[LINK] Knight of razor to slash government spending

[Tom Worthington]

At 06:18 PM 15/04/2008, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>... Minister Tanner asks the questions "We're asking why do we have 
>800 different federal websites, and why do we need 164 different 
>systems for processing grant applications?
>
>... It is quite possible that it is much more cost effective to have 
>them as individual systems. ...

Apart from saving a few servers, I expect consolidating web services 
would reduce duplicated work being done by web workers and media 
people in agencies. It seems silly to have these creative people in 
each agency and then try and get them to not be creative and use the 
standard commonwealth wide corporate logo, look and feel.

If agencies have a need to do something genuinely different for a 
real requirement, that is okay. As an example, Defence Recruiting 
need something different. But for standard web pages on standard 
topics across agencies to be all made to look different is a waste of 
time and money, as well  as making the web system harder for the client to use.

>Talking about grants systems, I once worked on a project for one 
>department that tried to reduce the multitude of grants systems that 
>it alone has and saw the miserable failure ...

Technology has moved on a bit. The ARC are building  a grants system 
using software engineering principles. That work should be adaptable 
to other grants processes. This is not about fiddling with code SAP 
style, but working from the requirements level. See:  "Executable 
Translatable UML for Enterprise Applications", 21 June 2006: 
<http://www.softimp.com.au/softeng/News%20Items/news24Jul06.html>.

I was skeptical of this approach, but it seems to have worked okay on 
the e-Voting systems developed for the ACT and Federal Governments.



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