[LINK] Knight of razor to slash government spending

[Richard Chirgwin]

Nobody, however, asked the minister an obvious question - and it's one 
that's overlooked in this discussion as well.

Tom Worthington wrote:
> 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?
Exactly what is measured when the minister says "800 Websites"?
- Domain registrations? This may not reflect the infrastructure itself. 
Some of the domains may be redirects because of a reorganisation. For 
example, www.dcita.gov.au responds with a redirect. So if the minister 
is counting domains, he's miscounting.
- Servers? Load may well demand it.

If we don't know what the minister is counting, it's impossible to 
assess whether the "800" means anything. It may be simply inaccurate, or 
it may reflect genuine requirements that the minister himself doesn't 
understand.

The minister also banged on about why the government needed eight 
different secure networks; to which I have a couple of comments. The 
first is that I'll bet the minister has no clue whatever about what he's 
describing as a secure network:
- Does he mean secured Internet gateways?
- Does he mean private WANs?

If the former, I can easily imagine that multiples are required. If the 
latter, then he's completely ignorant - having private networks for 
government communications is a good thing; and I can easily imagine that 
Defence should be separate from the AEC should be separate from DFAT. 
Then there's ASIO/ASIS, the ATO, Centrelink ... the list goes on.

So again, the question is "what is the minister measuring when he counts 
eight different secure networks?"

But there was something of a failure from the media here: the "shocking 
waste in the bureaucracy" angle was so irresistible that nobody asked a 
couple of obvious questions.

RC
>>
>> ... 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
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
>