The Pappas report on Defence released this week had a line that caught my eye. "Facilities and other operating costs have a diverse set of drivers that range from construction costs, which have increased above underlying inflation, to computer service costs, which have grown below underlying inflation."

I think that we have an 'IT equals cheaper' mentality in Australia that often hampers our ability to see all of its opportunities.

Of course, construction was simply allowed to grow, while IT service costs are simply expected to shrink, I thought to myself.

It started cogs turning in my brain. When do government IT costs get to grow really? When something's so broke that money has to be thrown at it, or if someone thinks that there are savings to be made — for instance in shared services. Looking at specific examples: Tcard was begun because Sydney's payment system is stone age — and of course because everyone's doing it (see former post "Just like lemmings"), while Defence certainly seems to be spending its $940 million on IT more to save than for extra functionality it will reap.

I think that we have an "IT equals cheaper" mentality in Australia that often hampers our ability to see all of its opportunities. The only examples I can think of that go against that trend are the Government 2.0 taskforce and the National Broadband Network. Generally, IT is the first place to cut and the last place to spend.

Think about the stimulus that Rudd so lovingly doled out to save the Australian economy. Why, oh why, do we need so many school halls? Why not, as IBM pointed out a while ago, use more of the money to add in technical capability? Smart infrastructure, not dumb.

Or, to go in a completely different direction, why not add lots more money to the government's Innovation Investment Fund? $20 million at a time (from a total of $200 million) is doled out to form new venture capital funds which invest in start-ups. Industry puts in funds like for like. Yesterday, a new one called Yuuwa was formed in Western Australia which, with industry funding, would have $40 million to spend on life sciences and information technology start-ups.

Imagine if we had spent even $1 billion of the $42 billion in stimulus money on new capital for start-ups. An Australian Silicon Valley could have suddenly blossomed, almost overnight. And the money would be fostering the future knowledge economy, not the construction industry.

IT isn't just good for a cost-cutting quickie. It's worth spending on — long-term marriage material with the possibility of very lucrative offspring.

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• Microsoft likes to be spanked
• Love me, tender
• Don't be an IT snake oil salesman
• TelePresence: Be a man Tanner

After all, it isn't the only agency asking for exemptions so it doesn't have to go to tender.

In the 2008/2009 year there were 729 procurement process approvals (not all IT) which went through the Victorian Government Procurement Board. Of those, only 265 were tenders — or only around 36 per cent. The board approved 51 exemptions from tendering, and 84 exemptions from tendering and taking three quotes: together around 19 per cent. The remaining approvals were made up by variations where agencies needed to change the amount, duration or service levels of their contract.

The previous year's statistics didn't look any better. 2007/2008 saw 37 per cent of one-off purchases go to tender, 24 per cent exempt from tendering (or tendering and taking three quotes) and 39 per cent become variations on older contracts.

With just around 20 per cent of the money for one-off purchases passing through the board not reaching tender, it seems Victoria Police was just going with the flow by taking its fair share of non-process.

The rules for the Victorian Procurement Board say that in order to get an exemption there needs to be: a matter of "extreme urgency" including matters of public health, security or safety; a case where goods need to be compatible with existing information technology platforms; or no reasonable or alternative or substitute to buy.

This could cover quite a few tenders. And does, as the statistics show. Despite CIOs vehemently telling me how amazed they are that such behaviour could go on, I'm sure that lots of other departments are getting away with wholesale contract variations and buying products or services without a tender on spurious grounds. The difference is that they cover their tracks with paper. They have reasons.

The problem with Victoria Police was that its documentation didn't allow its actions to stand up under scrutiny. And the more people scratched at the surface the more it stank. The wining and dining tactics of the vendors were certainly laid out in such bright light it hurt.

But it took multiple reviews for the ugly truth to come out. Something not likely to happen often. Something the government can't afford to have happen often, because if everyone obeyed the tendering rules 100 per cent, the overheads would probably take such a hike that finance staff would be screaming.

It's a case of pragmatism versus idealism, a daily battle where no one can win.

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• How dirty is Victoria Police's laundry?
• Victoria ramps up myki effort
• Berzins' blunders: Police ignored tender rules

Yes, there have been budget run-overs to the extent that the new Change Program spend is expected to be around double the planned costs from 2004. Yes, it should have been finished in 2008 not 2011. But the office has also had to deal with the government changing the taxation rules every single year, which has had the agency bouncing on its toes trying to keep up-to-date — with quite legitimate funding increases to pay for it.

Of course, there were also budget increases where there were no direct lines to the legislation costs, which is easy to criticise. Yet to really be able to stick it to the agency for these increases, there needs to be some horrendous error on its part which occasioned the budget inflation. I can't see what that is.

Some might suspect a bad relationship with key program partner Accenture for the increases. However, Second Commissioner of Taxation David Butler said that the relationship was positive and responsibilities were clear when they needed to be.

Others might say it was the fault of bad governance. But I don't get the feeling there's a lack of oversight on the project. The Change Program's steering committee was scheduled to meet today and will meet again later this month, all to make sure the next release — set to be the income tax upgrade, the big one — won't go ahead unless the office is ready for it.

David Butler
(Credit: ATO)

The agency is also very aware that everything it is doing on the Business Activity Statements release might be changed by the government's response to the Ken Henry review and not rushing the design so as to try and minimise what it has to do twice.

I'd say the problem causing the delays and cost hikes is more likely the scope of what the office has been doing and the myriad of other jobs it has on its plate, as mentioned in the ATO's annual report for 2007-2008:

Post-budget assessments indicate that we will continue to experience considerable pressure on the delivery of our information technology systems in 2008/2009. This reflects our significant work program, including implementing the government's tax policy changes, our own internal business process improvement program (the Change Program) and our contribution to whole-of-government improvement initiatives... Software developers face similar pressures to update products that support taxpayers and their agents to meet their obligations or to access benefits.

If the Australian Taxation Office has been guilty of anything, it's been a surfeit of optimism. Certainly when it set its original timetable and costing it was "ambitious" as the audit office said in its recently released review of the program.

Yet the auditors seemed to find it a tough ask to find things to criticise about the program, only releasing four fairly general recommendations, most of which, if you listen to the ATO, were either already implemented or weren't really applicable. The audit office has also admitted that although delayed, benefits had been realised from the part of the Change Program which has been done.

Maybe, as the audit office says, the ATO does need to count its costs more carefully and make sure the lines are clearly drawn where Accenture is concerned. But my opinion is that the ATO's transgressions are fairly minor and that, despite the costs, the Change Program will have been worth it.

The ATO employed 22,429 people at 30 June 2009. It had an operating expenditure of $3 billion. It collected $264.5 billion in net cash, provided over $17 billion in transfers and payments, and collected around $41 billion in GST for state and territory governments.

All this was being put at risk by out-of-date IT systems. An excerpt from the audit report said:

By 2000 it was clear to the Tax Office its ICT systems were unsustainable. It was taking too long to respond to government policy initiatives, the community was getting less efficient service and Tax Office staff were finding reduced capability in the Information Technology (IT) platform. In addition, the Tax Office had been aware for some time of inefficiencies in the ICT systems on which the administration of Australia's taxation and superannuation systems depended.

If the ATO's tax systems fall in a legacy heap, the whole country will stumble. Yes, the project being late will cost us money and delay benefits. But, considering that it doesn't seem the ATO has been guilty of gross incompetence, how much would it have cost Australia's tax system if it had done nothing?

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• ATO refreshes ABN system
• ATO's $879m 'worst-case scenario'
• ATO Change Program budget now $879m
• ATO sets key Change Program date

Earlier this year the government said it intended on adopting Cisco TelePresence to save time and some of its around $300 million annual bill on domestic flights. These telepresence units are gradually coming on line with the full network at 20 sites to be operational by mid next year.

But according to Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner speaking last Friday, we shouldn't be expecting massive savings straight away. He said that people wouldn't use the units immediately since in many cases it would be a "reflex reaction" to book flights.

"You are dealing with the in ground habits of thousands of thousands of people," he said. "That's not something that the finance minister can simply mandate and suddenly everyone changes what they do... This could be a number of years away."

I was deeply shocked by that statement. We have a finance minister who is quite willing to tell Telstra where to go, but doesn't want to put in policies to make sure that government employees start making use of its new $13.8 million telepresence investment? Ridiculous.

If you think about how many loud-voiced shareholders are screaming about having their investments risked because of Tanner and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's determination to force Telstra to the negotiation table and create a broadband connected Australia, you'd think Tanner would blanch at nothing to achieve savings on flights. He certainly doesn't seem to be listening to the shareholder's woes or Telstra's vigorous complaints.

He also didn't seem concerned about agency sensibilities when he asked them to drop their IT spending by 7 per cent for small agencies and 15 per cent for large agencies as mandated by the Gershon report. Understandably, some agencies weren't happy about the need to make those savings. Did Tanner budge? No.

At the same event last week he said those agencies were pushed to achieve the savings. "Once you put people under pressure they surprise themselves," Tanner said. This doesn't seem to be the actions of someone who panders to "reflex reactions".

The agencies have managed to achieve $109 million in the first phase of the project.

Tanner is also wielding an iron hand with the portion of those savings intended to be reinvested in innovative IT projects for the agencies. This was to be in some ways a reward for those agencies for saving money. But Tanner isn't frightened of withholding the goodies if the projects aren't good enough.

"We won't be automatically spending that money," Tanner said severely. "We want quality propositions."

So on the one hand, we have Tanner saying he pushed agencies to scrimp and save when they didn't want to. He is also holding money just out of their reach to achieve great proposals for innovative projects. He has put Telstra in a headlock so that it will go along with government wishes. Yet on the other hand, he cannot force public servants to use telepresence.

I think the minister needs to man up on the telepresence issue and say that flights are no longer alright.

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• Westfield to deploy 40 TelePresence units
• Internode installs Cisco TelePresence
• Federal Govt rolls out TelePresence
• HSBC begins TelePresence rollout

If a cowering Microsoft presents its bottom for you to spank, it will likely enjoy the experience more than you will.

The software giant's new operating system Windows 7 has come at a time where change is being demanded, not just in the realm of desktop computers but also in government procurement. Federal and state governments want to now make more use of their buying power to whip suppliers into shape. They are big and they want to flex their muscles on new submissive suppliers looking to claw their way out of the crisis.

But when I think about Microsoft cowering on the floor, its butt in the air saying "no, please don't hit me anymore", I see a gleam in its eye.

Because even if it had to give massive concessions on support and price to get the NSW Department of Education to change its mind from rolling out XP to putting Windows 7 on its digital education revolution laptops, which I suspect might have happened, another generation of children is going to be exposed to the joys of the Microsoft way of thinking.

It's a case of give a little, get a lot. Each swipe of the price cut whip hurts so good.

A similar idea works with the non-education public sector. How many companies are on Windows XP at the moment? A lot. Change takes time, effort and money. Microsoft knows that if it can swing another XP scale roll-out, it's going to be set for another 10 years or so. So what does it have to lose by signing lean margin agreements for three years?

Not much. After Windows 7 has been implemented, and the contract runs out, there'll be time for Microsoft to negotiate a better price.

So watch out government. If a cowering Microsoft presents its bottom for you to spank, it will likely enjoy the experience more than you will.

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• BIG is butt ugly
• The big 27,000: Win7 ensnares Centrelink
• Windows 8: Dying gasp or next big thing?
• Aussie Windows 7 Launch: Photos

If there'd been a focused project of a smaller scope, it would have been like the brief pick of many tiny needles instead of the invasive prod of the Gershon colonoscopy

Second to being the reviews government, I'd say the Rudd Government could be classified as the government of BIG. Broad sweeping changes that are all going to change our lives for the better. "Don't you worry, Howard's gone now. Everything's going to be all right. We're going to DO THINGS."

So the government has industriously gone about doing things. We have the BIG National Broadband Network. The BIG stimulus package. The BIG hospital reform agenda. The BIG Gershon review.

In our BIG, hire a Brit to fix us, Gershon review there were many changes suggested including governance, skilling, contractors versus in-house employees — a BIG broad master plan. This made for a complex map of a timetable of things to do.

I had a peek at that timetable recently. Did you know that September 2009 was the due date for the government to optimise the number of ICT panel arrangements? Or that this month was the date to have the datacentre strategy handed in?

We've had some update on those two initiatives within the last month. Finance Minister Lindsey Tanner said with a flourish last week that the government was going to have whole-of-government telecommunications and desktop panels.

Got that? It announced it was going to have them. By the end of 2009/2010 financial year. Panels for some services even as late as the 2010/2011 financial year. Until then there was a stopgap panel for desktop services. I wouldn't exactly call that the completion of "optimis[ing] the number of ICT panel arrangements established". (Although according to Intermedium, the number of contracts for the government has reduced, which would suggest some progress is being made.)

Then the datacentre strategy. According to the Gershon report, September 2009 was the deadline to "develop a whole-of-government datacentre strategy". The end of September saw Tanner announce an interim panel to breach the gap until the datacentre strategy could be implemented.

So far there has been a great industry consultation love-fest, but the strategy itself hasn't been developed. A report detailing options for the strategy will be finished by the end of the year according to AGIMO, after which it will be put to a secretary's ICT governance board which will put recommendations forward to the government. We're probably looking at another six months until we see a strategy.

The great thing about BIG for governments in power is that everyone gets so lost in the multitude of goals and deadlines that the amount of slippage and cost climb while benefits slip under the radar until some auditor general's report surfaces like the one last week on the NSW Government project that was $23 million over budget and nine years late. Hopefully by that time it's not that government's problem anymore.

The Queensland Government's into BIG too. It's been doing identity management programs, datacentre consolidation programs, transformation programs, consolidating all agencies onto one version of payroll and financials. It works about as well for the state as it does in the federal arena. After spending millions, Queensland recently admitted defeat on the payroll and financials consolidation, saying that there would be four or five versions of payroll and two to three versions of financials.

Quite apart from the well-known rule that states the bigger a project is, the greater the possibility it will go really pear-shaped, the BIG bang way also often alienates people. For instance, as the Gershon report came out in the middle of the financial crisis, the Australian Information Industry Association got itself into a huff about saving $400 million when the IT industry needed the money. I think if there'd been a focused project of a smaller scope, it would have been like the brief pick of many tiny needles instead of the invasive prod of the Gershon colonoscopy.

BIG also makes everyone in the industry dither while they wait for what's going to happen. It happened with infrastructure decisions while everyone waited on the National Broadband Network and it happened with government spending in the lead up to the Gershon review.

BIG does mean sexy PR. BIG does mean fanfare at the announcement. BIG does mean everyone staring at the headlights of change like stunned rabbits. But while you're looking at the headlights of BIG, you never know what's going to happen.

And after all, what's wrong with having a smaller scope but making stronger more closely watched priorities? We'll fix these now, then see how we go, so we can fix the next thing? Things that will maybe not make a sweeping difference, but that might actually get done on time, on budget and deliver what they promise?

Small steps. Kaizen. Think about it.

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• Governments: Just like lemmings
• Separation: The UK experience
• Land of the long white cloud computing
• Non-professional Oracle wrestling

Well first of all you hope everyone watched Transformers and not the new Terminator. But then you get together with the US and say, "there isn't anything in the market that does what we want it to do. How are we going to push this along on the cheap?"

(Credit: Commonwealth of Australia)

Then you announce a new competition and lay down over US$1.6 million for it.

Minister for Defence Personnel Greg Combet announced the international competition today. It's called the Multi-Autonomous Ground-robotic International Challenge, which thank goodness is shortened to MAGIC. It challenges research organisations to build robots that can act on their own, without input from remotes, conducting surveillance and reconnaissance.

Five competitors will get $100,000 to develop proposals into prototypes. South Australians will need to be on their guard. Those prototypes will be tested in the southern state in November next year. They might even be coming to a town near you, since the challenge is to have teams of robotic vehicles that can coordinate their activities in a "changing urban environment".

It's this bit that I find a little scary. "The robots must detect, monitor and neutralise a number of potential threats to meet the challenge goals and an international panel of experts will judge the entries." Neutralise? Anyone got a spare Kevlar vest?

Jokes aside, the best will get research awards for $750,000, $250,000 and $100,000 for first, second and third place respectively.

"The ultimate aim is to make these operations much safer for our military personnel, leaving the robots to carry out the dirty and dangerous work," Combet said.

Sounds good in theory. It isn't the first time government has reached into the skill sets of research facilities — and why shouldn't they? It's cheap, and in many cases, they've been funding the researchers anyway.

Yet some might question the speed of such investments.

The DARPA challenge, which awards a prize for autonomous vehicles that can best navigate a course, has been running for years. Last year's challenge was held in an urban scenario with dynamic conditions. But the benefits don't seem to have trickled into our ordinary lives. I couldn't speak about the defence applications.

The Solar Challenge, held in Australia, had its roots back in 1982. The first event was held in 1987. I was still running around in kiddy clothes. Yet how many cars have solar panels?

The Berkeley-Sydney Car
(Credit: NICTA)

Even if it doesn't yield immediate results, there are some benefits to the industry, as the Australian-US team consisting of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, University of California Berkeley and National ICT Australia pointed out after its DARPA attempt.

And who knows, maybe this challenge will provide a practical blueprint. The finalists can qualify for further funding under the US Joint Concept Technology Demonstrator Program to bring their prototypes into operational capability. If an Australian competitor is among the top three finalists, that organisation would also be considered for funding under the Capability and Technology Demonstrator Program managed by DSTO.

I personally think that such machines would have to be pretty good before they're sent to the front lines. It's lives at stake here. So I don't expect Transformers or Terminator just yet. But South Australians near the "undisclosed location" might want to watch their heads.

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• Web 2.0 taskforce: Will it stick?
• Don't be an IT snake oil salesman
• Aussie team takes DARPA race smarts to business
• EC invests AU$660m in robotics R&D

All in all the ministers (or their staff) wrote 10 posts in their past blogging foray, which had about as much character as soggy cornflakes.

All in all the ministers (or their staff) wrote 10 posts in their past blogging foray, which had about as much character as soggy cornflakes. Despite the cornflakiness, however, they received around 1500 responses (mostly chastising Conroy for the filtering scheme). Yet they still left the normal submissions channel open, which is where they likely got most of the fodder for their paper anyway.

It seemed to me it was a token attempt that didn't even amount to Tanner and Conroy sticking their little toe into the pool of web 2.0. There was no real collaboration and little sense of community.

If the new taskforce announced yesterday didn't have high fliers such as government chief information officer Ann Steward and Google engineering director Alan Noble as members, I'd say it would be a big waste of time and money.

Yet with them and many other illustrious names on board they might stand a chance, but only if the taskforce doesn't recommend putting web 2.0 on the surface of the government like a band-aid. It needs to be integrated into a government that has been altered from within to match the tenets of web 2.0 — openness and collaboration.

As a journalist, I obviously love the idea of the government becoming more transparent. I've mentioned that the government is already more open than the private sector but there's still a lot of scope for dodgy dealings behind doors.

Yet just setting up a Twitter account won't make the government transparent. Nor will creating ingenious applications to display information in new ways. It's more about getting data out of the walled garden. Unless it's out, there's not a lot of use for web 2.0 applications that use it.

Just setting up a Twitter account won't make the government transparent.

Of course, once we have a wealth of data flow, there would be scope for applications to delve into that information and tell the public when the government has done something cool/scandalous/suicidal/Utegate that we should know about. But until it's been decided that some information should be aired, I just can't see this whole transparency thing being driven by web 2.0.

Consider the RailCorp iPhone application saga. There we had publicly available information and someone who used their time to make an application to make it easily usable by rail commuters. It seems this is exactly the sort of thing the taskforce would intend for some of its $2.4 million in funding. But what happened? RailCorp complained about the application designer using its information.

Now let's look at community collaboration. I think it's a great idea. Get the community to, in a way, self-govern. But how does the government think it's going to take it all in if people start publishing their opinion or offering their help willy-nilly via the tubes? You'd need to have an army of people sifting through people's doggerel to get the few pearls of wisdom that are bound to be there.

So if everyone starts using web 2.0 to get their message to the government, I can see one of two things happening:

1. It works. Lobbying dies a slow death because the government knows what its voters really want. Strong online communities of like-minded people become forces to be reckoned with.
2. The government gets drowned in sheer wealth of information and clings to the old model to maintain its sanity.

Naturally there would be ways to stop the second outcome happening, but it'll need a lot of thought, which is what the taskforce is for.

I wouldn't be surprised if the taskforce spent little time looking at the technologies, devoting more of its efforts to looking at how the government works internally. Because the way it is, the web 2.0 transplant won't stick, in my opinion.

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• Govt unleashes web 2.0 taskforce
• Oracle mostly backs Tanner on Web 2.0
• Governments: Just like lemmings
• Don't be an IT snake oil salesman

Last week, NSW Premier Nathan Rees outlined plans to combine 160 state government agencies to become 13 super-departments.

This wasn't a particularly original thought. Queensland had decided to do the same thing earlier this year, making 23 departments into 13. In fact, similarities drawn by a news.com.au article between Queensland and NSW make it seem like Rees just took Queensland's plan and fiddled with it a bit.

But even Queensland's thought wasn't original because before Queensland came Victoria, with former Premier Jeff Kennett forming super-departments in the 1990s.

Going super certainly isn't the only communal trend in government. There's also the rash called shared services, which seems to be so contagious it's spread to almost all the states, including our wishful-thinking seventh state New Zealand.

Another big trend at the moment is datacentre consolidation, which Queensland believes it did first. "We already embarked on some of those things before Gershon ever reported them," Mal Grierson, director general of the state's Department of Public Works and Queensland Government chief information officer told ZDNet.com.au last week.

He took the CIO title late last year from Alan Chapman, who had been acting Queensland government CIO and is now the executive director for the government's Chief Information Office.

Of course, government isn't unique in following trends. Think about the universities with their sudden herd decision to go with hosted student email. Or the banks' desire to revamp their core IT platforms. Every company in every industry likes to keep up with the firm next door. But since government has such a public profile it should be easier to spot when the decision to follow some new trend is going to burn through the public arena like swine flu. Vendors have the time to position themselves accordingly.

Take NSW's decision to form super-departments as an example. I spoke with Queensland's Grierson last week who said that the Queensland government's shared services initiative had seen its time frame lengthened because of the amalgamation of the agencies. The focus now was on making sure each of the super agencies operate internally on standard platforms.

Now, assuming that NSW will have to do the same, if I was a vendor which had a system in one of the to-be-amalgamated agencies, I'd be pushing the case already that it was my system the new mega agency should be standardising on.

So whether or not NSW will be following Queensland over a cliff in lemming-like fashion or reaping the benefits of IT savings Mecca, I'm sure it will now be deluged with calls from vendors wanting to have lunch.

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• NSW re-shuffle to target IT savings
• Qld seeks help with NBN HQ bid
• Qld ICT campaign had no effect: Schwarten
• Don't be an IT snake oil salesman

Contractors dealing with the government have to make sure that they don't promise the world when they know they can't deliver it.

If government did think the latter, could anyone blame them? There has been a trail of broken projects lying in a pile of debris over the last decade which has strengthened that view.

Think of the NSW government's Tcard project, which started in the hopes of having something running for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games Games, but was cancelled last year by a disgruntled government with a running tab at almost $100 million. The Victorian equivalent Myki hasn't have an untroubled start either, running behind budget.

Aussat has been described as a piece of Space Junk by our former Prime Minister Paul Keating. And what about Sydney Water's IT failure earlier this decade, which had its budget reduced to a pittance because the government feared it would use it unwisely?

A report in 2007 by software testing company Planit found that large Australian organisations were losing an average of $84.7 million on software development projects each year.

Less than 42 per cent were completed on time and budget, according to that report. Six per cent were cancelled all together.

Last week at an Australian Internet Industry Association event, the head of the association's counterpart in the UK, John Higgins, spoke about his activities over the other side of the world. According to him, many UK Ministers said in the past that those from the IT industry were "no better than snake oil salesmen".

When I think of snake oil, I think of unreliability, of a cure which works because of a placebo effect if it doesn't make things worse. As pointed out above, IT does have the opportunity to do just that.

Yet AIIA CEO Ian Birks didn't think that the Australian government believed that and indeed some recent spending sprees make me believe he could be right; that IT has successfully been able to market itself as the medicine it should be, without the side effects. Indeed, such an image is essential since the world as we know it can't operate without it.

We have $11 billion of government money earmarked for spending on the National Broadband Network and just this week Defence said it would tip $700 million into IT so as to achieve savings of almost $2 billion. NSW is trying again on its Tcard and South Australia plans to enter the fray. $100 million is being thrown at Smart Grid technology.

Yet with such projects, their shine will only last so long as they progress on time and don't become bottomless pits where funds can be put. They need to show their requisite benefits.

The key to making sure that IT doesn't become a bad word, and believe me, there are pockets of society who equate it with the devil, is realism. Contractors dealing with the government have to make sure that they don't promise the world when they know they can't deliver it.

It means telling the government when something they are asking is expensive/unrealistic/complicated. (I'm looking at you, ERG). It means asking for help when something is going wrong. It means working to a project goal not a money pot.

We know government is a tempting morsel with its large deals, and a little white lie could be the way in. But is it worth turning the industry back into its snake salesmen?

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• Capgemini scopes Fed Govt desktop overhaul
• Gershon slams govt technocrats
• SA govt starts ticketing search
• NZ Govt flags shared services move

If an IT contractor isn't delivering, it's generally not in the best interest of any profit-making company that the general public finds out about it.

If an IT contractor isn't delivering, it's generally not in the best interest of any profit-making company that the general public finds out about it. The company can commit the crime of omission when it comes to projects that turn into a dog's breakfast, or try to explain adverse sums in financial results with flowery phrases.

Avoiding "no comment" like the plague, executives can become trained in sidestepping the question or giving non-committal answers such as "Project A is progressing just as we expected it would". And what, pray tell, was your expectation?

Of course, there are always the whistle-blowers from within the organisation, but of the many projects blowing up in companies' faces, how many have a conscientious observer who is willing to risk their job to air dirty laundry?

Fortunately for taxpayers, the government is a lot more open, especially around the signing of contracts.

Recently when I was sent information by a firm who wanted to show off a recent deal with the government, I asked what the value was. The company's spokesperson wasn't able to give it to me, so I went and found it on the relevant government's tender website where it was available for everyone to see.

I'm sure the vendors don't mind too much when that happens. However, they probably do mind when one of the endless audits rips open the veil on a government's organisation, exposing the metaphorical cockroaches scuttling around the department's IT.

Take, for example, the Western Australian Auditor-General's report in 2007 on the state's shared services program, which spoke about Oracle's involvement after it was contracted in 2005 to provide an integrated financial, human resource and procurement system.

Fortunately for taxpayers, the government is a lot more open, especially around the signing of contracts.

"The contractor is required to design, build and test a human resource system that provides payroll functions for 30 of the 70 different employment awards and agreements operating in the WA public sector. The whole integrated system was to be completed by the end of April 2006. So far, only three of the required awards for the human resource component have been delivered. Government is currently considering options about how best to deal with the delay and unfulfilled contract obligations," the report said.

This is a damning statement to have publicly available, despite the fact that the report goes on to explain circumstances which had made the vendor's work difficult, and that the government and its vendors are broadly pulling the project back on track.

Contrast this to another company Oracle is involved in, Telstra, for its transformation project. Although there has been a lot of press from leaks and unions decrying the Oracle Siebel system, there has been no confirmation from the telco that the system is not functioning as expected, leaving a taste of uncertainty in the mouth. Was it just staff being unacquainted with the new system as former CEO Sol Trujillo suggested? Perhaps the system was incorrectly implemented. Maybe it's all a storm in a teacup.

Without the public getting a look at a review intended to shine a light into those murky depths, who really knows where the blame lies for long call queues and frustrated call centre workers?

So back to my point. If I was Oracle, I'd prefer the uncertainty to the damning black and white of the Auditor General's review. What do you think?

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