Tas govt's plan to drastically reduce backoffice systems

Tasmanian government agencies are preparing to shift to a single, commonly structured and configured database system for all HR and payroll activities in a drastic shakeup of backoffice processes.

The single system is expected to replace multiple instances of the government’s Empower HR system, which is used by the majority of the state's agencies to support some 40,000 public servants.

It is being introduced as part of the Department of Premier and Cabinet’s Empower integration and automation program (EIAP), which began after an independent review of the Empower system.

Empower was introduced more than 20 years ago, at a time when it made sense to have seperate database instances for individual agencies.

But its mulitple instances have become costly to run, and led to continuing high levels of manual transactions.

The numerous databases also make whole-of-government reporting difficult to achieve, with each instance having different configurations and coding.

The EIAP will reduce Empower's sixteen test and production systems down to three production databases for the Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, and all other agencies.

"Three commonly configured databases will enable the commissioning of new automated solutions that are much more cost efficient as the solution can be reused," a spokesperson told from the department told iTnews.

The spokesperson said the EIAP would build workflow functionality into Empower and the Tasmanian government’s recruitment and selection service PageUp, and use "rule-based interfaces to share information with other systems at regular, pre-determined times, rather than manually transmitting and uploading datasets".

Reducing manual processes and improving real-time reporting capabilities are expected to improve the efficiency of transactional areas by as much as 50 percent.

The program will also introduce a new reporting platform, which will shortly be piloted in the Department of Justice.

The platform will provide contemporary, high quality personnel reporting to the government and its agencies.

Planning for the new Empower production databases has commenced, with migration of agencies to begin next year.

The program is expected to be complete by mid-2019.