This followed muted interest from departments in volunteering to pioneer the system, which will be built by multinational Cap Gemini Ernst & Young at a cost of up to $7.5 million.
Mr Mallard says moves to share IT infrastructure between groups of departments or across government are likely to be given added impetus by the Government's "Review of the Centre", which involves re-examining the structure of public service delivery. This shouldn't be portrayed as "a big Stalinist change", he says.
Shared initiatives could involve creating new physical government "store-front" arrangements, providing access to government services from a single location. Computing capacity could also be shared by departments, he says.
E-government Unit head Brendan Boyle says the GoProcure mandate sets an important precedent, but doesn't spell the end of decentralised IT decision-making by departments.
While all transactions will have to go through GoProcure's Oracle Exchange hub, departments will be free to buy their own requisitioning software to manage internal processes such as authorising purchases and acknowledging the receipt of goods, or else use GoProcure's requisitioning tool, Oracle iProcurement.
Police and the Defence Force already have their own requisitioning software supplied by German company SAP.
Police national procurement manager Stan Pope says there will be limited efficiency gains, if any, routing supplier transactions through GoProcure rather than the police's existing SAP Enterprise Buyer software. But he says GoProcure should help central agencies get an all-of-government view of spending and there could be benefits in police accessing centrally-stored catalogues.
He supports Mr Mallard mandating its use – an approach Mr Pope says could usefully be extended to some other IT infrastructure.
Quelle: stuff
