The din and holler of the election campaign is abating. The new administration is ramping up. What can the channel expect? The industry types who spoke to CRN foresee a more entrepreneurial approach to government IT, with greater industry engagement and with an emphasis on ICT as a driver of productivity.
It is important to understand the common ground between the parties, since this speaks to policy continuity. There are some important areas of agreement between the old and new government, said Suzanne Campbell, chief executive of the Australian Information Industry Association – the key lobby group for the IT sector in Australia.
Those areas include attitudes to cloud computing, the push to online service delivery and the development of a conceptual framework to provide statistics to better understand the digital economy, said Campbell.
But of course it’s the policy changes that really excite discussion – and reveal new opportunities. The NBN is the clearest difference between Labor and the Coalition but Campbell flags three others that stand out. The first is that the new government recognises the clear advantage of letting industry take the lead around the key technical challenges facing government.
A second point of difference is the very clear statement on transparency and accountability, she said. The new administration has said it is committed to providing dashboards for key metrics on the government IT performance and progress.
“Previously the old policy required the agencies themselves to publish digital economy plans.
A third key area of difference is industry engagement, according to Campbell. She said the Coalition explicitly committed to engaging with industry in relation to governance and content and has indicated that it will create a government IT advisory board with representation from the IT industry to provide expertise to AGIMO, CIOs and cabinet. The approach would be similar to the advisory board recently announced by the Queensland state government, which was welcomed by industry.
Of the Federal government strategy, Campbell said: “That’s a very exciting development from an industry perspective. In the area of open data and open government, the Coalition committed to seeking a proposal from researchers in the private sector for joint public private projects in big data, for example.
The market-driven application of IT solutions offers significant productivity gains to government, something that has been lacking of late. Basically, the government needs to spend more on IT to facilitate improvements in productivity and service delivery, said Campbell.
“There has to be more focus on the ability of IT to drive productivity in government.”
Campbell’s view resonates with market participants like Wayne Neich, the recently appointed Australia and New Zealand managing director of virtualisation vendor Nutanix.
“We definitely welcome a market-driven approach from government because it ultimately aligns with the history of tech innovation in which the most efficient, most stable and lowest-cost option wins.”
According to Neich: “ In the absence of a market-sensitive technology policy, inertia can set in, which means that legacy systems and archaic ways of doing things remain in place as there is no urgent driver to change.”
Culture changes
Market-driven approaches will also require changes in culture and organisations. Catriona Wallace, managing director of consultation outfit Fifth Quadrant, cautioned that many departments, both at federal and state level, operate in silos with under-utilisation of resources. “The consolidation of multiple citizen or customer-facing services would allow greater flexibility and value for money across departments and would provide government with a more dynamic platform to respond to market changes.”
Meanwhile, Darren Besgrove, director and chief operating officer of app firm BlinkMobile Interactive, suggested one of the first lessons government can learn from industry is that customer service requires customer-centric thinking. “The immediate opportunity is to understand how users – be they citizens or employees – interact with government systems and services as part of their daily activities and look to better ways to enhance and add value to those interactions.”
He suggested that this might involve combining information and processes from across different government departments or different sectors.
“Instead of thinking first of government systems and how they might be extended, the bigger opportunity is to think first of users and the range of use cases and devices needing to be served, then employ the technologies necessary to best serve that user need from existing information sources.”
Another lesson from industry is to look at the processes around the adoption of IT. Besgrove suggested removing contract and approval hurdles to undertake pilot and ‘proof of concept’ projects. This will help build strong business cases for more wholesale adoption, he said.
Governments might also want to relax their stance around who they work with, according to Tony Mahoney, Queensland state manager of hosting provider Nexon. “Many of the approaches that government takes when it comes to IT have traditionally come from tier 1 or big business organisations. However, many of the skills and resources they use come from partners they engage.”
He suggested this creates an unnecessary layer of complexity and cost that could be removed by dealing more directly with the technology partner.
Christian Ebel, director of value solutions at Dassault Systemes ANZ, said the public sector could take a page from the private sector’s playbook and invest more in off-the-shelf commercial IT platforms. “This is especially true for Defence projects where secured commercial off-the-shelf IT collaborative platforms, already used by some prime contractors, could be used by [the Department of Defence] to ensure a delivery of new major equipment on time, budget and specifications.”
Joe McPhillips, Australia & New Zealand channel director at networking vendor Riverbed, highlighted the importance of online service delivery.
“People want online services – and want to access them from a variety of devices – so ensuring these applications are performing at their peak, regardless of how many people are accessing them, is absolutely vital to their success. And who knows where this could lead? In time we may even be able to cast our votes online.”
Inertia and resistance
For all its good intentions, change might prove more difficult than sloganeering, especially in the Byzantine environment of the Commonwealth public service. Two ministers in particular will exercise more sway in the year – finance minister Mathias Cormann and communications minister Malcolm Turnbull. The two jointly held their first meeting with AGIMO in late September.
IBRS analyst Guy Cranswick said Turnbull in particular will be a major asset in government,
“Turnbull comes from private enterprise and is very comfortable with technology. He can talk it. That means that he sees a potential for innovation. He brings an understanding of business cost priority and technology value. He won’t gold plate projects because he knows how to parse the details and be able to see what’s is going on. That might not be entirely comfortable for some people in the industry.”
Indeed the previous board of the NBN has already learnt this lesson. Shortly after taking office, Turnbull asked several of them to resign. At time of writing, all but one, Brad Orgill, had taken him up on his offer. One of the clearest mandates from the election related to the NBN.
The divisions between the parties were stark, and while many in industry criticised Turnbull’s approach, there can be little doubt as to the government’s intentions.
Turnbull, however, is keeping contracts in place and the show rolling while a full review of operations is conducted. The review should take 60 days.
But suppliers want certainty, quickly. One of the problems according to David Norris, managing director of Castle Hill-based managed services consultancy Nortec, is that the extent of problems, technical issues and financial position of the NBN is still not clear.
The NBN: What it means to me
By David Norris
Nortec is a managed services consultancy and we have been in business for over 21 years. About three years ago we moved into the fibre greenfield estate market, suppling services over a fibre backbone. These services include telephony, internet, fibre video monitoring systems, nurse call and aged care systems. As part of this process we became a partner of NBN approximately six months ago and have been interested in the rollout of NBN throughout mostly NSW.
Like all the NBN partners, we have been receiving regular updates on the processes and procedures for working with NBN, the pricing structures and the point of interconnect (POI) situations and locations.
While documentation has continued to proceed, and we are receiving pricing structure information, the actual rollout to our types of customers has been slow. This has allowed other private fibre enterprises with whom we also partner to gain access to greenfield sites to install their infrastructure.
I think most people would like to know the real extend of the issues, problems and finances at NBN Co. We are hoping this will be revealed and sorted out by the new government so as to allow us to get on with businesses. The resignation of the NBN board is not a very good start.
Until there is stability within NBN Co, the board of directors determined and a clear indication to the market of the capabilities of the fibre to the node, our market will be slow with a take-up of fibre services. I believe the brownfield sites will stay with Telstra for the foreseeable future.
Greenfield sites will abide by the law, which states that they should be ‘fibre ready’ but I do not believe many companies, developers nor operators will invest funding into designs for ‘pit and pipes’, without having a clear understanding and commitment from NBN Co on what they are getting into, when it will happen for them, and what may be the end pricing.
In the meantime, a number of our projects are on a ‘wait and see’. Do they have the NBN rollout into their new developments or do they pay for pit and pipes and fibre cabling themselves? What is the time frame for the rollout?
So to that effect it has slowed that portion of our business significantly. They have been on a wait and see for most of this year.
To date the NBN has been much more a political football that a nationwide high-speed broadband services offering. We hope it will now change.
David Norris is managing director of managed service provider Nortec, based in Castle Hill, Sydney
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