[LINK] Australian Government ICT Reform Program

Tom Worthington Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au
Wed Jun 24 10:36:33 AEST 2009


At 09:32 AM 24/06/2009, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote (was: "Re: 
Government 2.0: Policy and Practice"):
>In your email you used the term "participatory government" ... So 
>what did you mean ...

No, I didn't use the term "participatory government". For what I 
meant see: <http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/mgovernment/>.

But while on the topic of government ICT, John Sheridan from AGIMO 
talked about the implementation of the Government's ICT Reform 
Program at a joint ACS/AIPM meeting in Canberra last night 
<http://acs.org.au/index.cfm?action=event&area=9002&temID=eventdetails&eveID=10136584490702>.

John discussed the implementation of the Gershon Recommendations. He 
mentioned the Portfolio, Programme, and Project Management Maturity 
Model (P3M3) tool from the UK would be used 
<http://www.p3m3-officialsite.com/>.  He commented that IT budgets in 
industry are expected to be flat, during to the global financial 
crisis and government IT people could not expect any better than 
this. Part of the savings which the government is requiring from 
agencies on ICT will be available for new initiatives which agencies 
bid for. AGIMO will make use of a similar approach to Intellect, the 
UK IT industry body <http://www.intellectuk.org/>. Green ICT will 
also be addresses, hopefully by the public service staff and 
contractors enrolling in my Green ICT Course. ;-)

While the ICT Reform Program has its own internal logic, I don't 
think it matches up to the needs of the clients, who are the 
Australian Public Service and their clients, the Australian public. 
The ICT system which AGIMO is planning to build does not match up 
with the ICT enhanced political system envisaged in Monday's 
Government 2.0 event at Parliament House 
<http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/05/29/public-sphere-2-open-government-policy-and-practice/>. 
A useful analogy would be to say AGIMO are building a better saddle 
for a horse, when horses are no longer used for transport.

AGMIO are planning how to improve efficiency of the separate islands 
of ICT in the various government agencies. But what is needed is one 
government mashup. That a particular agency has an efficient internal 
system will be of little value if it is only available in that agency 
and can't be used across the public service or easily accessed by the 
public. There is little sense in making the tiny isolated email and 
electronic document archives of each agency more efficient.

More on this at: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/06/government-ict-reform-program.html>.



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, Australian National University  




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