Empired rolls out RAMS in WA

Gavin Burnett, executive director at Empired, said the roll-out of WA's RAMS (Recruitment Advertising and Management System) was the largest implementation of this type the company had done. Empired last year deployed a similar but smaller system for the Victorian Government.

“RAMS is [WA Government's] first-ever implementation of an ASP-type model on a whole-of-government basis,” Burnett claimed.

He said the software system would be used to manage all recruitment and job advertising online, including staff redeployments and severance processes for 90,000 Full Time Equivalent staff.

Previously, WA Government's individual departments had combined various multi-vendor outsourced and in-house systems and methodologies. The new system would enable files and records to be handled once, by one person, instead of many times by multiple staff. The resultant cost savings were estimated in millions, he said. “We've basically integrated three support systems into one.”

The contract was worth $500,000 up front but Empired would also reap recurring revenue from the bandwidth RAMS used, he said.

Burnett said the system -- based on Empired's own BigRedSky software -- could be modified to incorporate different functions and could be rapidly deployed. The whole-of-government recruitment management system for Victoria was rolled out in three weeks.

“When we initially devised the application, we wanted to build a piece of software that ... could be configured so that we'd gone from a single core product to a range [that work together],” he said.

That a State Government was prepared to trust a core function like recruitment to a third-party ASP showed how far the business model had come, Burnett argued.

He said Empired hadn't set out to be a government supplier, but it seemed that its products particularly appealed to government organisations.

“So we're [aiming] to roll out an e-government platform ... actually targeting government business in other states, and have had interest from the US in one of our products.”

Austrade had forwarded an enquiry from the US to Empired from a potential distributor for products and services. However, it would be months before the company was placed to take advantage of the opportunity, Burnett said.