Finance tasked with building secure dataset sharing portal

The federal Department of Finance has begun preparations to establish a single system that allows agencies to share and integrate datasets securely.

The system, known as the secure information sharing capability (SISC), aims to help the public sector shift towards structured government data that is easily accessible, searchable, and useable.

It forms part of the federal government’s wider Data Integration Partnership of Australia (DIPA) initiative, which was allocated $131 million from the public sector modernisation fund in this year's federal budget

The DIPA aims to link up disparate datasets on government programs to analyse the long-term effectiveness of policy delivery. It will help the government deliver on a number of the directives in its December 2015 public data policy statement.

Memorandums of understanding were until very recently the most common way for agencies to forge sharing arrangements, despite being labelled “unnecessarily complicated and time consuming”.

A Finance spokesperson told iTnews the secure cloud-based SISC would allow entities to share data through a single interface.

It will also provide "core capabilities" that could be used for other projects such as the whole-of-government digital records reform program, but the department is yet to work out how. 

"The core capabilities of SISC, the interaction with other projects and how they will be utilised is currently in the planning stage," the spokesperson said.