ASQA moves to consolidate IT service providers

The Australian Skills Quality Authority will transition its IT services away from two government bodies and into a single managed services environment.

ASQA’s current IT services environment is managed by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) and Education Services Australia (ESA), a company owned by Australia’s Education ministers. ASQA is the national regulator for Australia’s vocational education and training sector.

DEEWR manages the majority of ASQA’s 20 IT services, including HR, payroll, finance, desktop SOE, videoconferencing and IP telephony, among others, while ESA provides ASQA’s core business system ASQAnet and its website, with other contractors. ASQA controls its own reporting database.

But the current arrangement is not working. An inability to integrate the separately-managed systems has meant a “major constraint” by “preventing the full exploitation of integration requirements that derive from ASQA’s business processes,” the agency said in tender documents. 

It wants to move all the existing IT services managed by DEEWR and the ESA into one environment managed by a to-be-appointed service provider, under its Nimbus program.

It will also implement a commercial off-the-shelf electronic document and records management system to integrate with its core business system and desktop applications.

The Nimbus program identifies six projects to deliver business processes that are “both efficient and consistently applied across the organisation, and which are dependent on the application of the simple principle of there being a single source of truth”.

“ASQA’s disparate IT managed services environments with siloed information repositories; and the absence of an EDRMS have prevented these requirements being met,” it said.

It favours Microsoft implementations “where appropriate”. 

ASQA has around 212 staff across Australia, and services 262 PCs, 40 laptops, 8 videoconferencing endpoint products, and 63 mobile devices.