Govts to be compared on IT performance

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The Department of Finance and Deregulation has progressed with a plan to have Australian Federal, State and Territory agency IT services benchmarked, releasing an expressions of interest document for a supplier to carry out the service.


In 2009, the governments agreed to start standardising ICT performance, starting with conducting benchmarking using 2010/2011 data to measure performance on 40 metrics, such as:

• the percentage of total business as usual expenditure, 
• percentage outsourced,
• annual per unit operational cost
• annual per unit capital replacement cost,
• capital replacement time frame
• percentage vendors of total ICT vendors,
• percentage mix ICT internal versus external full-time employees, and
• percentage ICT full-time employees of total end users

for

• end-user infrastructure, 
• mid-range (servers),
• Local Area Network (LAN) and Remote Access Services (RAS),
• storage, facilities (datacentres) and applications, and
• help desk.

About five of the Australian governments were expected to participate in the benchmarking exercise to start with. Each can provide data from multiple entities within their remit, such as individual agencies or a group of agencies. More governments could possibly come on board in future years.

The vendor would need to supply analysis and static reporting on the benchmarks, with information to be supplied by the governments in a format such as Excel. The expression of interest documents pointed to the US Government's IT dashboard as an example of what the vendor could do, linking to source code made available by the US Government.

The reports needed to compare benchmarking results between organisations, while putting them into context given the sale of the organisation, its asset depreciation schedule, the availability of its services, and its business model. The report would have to also draw comparisons with industry and government benchmarks and consider the results in light of technology trends.

The project is scheduled to start in October this year, with jurisdictions to provide data in November, and the static and online reports to be completed in February and March next year respectively. The contract is to run for one year.

.zdnet.com.au