solution’. That has been tried many times before – Mandata is the earliest that I can remember, then there was “you will use only COTS solutions for HR/FI” which was great for SAP & Peoplesoft. But hardly anyone is happy, except the vendors of the annointed solutions.

It’ll be fun to watch. I hope some good comes out of it, but I think it’s a slim hope.

VYBerlinaV8_the_one_they_all_copy1:42 pm 14 Jun 08

It’s a wonderful dream, the I think the industry in general os nowhere near mature enough. People will look back at now in several decades time and talk of the ‘glory days’ of IT.

VYBerlinaV8_…. your $0.02 sounds suspiciously like pragmatic practical common sense – exactly the kind of thinking that stops IT empires being built.

“Wouldn;t it be nice if we could” has a habit of transferring a “web forum based on PHPBB or invision powerboard for discussions on an issue” turning into a “Internet 3.0 revisioning project running on SharePoint with 16 levels of security and domain control with 5 new graphic design consultants being brought in to reskin the homepage for the intranet”

An massive amount of govt IT investment would never pass a reasonable fitness for purpose test. Can anybody name a Department with a practical working Electronic Document Management System – one that allows you to find documents? I suspect not, same goes for the endless data-warehouses, collaborative work spaces, and insert flavour of month integration exercise.

Seriously the govt as a whole could think about going to Google and saying how can we manage the 20 odd million documents we have and still have a reasonable and effective access control – I bet a whole of govt approach would probably get somewhere, same goes for financial management, ministerial correspondence and so on. The real problem is that none of these approaches would allow empire building and mines better than yours.

Agree re open source – there are so many web solutions that work under CC or GNU that the govt avoids that would actually meet their needs, unlike the off the shelf, endlessly customised clunky monstrosities that pass as corporate applications.

Lets hope a read discussion actually occurs.

VYBerlinaV8_the_one_they_all_copy7:51 am 14 Jun 08

Some interesting points there Tempestas. I work in this sector, and my thought is that government needs to think a lot more pragmatically about what it’s needs really are, rather than simply coming up with the usual shopping lists of desires unsupported by business need. Policy agencies are the worst by far – some of the ideas I’ve seen come from some of the people in these places are like a 5 year old’s letter to Santa.

I would rather see a working group formed, made up of a range of public and private sector persons, with a range of IT/business skills. Fundamentally, we need to get away from the immaturity of ‘I want to do this, and I believe technology can do it’ to ‘this needs to happen to support my business – what are the options, technology or otherwise, for achieving it’.

I’ve wasted a lot of time over the past 5 years dealing with public servants who say “wouldn’t it be nice if we could…”, with no business justification at all.

Open source vs not is another can of worms. A policy of open source only would hobble many of the functions performed ‘behind the scenes’ in IT – a lot of the open source stuff out there just doesn’t have the horsepower (and I’m not talking MS product here). Having a sensible, blended approach would be much better, I think.

Anyway, just my $0.02.

Ah from outside we go in, so we can go from inside to out!

IT is a much more complex problem then who/how. I’d suggest half of the agencies in this town don’t even know what they want IT to do. Governments with their bi-polar needs for openness and secrecy and accountability and transparency are never going to find an easy solution.

Often IT solutions are what sounds like a solution to a senior manager who gets his (and its usually a him) 15 year old child to put contacts in his phone.

It would be good if this strike force tried to explore the whole reasoning for what IT a govt actually needs, and maybe one size solutions will never work, virtualisation sandboxes can make security a manageable issue and if it ain’t a web standard it can’t be any good for government.

Of course half of us might be without incomes with a sane approach to IT in the sector.

Still looking at things is a start. Its whether that look comes with a set of preconceptions or not that will make any difference.

After the pathetic flop of outsourcing, I guess they had to try something new. Maybe a centralised brains trust would enable them to catch and keep some good IT people, as it’d be attractive and provide good career prospects. Outsourcing has been utter cr@p and has resulted in mediocre clerically-minded folk being in charge of awarding IT contracts with no concept of what they should have been asking for. Mind you, this flying team will enable them to keep outsourcing the delivery of the service.

A strike force? Awesome. Camoflauge-patterned suits for all executives!

Holy crap, now not only is RiotACT just a vehicle for ripping news from other websites, but really freakin old news at that.

This item appeared in Australian IT three weeks ago!

The government could probably save at least $1 billion by switching to Open Source.

They could then employ Australia’s brightest programmers to help maintain the now critical Open Source applications for a fraction of the cost, and improvements to the software can then be used by individuals and businesses worldwide – a win for everybody except Microsoft

canberracafe.com5:45 pm 13 Jun 08

No that’s bureacracy again. I’m sure they would like to open it all up but just thinking of the approvals required sends shivers up my spine.

Back on topic – more about this strik force please. It makes sense to introduce more ‘programme management’ over ‘project management’ across Canberra? More governance? Sounds like it will actually be a good thing?

How about wireless, mp3 and pod casts? How about getting agencies out of the dark ages and into 2008?

We have a Minister that updates his facebook site via his palm pilot – yet we have IT administrators who think 36mb of mailbox storage is adequate and no-one should be able to access a single mp3 file. Who think Web 2.0 is the devil and that we’ll all be ruined if anyone tries to use today’s technology….

Absent Diane5:14 pm 13 Jun 08

you are being hysterical fnaah… :p

ernieball in the states were the first major american company to ditch microsoft products for open source solutions. I read somewhere tha t apparently their move cost MS USD200 million in revenue due to copycatting. according to owner sterling ball (who is a bit of an eccentric maverick) their network and desktop’s have never been more stable. they ditched them MS over BS licensing issues.

How about pulling out the entrenched middle management and letting the IT people get their jobs done with a minimum of meetings and bureaucratic nonsense?

How about considering open source software instead of shovelling money at Microsoft all day?

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