More belt tightening is on the way for the Federal public service.
This week Finance Minister Penny Wong and Special Minister for State Gary Gray announced the Government is looking for a further $550 million worth of savings over four years from a public service which is already grappling with a stiff 4 per cent efficiency dividend in the current year.
They said the focus of the cuts would be air travel, consultants, contractors and printing costs rather than public service jobs. The Departments of Defence, the Senate and the House of Representatives have been excluded from the savings plan.
Defence has recently published a three year $8.1 million contract with IBM for Security and Secretariat Application Sustainment, signed through its Applications Managed Services Partner Arrangement (AMSPA).
The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry’s (DAFF) CIO Graham Gathercole has told iTnews the Department will be announcing the preferred tenderer for its secure internet gateway services by the 3rd of October. DAFF is procuring for itself and on behalf of up to 13 other agencies in its role as one of the eight lead agencies in the Department of Finance and Deregulation’s Internet Gateway Reduction Program. The incumbent gateway supplier to DAFF is Macquarie Telecom.
The Clean Energy Regulator has signed a $3.4 million contract with Microsoft for the “Provision of an Energy Emission Reporting System” to support its monitoring and compliance regulation responsibilities associated with the application of a carbon price in Australia.
Geosciences Australia has announced a plan to analyse 20 years of data using the National Computing Infrastructure’s recently acquired 1.2 petaflop Fujitsu supercomputer.
The analysis will contribute to a better understanding of how the Australian landscape has changed over time including the impacts of groundwater extraction, carbon sequestration, resource exploration and mining activities on the environment. While the data has been available for many years it is only recently that the technology has become available to support analysis on this scale.
Fujitsu has also recently announced it has won a $10 million five year deal with the Western Australian Department for Child Protection for support of its PeopleSoft CRM system.
The Queensland State Archives have released a Digital Continuity Strategy setting out plans for a comprehensive whole-of-government approach to public records, including digital records, ensuring that they are preserved and accessible well into the future.
The objective of the strategy is to “future-proof the critical digital records of government business”.
Hewlett-Packard has won a $4 million contract with Queensland Health for the licensing, maintenance and support of a HP TRIM electronic document records management system. The contract runs for three years out to 30 July 2015. HP TRIM was selected to provide Queensland Health with an enterprise-wide eDRMS solution in late 2009, but the project appears to have been put on hold until earlier this year.
Queensland Health has also signed up to a three year $9 million Telecommunications Management contract with UXC covering service desk, bill consolidation services and technical design services. More than 12 months elapsed between the release of the tender and the contract award. The contract runs to July 2015 with one 12 month extension available.
The South Australian Government Financing Authority has signed up to a Software as a Service agreement for the provision of an ‘Insurance System Solution’. The $2.6 million contract with Aon Risk Services runs for five years to August 2017 with a single five year extension option.
Uptake of New Zealand’s Government Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) initiative has exceeded targets, with 20 agencies are already using or transitioning to use IaaS provisioned by Datacom, CSG, Revera and IBM New Zealand. A standard service catalogue and on-demand access support agencies to easily and cost effectively provision the services they need.
The latest New Zealand Government ICT Update also reports on the start of the non-mandatory Common Web Services initiative which will allow agencies to easily engage online expertise through a panel of 42 providers covering seven categories including
- Information architecture
- Usability advice
- Website testing
- Front-end web developing
- Graphical/visual design
- Website technical writing, and
- Accessibility consultation.
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