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eGovernment Forschung seit 2001 | eGovernment Research since 2001
The new Coalition Government has made a significant commitment to moving some government IT to the cloud, while slamming what it says was the former Labor Government's luke warm approach to cloud computing.

It outlined its approach in 'The Coalition’s Policy for E-Government and the Digital Economy', released just prior to the Federal Election. Most significantly, the Coalition said that government could "contribute to the growth of a vibrant domestic industry of cloud infrastructure and service providers by moving more rapidly to adopt such services whenever economically justified in its own operations."

To this end the Coalition plans to move 'light user' government agencies with insufficient IT scale to shared or cloud solutions. 'Heavy user' agencies with complex needs will retain autonomy but improve accountability. The bar will be set based on efficiency levels.

The Coalition has promised to simplify Government ICT and eliminate duplicated, fragmented and sub-scale activities across agencies by "requiring use of shared or cloud services where minimum efficient scale hurdles are not met.” It intends to set "a default expectation that private or public cloud solutions will be used whenever efficient scale is not achieved at agency level." It also intends to trial the relocation of critical data not suitable for locating in a public cloud to a secure government cloud using automated tools from 2014.

The Coalition claims that this approach represents a much firmer commitment to cloud than was made by the former Labor Government. "While departments and agencies have a notional obligation to consider cloud services where these are relevant to a need, the process required to demonstrate a business case and obtain approval, coupled with onerous legal and security hurdles, have led many observers to interpret the existing rules as a decision to largely avoid the cloud," it says.

Further the Coalition has accused Labor of "passivity and timidity" that it says has "wasted some of the good work which has been done within some agencies." It contrasts this with "the aggressive recent commitments by governments in the UK and US to innovation in online service delivery (including via mobile devices), use of public cloud services, open government and increased sharing of resources across agencies."

However while the Coalition Policy has a strong focus on government ICT initiatives it is much shorter on policy initiatives for the wider digital economy than was Labor, which had set a goal in its National Digital Economy Strategy - released in 2011 and updated in July 2013 - that “by 2020, Australia will be among the world’s leading digital economies based on key indicators such as Broadband penetration and usage rankings.”

The Coalition said that Labor's strategy contained a number of laudable goals for improving Australia’s relative global position or meeting specified quantitative targets for various measures of digital activity, such as broadband penetration, prevalence of teleworking, and users of e-health. However it was highly critical of the ALP's execution of the strategy and promised to update the strategy during its first term.

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Quelle/Source: CMO, 31.10.2013

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