[LINK] Effect of New Government on ICT in Canberra

[Roger Clarke]

At 8:23 +1000 11/9/13, Tom Worthington wrote:
>Last night Scott Cass-Dunbar, Director, IT Advisory, KPMG, talked on
"Bigger than big data - the real trends reshaping IT in Canberra" at the
Australian Computer Society Canberra Branch meeting.
>Scott looked at the "The Coalition's plan for the digital economy &
>e-Government" (Liberal party of Australia, 2013):
>http://www.liberal.org.au/latest-news/2013/09/02/coalition%E2%80%99s-plan-digital-economy-e-government
...
>  ...  the use of the Internet in place of physical delivery of 
>services. This is not just for access in remote areas, but also in 
>cities to replace face-to-face government services.

That's been the dream of every government since the late 1990s.

It always founders on:
-   diseconomies of scale and scope (i.e. it's superficially attractive,
     but economies of scale and scope are quickly overwhelmed by the
     complexities)
-   incompatibilities among agencies
-   different stages of the investment life-cycle in different agencies
-   NIH syndrome, aka inter-agency rivalry
-   fears of monolitic government breaking down the vitally important
     silos which are all that protects data privacy from the State


>The new Government will aim to reduce ICT cost and complexity with
>shared or cloud services. ...

There's ample evidence to show that:
-   agencies have highly varying profiles
-   each agency needs to undertake cost/benefit/risk assessments
     (which aren't called COBRA for nothing), on each application
-   many applications will show limited benefits
-   most will show insufficient benefits to counterbalance the
     disbenefits (such as fit to need, quality of service to staff,
     quality of service to clients), and the heightened risks


>A trial of a secure government cloud for "critical data" by 2014 will be
>conducted.

So is this a tacit admission that data is being transmitted in an 
insecure manner?  That would affect at least commercial-in-confidence 
and personal data, and maybe government-in-confidence data as well.


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University