Information and Communications Technology

Commentary

By Stuart Wakefield, Director, Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO), Department of Internal Affairs.

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) leaders are working with the Treasury to refine metrics and provide more insight into ICT performance across government. The individual agency information in this report is useful to CIOs. It helps generate questions about the patterns, context, and drivers of cost and effort in individual agencies, and the metrics used in this report were selected for this purpose. While the Better Administrative & Support Services (BASS) ICT metric set has been a good start, more and different management information is required to inform government-wide strategies and decisions by the ICT Strategy Group, ICT Council, and Government Enterprise Architecture Group.

More detailed measurement and benchmarking will identify trends and opportunities to lift ICT performance across government. Australian jurisdictions do significantly more detailed measurement to identify low value spending, inform strategies and investments, drive an agenda of ICT efficiency, and embed a culture of agencies reusing and sharing rather than building and operating their own systems. At the time this document was written, the OGCIO together with the Treasury were exploring options for collaborating with Australian jurisdictions to share intellectual property and data for more detailed ICT benchmarking and insight.

The Directions and Priorities for Government ICT programme should lead to greater efficiency and cost savings, and these improvements should be evident in the next BASS report. The ICT Strategy Group and the ICT Council lead this programme. It focuses on aggregating demand to procure ICT goods and services from third parties at lower cost, leveraging scale across government for common services, and improving ICT effectiveness by standardising and enabling service transformation. While the impact of the programme should be evident in FY 2011/12 performance information, it is worth noting that overall ICT spending is likely to continue to trend upwards as agencies invest capital in transformation projects that will realise savings in non-ICT business spending.

The Common ICT Capability Roadmap advances the Directions and Priorities for Government ICT. Two key initiatives from the Common ICT Capability Roadmap have recently been launched:

• Government Infrastructure as a Service is available for agencies to buy their computing infrastructure 'on demand'. This initiative reduces the need for agencies to purchase and maintain their own infrastructure (IT hardware used to run their applications, file storage, and other standard ICT functions). Government Infrastructure as a Service is the first step towards government cloud computing, in which an increasing range of services can be provided on demand. This is a significant milestone in the Government’s progress on the ICT Roadmap, and more initiatives like this one are likely to be rolled out in the next 12 months.
• The Government has recently announced the launch of the New Zealand Government Cloud Programme. This programme is at the business case stage, and it is evaluating how Cloud office productivity services could be integrated with legacy systems and services. The programme will identify how Cloud business models could be leveraged across government and what services it could deliver. This work builds on the Department of Conservation’s Smart Desktop Services (SDS) programme, which confirmed the potential for a government-wide cloud-based model for desktop computing.

I look forward to seeing the impact of improvement programmes and a richer government-wide ICT performance story in the next report. I encourage ICT professionals to use the information about their individual agencies in this report by comparing and contrasting their results with those in other organisations and asking questions about drivers of cost and performance and lessons learnt. And I look forward to working with ICT professionals and the Treasury to improve the quality of the management information about whole of government ICT performance.