Qld Govt details massive IT action plan

Avoiding risk

Minister Ian Walker.

The earlier IT Audit found nearly all of the state’s 10,000 IT systems would need to be replaced within five years at a cost of $7.4 billion. Many are critical IT assets that have already reached end-of-life and are long overdue for replacement.

Under the action plan, all government agencies must now review and report to the QGCIO on their system risks. These reviews and mitigation plans are to be completed and put in place by October 2013. 

Mitigation strategies for high-risk systems will be developed by the Queensland Government Directors-General Council by December 2013.

Agencies will also be required to establish business continuity and disaster recovery plans for all significant IT systems within the same timeframe.

ICT-as-a-service and the cloud

The Queensland Government spends around $1.6 billion every year on IT. The ICT audit had found that the government was too locked in to vendor roadmaps and upgrade cycles.

The Action Plan endorsed a plan to move to an as-a-service model and ditch the owner-and-manager model of IT.

The Government’s ICT Strategy also discussed the divestment of shared services agency CITEC within two years. The Action Plan offered little more on how this might be achieved, promising only to develop a timeframe for doing so by December 2014. 

All of what the action plan deemed to be "commodity IT", including desktops, servers and storage will be accessed from the market as-a-service starting from December 2013, in an attempt to remove the requirement for agencies to manage commodity IT in-house. 

From March 2014, the state plans to have developed departmental as-a-service roadmaps which chart the divestment of IT systems and assets. Agencies will need to develop their own plans and timeframes to move from owning such assets to the new as-a-service model. 

Fixed data networks, which currently represent a “significant cost”, will also be moved to as-a-service arrangements by March next year, as part of a “one government, one network” approach.

The state government will also:

• Release a tender for the consolidation of email and collaboration systems across agencies by October 2013;
• Launch a cloud strategy and develop policy for an as-a-service approach by November 2013, and;
• Launch an ICT-as-a-service advisory toolkit for agencies by December 2013.

The Government is also looking to fast-track investments valued at less than $1 million that can effectively be argued as being "innovative". 

It plans to introduce new provisions into the Queensland Government Portfolio Management Methodology that will require agencies to consider "IT innovation" during sourcing. 

The action plan outlines steps to remove “time consuming and costly” approaches to IT sourcing to introduce contestability and speed-to-market for technology innovation.

In practice, this will result in increases to the minimum number of quotes required before an investment can be made, a simplified contractual framework for IT procurements up to $1 million and the removal of red tape and “onerous processes” around service provision. A new sourcing framework was promised by February 2014.

The government will also initiate a review of the existing Government Information Technology Conditions (GITC) framework and associated policy.

Wins for small business suppliers?

Small-to-medium enterprises currently struggle to compete for Queensland Government business against larger competitors, the report noted.

The state intends to make it easier for SMEs to win government business by developing a set of guidelines that will ensure at least one capable SME responding to a tender will automatically be short-listed in the evaluation phase.

Major consortiums will also not be able to change SME sub-contracting arrangements without the government’s approval.

Where appropriate, significant contracts will be split up to allow SMEs to bid for a particular stage of a project. 

The government will also simplify Government Information Technology Conditions (GITC) for SMEs and directly engage SMEs in the provision of innovative solutions up to $500,000. 

The plan promised an SME ICT policy by July 2014 to cement such initiatives. 

Read on for Queensland's digital strategy approach.