Outsourcing push reveals Health and DHS split

Cross-agency confusion on welfare infrastructure

11 August, 2014

Cost of government ERP systems under fire in NSW

Standards opened to boost competition

7 August, 2014

What Apple and IBM’s alliance means for government

Outsourcing enterprise scale deals and support.

17 July, 2014

Australian security software spend beats global trend

Gartner cautions about democratisation of security threats as IBM claws its way back into the top three vendors.

11 June, 2014

Tax set to fire 3,000 staff as Abbott’s ‘natural attrition’ promise for APS falls

Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey has given the green light to mass redundancies in government agencies to prosecute public service spending cuts in the forthcoming Budget.

9 May, 2014

Welfare and Tax primed by Hockey for core systems overhauls

Decades of sweating systems infrastructure has come back to haunt policymakers after the Treasurer cautioned replacements will cost ‘billions’.

29 April, 2014

Queensland state government jumps onto Microsoft’s cloud

The Campbell Newman government has entered a new deal with computer giant Microsoft to deliver cloud-based software to public sector offices.

10 April, 2014

Legal lessons from the Queensland Health Payroll Report

By Michael Grosser* The Queensland Government’s procurement practices and the acceptance of the role of probity advisors have evolved considerably since 2007 when it commenced the procurement activity for the Queensland Health Payroll System. Probity is now recognised by Queensland Government agencies, statutory bodies and Government Owned Corporations as being an integral part of how […]

23 January, 2014

QLD’s ban on IBM stays put as state government sues for damages

By Julian Bajkowski Queensland premier Campbell Newman has confirmed that a ban on IBM securing new public sector business in the state is still standing after the government commenced legal action for damages late last week in the Supreme Court of Queensland. A spokesman for the Premier told Government News that there has been “no […]

9 December, 2013

Total APS job cuts too difficult to predict for Public Service Commission

By Julian Bajkowski The Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) has released its annual stocktake of the federal bureaucracy with the grim warning that it is now “difficult to predict” how the cumulative impact of successive rounds of job cuts under both the Coalition and Labor will hit staff numbers. Tabled in Parliament on Monday afternoon, […]

2 December, 2013

Victoria hits hiring accelerator on Digital Government

By Julian Bajkowski The Victorian government is conspicuously muscling up on its technology leadership smarts after the state revealed it is on the hunt for no fewer than five top flight public sector executives to lead its recently released ICT strategy. The state has created the new roles within the Department of State Development, Business […]

19 November, 2013

CPSU warns Commission of Audit against further job cuts

By Julian Bajkowski The union representing federal public servants has cautioned the Abbott government against instigating a Queensland-style “slash and burn” program of cuts through its National Commission of Audit announced this week. Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) National Secretary, Nadine Flood, said that although the new government “clearly has a mandate to conduct […]

24 October, 2013

Finance launches investigation into ERP software costs

By Julian Bajkowski The Department of Finance has put some of the world’s biggest business software companies on notice that their lucrative contracts will soon be the subject to a sweeping review as the federal government seeks to extract better value from so-called enterprise resource management (ERP) systems. Just a week after the election of […]

17 September, 2013

Queensland releases government technology vision

By Julian Bajkowski The Queensland Government has set out its grand vision for recasting how the state’s public sector buys and consumes more than $1.6 billion a year in technology services, software and infrastructure, confirming it will dump confirmed the longstanding build-own-operate model in favour of buying technology as a service. In a set of […]

30 August, 2013