Featured, News - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 22:03 - 0 Comments

Budget 2011: Wadeson wins DHS funding colossus

Immigration’s Systems for People project is finished. The Australian Taxation Office’s Change Program has been laid to bed. And Defence’s payroll consolidation hasn’t yet kicked off. But tonight a new mega IT project was born in the halls of Canberra’s public service; and it’s time for the Department of Human Services to hog the limelight.

In tonight’s Budget, the Federal Government allocated the better part part of a billion dollars to projects that will realise the creation of the fledgling super-department known as the Department of Human Services, formed by the merger of a number of agencies, including Medicare, Centrelink and the Child Support Agency, integrated and unified.

The jewel in the crown of the funding is a $373.6 million investment which will be directly used to integrate the technology platforms of the agencies, under the guidance of DHS deputy secretary for IT infrastructure and long-time Centrelink chief information officer John Wadeson. In budget documents, the Government stressed that most of the funding — $295.4 million, including $205.3 million in capital funding — would be allocated from within DHS’ existing resources.

As Wadeson has previously highlighted in detail, a number of large integration projects will fall under the wider integration effort – including the creation of a single shared ICT gateway, a single integrated security management system to protect sensitive information across the department’s many payment systems, a new data recovery centre and a single consolidated data management system. In addition, common staff portals, desktop and email systems will be created as the department’s various wings are tied together.

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