[LINK] Australian Government Data Centre as a Service

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

On 2/03/2011 12:34 PM, Roger Clarke wrote:
> On 2/03/2011 9:11 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:
>>   ... If bespoke applications are replaced with standard web based
>>   ones, the processing and data storage requirements will be much smaller.
> A proportion of business functions can be supported by standardised apps.

But only a small number. End User computing (i.e. what users do on the 
PC and/or with MS office) uses only a very small proportion of the total 
government IT infrastructure. And most of it is in the File and Print 
environment which isn't even in data centres.

If all the government's .doc, .xls, .pdf, .pst files were deleted, 
hardly anyone in operations would notice, apart from the back-up and 
restore people, but that's small bikkies.

Saving even 50% of bugger all is not worth the effort.
> Custom-building or customisation can be dispensed with, because
> there's not a lot of harm done by having to fit those particular
> business processes to the software rather than the software to the
> business processes.
>
> Think doc prep, spreadsheet modellers, calendar, time-sheets, etc.
>
> But government agencies do a great many things that very few other
> organisations do.
>
> People often forget that:
> (a)  government agencies don't have competitors.  We don't want lots
>        of organisations performing those functions, just one per
>        jurisdiction
> (b)  government agencies are subject to enabling legislation, and for
>        legal reasons their business processes have to correspond to
>        those statutes, and hence a standardised app, even if one exists,
>        may not be able to be used
> (c)  parliaments muck around with legislation continually, and hence
>        some business processes that could previously be supported by
>        a standardised app can't any more
>
> My impression is that a lot of small-scale apps being developed in
> government are very specific.  Even something as apparently generic
> as grants admin is a lot more variable than you'd think, e.g.
> AusIndustry and the ARC have very different needs.
I agree totally.

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email:	 brd at iimetro.com.au
website: www.drbrd.com