The report, issued by the Finance and Public Administration References Committee after nine months under review, said the government's current tendering processes inhibited smaller, more narrowly focused, enterprises from competing for IT business in the public sector because details included in preliminary tender briefings were too general.
Furthermore, time-consuming and complex legal requirements, such as written financial guarantees, dissuaded smaller enterprises from competing for loosely worded government tenders.
-There were some elements that inhibited SMEs (small-to-medium enterprises) from tendering," the committee's chairman, Senator George Campbell, told ZDNet. -The way the tenders were conducted knocked them (SMEs) right out of the ring."
The report also calls for greater transparency in all aspects of government IT outsourcing tenders. -The government needed to make all details of tendered projects publicly available, -given the amount of money spent on this", Senator Campbell said.
He complained that too many public contracts had been kept -commercial and in confidence".
The report, titled -Rebooting the IT agenda in the Australian Public Service" follows the blowout that arose last year when a federal enquiry found an AU$1.2 billion whole-of-government outsourcing project failed to deliver on most promised benefits.
The report makes 22 recommendations regarding government IT outsourcing, such as engaging -probity auditors" and conducting public seminars for all tenders worth more than AUD$10 million.
Good to see someone standing up to the bureaucracy in the tendering process. I have no luck at all with tendering - just wasting hours of time and money. There needs to be a trade hub or something streamlined to get things going better. Business shouldn't need endless guarantees and clauses before they will do business. One small observation. If you are under 10 staff in Australia, no larger company will deal with you, not just government. They think you'll be gone tomorrow although you have spent loads of money setting up a proper company structure and public liability insurance to comply with goverment requirements. The old boys' club is alive and well in Australia.