... the change has occurred is extremely important. People like to have clearly articulated objectives so that they know what is expected of their performance going forward."
Such failures to communicate can have a long-term impact on future projects. "People very quickly forget what you say but will remember what you do and how you treat people," said Jo Bryson, executive director of the Office of e-government in Department of the Premier and Cabinet in Western Australia.
Outsourcing woes and shared services
When the Howard government first came to power in 1996, whole-of-government outsourcing for IT quickly become the order of the day. A decade on, such projects are widely viewed as a failure, but the push to use outsourcing in both federal and state government remains strong.
One common approach is shared services, where commonly required functions such as payroll or disaster recovery are outsourced to a single agency for use by multiple departments as needed.
If there's an ongoing challenge in developing a shared services environment, it's in recognising the complexities involved.
"It takes a long time -- don't think you can leave it until the last minute," said Jo Hein, national manager IT shared services Australian Customs Service.
"It's 99 percent boredom and 1 percent sheer terror -- it's a long hard process," said Future ICT's Mills. "You can't outsource the outsourcing -- it's part of the core business."
Delivery challenges
One ongoing focus within government is to make services available through a variety of channels, including face-to-face, telephony and online.
"There's a sort of recognition that the future of service delivery is bound up with what's going to happen with ICT," said Centrelink's Wadeson.
"The real issue as much as anything else is holding things back and getting the timeframes, getting the structure right and being able to do things in some sort of ordered and sensible manner."
IT managers naturally tend to focus on Internet-based methods of service delivery, but this can cause problems.
"Agencies tend to become channel-centric in their approach, and that's a big mistake," said Trevor Smallwood, branch manager capability building projects at the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO). Agencies should instead focus on individual customer needs, he suggests.
SOA with a smile
Service oriented architectures (SOA) are also an increasing topic of discussion within government circles. "I don't think we can have the ability to deliver services across multiple channels and across multiple service delivery channels without having some kind of central SOA capability," said Smallwood.
While government might seem a natural to adopt the SOA approach, uptake to date has been mixed. Even in projects that embrace the concept , using SOA terminology too soon may be risky.
"We started from the premise of being sick of having a great big bowl of spaghetti," said Bob Correll, chief information officer for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.
"We wanted systems that would be more agile and more responsive to the changing needs of the business. The way we started it was to have it demand-driven on a project by project basis."
Surprisingly, adoption of relevant technologies such as ITIL can be held back by vendors keen to promote their own wares.
"We used ITIL as the base of our communication tools," said Mills. "The smaller companies were happy because they were already using it, but we got a lot of kickback from the larger companies because they'd invested a lot in their own systems."
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