IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Coffs Harbour City Council has reapplied to create a pilot joint organisation of four North Coast councils.

The proposed joint organisation would include Clarence, Coffs Harbour, Bellingen and Nambucca.

Coffs Harbour mayor Denise Knight said the four councils had been sharing services for many years.

NSW councils' operating costs have risen eleven-fold in the past 30 years, while capital expenditure has only doubled in that period, a report by former Treasury head Percy Allan for the Urban Taskforce reveals.

Businesslink provides shared services such as IT and finance to a variety of state departments.

In a letter obtained by The Australian, NSW Minister for Family and Community Services Pru Goward explained the move to her department's director-general, Jim Moore.

It’s never been a very transparent strategy — and the previous Labor Government in NSW definitely didn’t enjoy answering questions on the matter — but for several years now the state has focused on delivering IT services to a number of agencies through several shared services divisions, including ServiceFirst, which was quietly created from the mergers of a number of agencies in 2008, BusinessLink and one or two others.

The New South Wales Department of Finance and Services is undergoing a reassessment of its information systems security for its shared services division, ServiceFirst, replacing its existing firewalls and looking for a contractor to implement new ones.

Under the new arrangement, the extra categories will let agencies buy products and services from companies registered in the Scheme without the requirement of going to a formal request for tender process, a move many smaller businesses have been strongly agitating for as a more cost effective way of doing business with government.

Australia’s public service lacks the will to embrace shared services, despite the cost savings and simplification it can deliver, according to former Defence CIO Greg Farr.

Speaking to an audience of his peers ahead of yesterday’s iTnews Benchmark Awards, Farr said Defence had “ended up sort of half pregnant” under previous attempts.

The Queensland government has not spared IT from cuts as part of its debt-reduction budget, with the government committing to overhaul shared services.

The newly installed Queensland Liberal National government, led by Premier Campbell Newman, yesterday delivered its first budget, aimed at stabilising debt levels of AU$81.7 billion by finding AU$7.8 billion in savings for the next financial year.

The Queensland Government is planning to combine and outsource a number of government payroll systems into one single system, two years after a disastrous payroll experience with its health department.

Information Minister Ros Bates' department will be the first to receive the unified payroll treatment. Her department, which includes Arts Queensland, CITEC and Queensland Shared Services, has eight separate systems, which will be rolled into one and outsourced.

The Queensland Government plans to establish a new central procurement office for state departments and agencies in an attempt to rectify previous challenges with shared services arrangements.

According to Queensland Government chief information officer Peter Grant, previous shared services systems had failed to achieve stated outcomes including saving money, reducing operational redundancy and allowing agencies to focus on their core responsibilities.

IT Minister Ros Bates said the Newman Government was reshaping shared services to reduce costs, confusing regulations and onerous red tape for taxpayers.

“A new One Stop Shop will be developed to provide Queenslanders with easy and convenient access to Government information online, over the phone and face-to-face,” Ms Bates said.

Public servants have now been forwarded self assessment forms, which are posted on the internal public service site GovNet.

An ALP spokesman said public servants losing jobs are required to decide within two weeks on options for the treatment of their superannuation accounts.

South Australia’s Shadow Finance Minister Rob Lucas has added to a long-running series of attacks on the Labor State Government’s handling of technology initiatives, labelling its implementation of a series of shared services centres as an “unmitigated disaster” that had blown out by $68 million.

Mr Snelling said the Government was confident the program would meet projected savings targets.

"By 2014-15, the Government expects to have saved $338 million through the program while outlaying $128 million," he said.

Shared Services, scrapped in Western Australia this week, has cost the State Government about $128 million - more than double the initial estimate of $60 million.

Figures provided to The Advertiser show Shared Services now employs 873 full-time staff, up from the 745 initially moved in from other departments.

Opposition finance spokesman Rob Lucas said treasury officials had told parliament's budget and finance committee that the cost of implementing the scheme had blown out from an estimated $60 million to $128 million.

Mr Lucas said the project, which was supposed to save the government $60 million a year, would also not realise such savings.

SA Health was unaware of the oversight until notified by the Sunday Mail and has launched an investigation into what officials describe as "an administrative error", which left employees without health cover for more than a month after deductions from their pay were not passed on to firm Bupa.

The Cabinet-approved program was meant to save $16 million by standardising purchasing across all government departments and agencies.

But a report tabled last month by Auditor-General Simon O'Neill casts doubt on those savings because the department responsible for "a significant part" of them, SA Health, has not started the process.

The award is shared by six regional councils – Southland, Taranaki, Northland, Waikato, Horizons and West Coast – who have worked together to develop and share specialist technical software needed for their core functions.

The Integrated Regional Information System (IRIS) is one of the largest local government shared-services’ projects ever undertaken in New Zealand, and won the ‘Joined Up Local Government’ Excellence Award at this week’s Society of Local Government Managers annual meeting in Wellington.

Victorian ICT shared services agency CenITex will begin outsourcing key services “in a couple of weeks”, as it seeks to turn itself from an owner and provider to a broker of IT services.

In an emailed statement, chief executive Michael Vanderheide confirmed the plan to transform CenITex was in the process of being implemented.

“This overall program of work will result in a fundamental redesign of CenITex,” he said.