Qld emergency services to buy payroll “as-a-service”

With the spectre of Queensland Health hanging over it, the owner of one of the state government’s next biggest payroll systems has confirmed a plan to replace its LATTICE human resources systems with a software-as-a-service solution.

The newly established Public Safety Business Agency (PSBA) has published its plans to start accepting tenders on 17 March 2014 for “human capital management (HCM) software-as-a-service (SaaS)”.

The PSBA picked up responsibility for back-office systems used by the Queensland Police Service (QPS) and Fire and Emergency Services – but it decided not to alter the scope of the payroll project which had already begun at the time of the reforms.

Thus the $101 million project to replace the ageing LATTICE systems will see Queensland ambulance workers, firies and prison officers all moved onto a cloud-based system.

Queensland police will not be included in the scope of the project at this stage.

The PSBA has also raised the prospect of outsourcing the processing of pay runs and HR management altogether, adding “core human resource and payroll business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS)” to the scope of the tender.

In total, the new systems will be responsible for the paying of 13,000 Queensland government employees, making it one of the largest cloud-based HR deployments in the country if successfully completed.

The former Department of Community Safety, and now PSBA, has been working on the project since September 2012, but progress has been delayed by a comprehensive restructure of emergency services triggered by the 2013 Keelty review.

According to the Queensland Government's ‘ICT Dashboard’, the September tabling of the review “delayed the Cabinet Budget Review Committee submission requesting approval to progress to tender”.

The project has been issued with an ‘amber’ warning status as a result of the delay and some unspecified concerns about the quality of progress.

“The program is continuing to finalise strategies and planning to ensure quality outcomes,” the dashboard advises.