Featured, News - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 17:07 - 11 Comments

Delusion? South Australia pledges
“No more big ICT projects”

news The South Australian State Government has issued a new whitepaper designed to provoke discussion of its future ICT strategy, promising as part of the document that from now on, it won’t pursue “big ICT projects” any more, with all technology-related initiatives to last 90 days at most.

In his foreword to the paper, South Australia Connected: Ready for the Future, the state’s Premier and Minister for the Public Sector, Jay Weatherill, noted that the whitepaper (available online in various formats here) had been compiled in partnership with vendor lobby group the Australian Information Industry Association, which represents a number of industry giants such as IBM and Microsoft, as well as smaller players. The Premier noted that South Australia wanted to “embed a new culture of innovation between government agencies, and between government and industry”.

“Using and improving technology allows us to break down barriers that have previously prevented us finding shared solutions to common problems. To improve our ability to innovate, we will work more closely with industry to develop a practical and sensible framework for introducing new technologies into government,” Weatherill wrote.

“It is no secret however, that governments the world over are grappling with an environment in which savings need to be made, while at the same time there is an ever‐increasing demand for services and information. South Australia is not immune from these pressures. That is why we need to respond with a comprehensive, strategic approach for the use of ICT to ensure that we are connected and always innovating, so that the best possible service can be provided to all South Australians.”

In general, the whitepaper does not go into traditional concrete areas of discussion with respect to IT project and service delivery within Australia’s public sector, such as balancing IT outsourcing approaches with internal resources, governing IT projects and different models for delivering such projects, such as in-house development, outsourced development and the new cloud computing/software as a service paradigm.

Neither does the document deal with the sorts of standards and centralised purchasing issues which centralised government IT strategies normally deal with in Australia.

Instead, it outlines a set of principles which the state believes will guide its approach to IT strategy as a whole. For example, some of the directional statements which the state included in its whitepaper include the need to ‘serve people’, ‘secure resilience’, ‘improve delivery’, ‘work together’ and ‘innovate now’.

These ‘directional statements’ are broken down in the document in somewhat more discrete lists of items which attempt to show the definite direction South Australia wants to move in. For example, in the section labelled ‘securing resilience’, it states that it wishes to move from buying software and hardware to buying services, and in the section on ‘working together’, it notes that it wants to move away from departments and agencies competing, and towards a ‘share first’ approach. In the innovation section, it notes that it wants to move away from “big monolithic projects” to “rapid prototyping”.

Most of the statements in the paper are quite high-level and represent in very general terms the broad trends of current thinking with respect to government IT and project service delivery. However, there are some unusual aspects of the paper.

For example, in the ‘improving delivery’ section of the paper, it notes: “From now on, we’re not going to start up any more big ‘ICT’ projects. We’re only going to have service/information/productivity improvement projects. Projects will be shorter, typically 90 days at most, and they will be planned and delivered by multi‐disciplinary teams, not just IT.”

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