Qld IT agencies downsize by 600 staff

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exit

blog We’ve known for a while that the new Campbell Newman-led LNP administration in Queensland has been slashing and burning when it comes to IT jobs inside departments. In September last year the state revealed it had terminated some 384 technology contractors, and in July some 430 more were listed as being given the chop. But we haven’t quite been able to get full visibility on just how drastically some of the state’s key IT-focused agencies have been shrinking until now. This afternoon technology media outlet iTNews (we recommend you click here for the full article) reported:

“Queensland’s peak IT agency shed nearly 600 staff in 2012-13, including 271 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) roles from its government ICT branch.”

To be honest, I’m not quite sure how to feel about these cuts. On the one hand, Queensland desperately needs as much competent IT personnel as it can get, given the fact that, as a recent ICT Audit found, ninety percent of the state’s ICT systems are outdated and will require replacement within five years (total cost of $7.4 billion). On the other hand, it seems fairly obvious that many of the departing staff were on-board when these systems went downhill. There is a strong argument that Queensland needs to outsource and cloud-compute its way out of this mess — its internal IT staff can’t do it on their own. I guess we’ll find out what over the next few years what impact cutting this level of IT staff will have.

2 COMMENTS

  1. I don’t understand why people think putting everything into the cloud is going to resolve all their issues. The marketting people are doing their best to make sure we think it will as that’s their job. Too may people these days believe the hype and visualise the “cloud” as a magic solution that is going to fix all their problems.

    In reality, getting things into the cloud involves the same procedures and processes as migrating your data to another platform that you support. The only difference is the initial cost is less and someone else looks after your infrastructure afterwards, which you pay them for from now on.

    Also, I think if you look closer at some organisations you’ll see most of the issues aren’t actually with the technical staff but with those above them making the decisions.

  2. One lesson from Queensland Health Payroll, it was the Governments inability to manage vendors and contractors due to a lack of expertise and resources.

    While it is not possible to know where these jobs have been cut from it is likely this just further denudes Queensland’s ability to manage their own systems.

    Whether this can be managed with the new service panels remains to be seen.

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