[LINK] IT can lead to big savings: Tanner

[Tom Worthington]

At 10:06 PM 7/04/2008, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>... The whole of government approach was tried by the Liberals and 
>it failed miserable. So they moved to a more (not ultra-) 
>decentralised model. Now the Labor party want to go back to a failed 
>model of procurement in the hope of saving money. ...

Our ability to handle ICT projects has improved (at least the ability 
of some of us). Also the adoption of Internet and web technology has 
provided standards and infrastructure to make large networked systems 
much easier.

As an example, ABS issued a request for tender for a recruitment 
system a few weeks ago 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2008/03/e-recruitment-system.html>. This 
will have a web based interface and can  work over the Internet. 
There should not be anything different about how ABS does recruitment 
to most federal government agencies (apart from some in law 
enforcement and security). There doesn't seem any good reason why 
most government agencies couldn't use the same system as ABS. The 
system would just need a few extra features and more userids issued. 
The hardware to run the system for the entire public service would 
fit on a desktop server costing a few thousand dollars.

Rather than create a huge project for a recruitment system, the 
Finance Department could simply identify this as a potential 
corporate application and give ABS a few extra resources to take 
wider needs into account. ABS would implement the system for 
themselves and if that worked okay, the system could then be made 
available to others. Along the way the sums could be done to see if 
it is worth having the system open source.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, ANU