New Zealand-headquartered IT provider Datacom missed out on an SAP contract with the Queensland government worth millions after the state's LNP government was rolled.
The dumped business process outsourcing deal – news of which was broken today by CRN's sister title, iTnews – would have seen Queensland’s Public Safety Business Agency (PSBA) hand end-to-end payroll processing to Datacom on its SAP platform, and take the state government off the hook for the replacement of its long out-of-date LATTICE payroll technology.
The $101 million PSBA payroll project was halted after Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Labor party rolled the LNP government in January this year.
Outsourcing payroll processing to Datacom would have almost certainly made a large number of back-office jobs redundant within Queensland Shared Services (QSS).
The new government came in looking to reverse "any outsourcing, privatisation and forced redundancies that may have occurred in the PSBA”, iTnews reported – so despite having already spent $19.8 million on the planning, design and procurement phase of the project, the PSBA team was sent back to the drawing board.
Other state government privatisation plans, such as the sell-off of IT infrastructure provider CITEC, were also called off.
The move was a clear attempt to distance the new government from the strategy of LNP premier Campbell Newman, which saw him cut thousands of jobs out of the state’s public service, according to iTnews.
LATTICE, which has been out of vendor support since June 2008, uses the same technology that Queensland Health migrated from in 2007, leading to that department's years-long legal dispute with service provider IBM.
The timeline for a new payroll system at PSBA is now up in the air.
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