You other guys, what’s with the cynicism? Tom is clearly expressing a professional analysis based on personal experience. This is exactly the sort of expert opinion the IT industry needs.

I think it’s about time for some disclosure as to who you are.

Renai

Sounds more like a startup than a business…

The Victorian Ombudsman’s Report on CenITex has been released and I felt that I should try to put things into perspective given that I worked at CenITex from its foundation until around July 2011.

My first comment is that apparently there were a few greedy individuals employed or contracted by CenITex who rorted the system for their own individual gain. I despise this type of behaviour and those people involved should be dealt with in accordance with the law.

The press has been very active in highlighting these issues and other inefficiencies at CenITex, but it is usually old news just being recycled in another format.

I thought it was time to put things into perspective given that these few “bad apples” are, in my view, overshadowing some of the significant good work of CenITex during the time I was there.

Firstly, the establishment of CenITex was a very courageous and ambitious undertaking by the Victorian Government. It was established to remove ICT duplication, reduce costs and streamline services to Government Departments and the community. There was a recognition that centralising the ICT function would require massive infrastructure and service delivery transformation in parallel to transitioning a huge number of people (VPS and contractors) into the centralised Agency (CenITex).

There were also very tight timeframes imposed on the Program by the Department of Treasury and Finance DTF (GSD) who were funding the transformation activities. This transformation was to be named the ETS Program (Efficient Technology Services).

The scale of change required very strong leadership, and strong support from DTF. We had very strong leadership from our CEO Peter Blades, but sadly CenITex did not receive strong backing from DTF.

As each Government Department or Agency was approached to commence the Due Diligence activity before transitioning into CenITex, we encountered significant resistance from most of the Departments. This caused the ETS Transition Team to waste an enormous amount of time (and money) trying to convince the Departments to co-operate and to deliver critical information so that costs and risk could be effectively determined. During these roadblocks DTF rarely intervened.

After much wasted time, several of the Departments’ IT functions did move across to CenITex, but in most cases the in-coming costs of the infrastructure and services that CenITex was going to take over could still not be accurately determined by the transitioning Departments. (They did not know their own costs). As a consequence of this CenITex found some big surprises when they started paying their salaries and other expenses.

During the time of transitioning the Departments into CenITex, CenITex was also transforming and uplifting its own Service Management environment with the replacement of tools, processes and business model as well as designing and developing a Whole of Victorian Government (WoVG) platform for infrastructure.

In addition, because CenITex was a fairly new entity, it was establishing its own internal processes, based on a hybrid VPS/Commercial model. All of this activity was being overseen by DTF. It was inevitable that, particularly in the early days and because of the massive amount of change that was going on, some things were going to “slip through the cracks”.

Everyone that I worked with at CenITex (remember there are around 600 people there now) were consummate, highly committed professionals, whose sole interest was to ensure that the ambitious agenda set out by DTF was achieved.

It is annoying therefore when I read the recent press headlines that do not recognise the hard work and professionalism of all but a small number of CenITex people who are now charged with running and maintaining the majority of Government ICT infrastructure in the state of Victoria.

CenITex should be supported, not denigrated. Its achievements to date have exceeded just about any other Government Shared Services function in Australia. A massive undertaking that has made considerable ground despite the lack of co-operation from the Government Departments and the lack of Governance and support from DTF.

The Government should accelerate (not stall) the Agenda for ICT centralisation by investing in new technology and processes as the ultimate cost savings are enormous.

For the record:

(I do not work for CenITex, nor do I have any affiliations with any vendor or individual currently doing business there).

You hope there’s more rorting of public funds?

If you read the report, this happened in only one arm of CenITex, and that those accused have all either been dismissed, have resigned, or didn’t have contracts renewed.

As a Victorian taxpayer, I for one hope this is all that there is.