Turnbull's Transformers lash government IT mavens over spend

A taskforce led by Australia's Digital Transformation Agency hopes to rein in the Australian government's galloping IT spend. The Agency's (DTA's) analysis, posted to its site late last week, says government IT procurement has blown out under the Turnbull government, from AU$5.9 billion in 2012-2013 to almost $9.6 billion. The …

[Tim99]

$10 Billion

Are we really spending more than 120,000 salaries a year? Just how much are we "saving"?

[Slipoch]

The update to the welfare payments system is not actually updating it, but using SAP as a wrapper around the old windows wrapper which wraps the old DOS system.

[Pompous Git]

"using SAP as a wrapper around the old windows wrapper which wraps the old DOS system"

Centrelink run an IBM Model 204 database management system first used commercially in 1972. DOS wasn't even a twinkle in 14 yr old BillG's eyes back then.

[Richocet]

Go home you're done.

The above two short comments sum up this article so well.

[Slipoch]

oh dear lord

"Centrelink run an IBM Model 204 database management system first used commercially in 1972."

Please not PIC, please not PIC, please not PIC.

Sad thing is when I collected my unemployment money back in the day I had to point out to them the pointer errors and instruct staff how to use their own program. Yet I couldn't get a job there even with more frontline customer service experience than they had.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of those old programs

actually worked effectively because they were designed and built in house, not off the shelf stuff built for "we know whats best for your organisation" mega-corps. How much would be saved if the underlying hardware was replaced/emulated and the java junk dumped, hiring humans as required to do jobs they used to ?

Not to mention 2 decades of attrition of staff means skill loss and funding cuts meant no money to do updates of hardware and software. A persistent belief in silver bullets on part of CIOs (eg windows everywhere or java applications) also meant massive cost over runs when reality collided with vision from sales types

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Many of those old programs

I think the ABC Australia show Utopia covers some of the decision making processes brilliantly, complete with a hand waving architect talking glibly about digital disruption.

The best systems of the day were developed by simple small teams of hard working public servants with minimal contractors, political backing, and best of breed hardware and access as required to contractors for specific expertise. The solutions here talk about involving even more partnering arrangements, innovation destroying over-standardisation (governance) and cloud first approaches which are not proven to save money in the long run.

Analysis of the costs indicates a large percentage going on labour hire, outsourced telecommunications, outsourced managed services, all of which are a direct result of the continuous cuts to public service staffing levels, and deskilling caps on salaries for technical staff, necessitating hiring of contractors at much higher rates and actual cost to the taxpayer.

The recommendations of the review may result in an exacerbated cost blowout as they largely are prescribing more of the same flawed beliefs as government IT and large corporate IT is subscribing to.

[Tim99]

Re: Many of those old programs

Upvote for the Utopia reference...

[FozzyBear]

Now if we could remove or update all of the old deadwood and legacy politicians still hanging around, that should save a shiny penny or two.