The Department of Finance has scaled down its ambitious plan to implement a state-of the-art whole of government automated records management platform for Australian Commonwealth Agencies and will now seek to establish a panel of qualified RM vendors in 2019.

A moratorium on new investment in records management solutions remains in place, however the range of exemptions has expanded to cover almost half of Commonwealth Government bodies. Agencies that wish to update existing RM systems to maintain vendor support are also being given permission.

In May 2016, Finance had initially recommended that agencies be required to opt in to receive records management as a service (RMaaS) from a lead agency.

After more than three years of work and millions of dollars invested, Finance is now requesting that industry vendors help it draft requirements for a new panel that will be put in place in 2019. This is in addition to several existing panels that already include vendors of record-keeping platforms.

At an industry update session, Kayelle Drinkwater, Assistant Secretary, Accountability and Reporting, said the Department of Finance would make available a set of rules and some code it had developed to provide vendors some form of guide to future capability directions.

A Request for Proposal (RFP) will be made available via Austender in October 2018 seeking industry comment on the Panel requirements.

“We don’t have all the answers in the Government, and [the RFP is] your opportunity to influence the [details of the] tender for 2019,” said Drinkwater.

Finance wants to increase the productivity of all APS workers by removing the need for ‘end user filing’, by applying smart technology that will automatically extract and categorise information held within common business systems such as Word, Outlook and SharePoint.

While announcing the Government’s preference for open source technology, Drinkwater strongly emphasised the importance of Active Directory integration.

Those vendors who respond to the RFP in October will not be assessed or scored. Their submissions will be used to guide the drafting of a followup Request for Tender (RFT) in 2019 but there would be no “advantage or disadvantage” in responding to the RFP stage, Drinkwater said.

Finance wants digital records management solutions that incorporate smart technologies such as auto-classification, ontology management, machine learning and built with a Micro Services Architecture to support easier communication and integration with existing business systems.

Vendors that are successful in being placed on the panel in 2019 will need to demonstrate these capabilities or lay out a roadmap for achieving them in the future.

One attendee at the briefing commented that “Industry has already gone through a ‘non-assessed’ process of claiming capability against stated requirements in 2017’s ‘Market Day’ – only to have an unsubstantiated critical assessment of aggregate capability fed back into the public domain, to considerable disquiet.”

“Industry has previously told Finance it has these smart technologies already, but they are not being utilised; Finance effectively publicly rejected these claims without substantiation.

“Micro Services Architecture is a vague term and is certainly not necessarily ‘smarter’ than its peers. Theoretically, it has advantages if done well but it’s certainly not magic or a silver bullet, and for a small cadre inside Finance to be stipulating architectural requirements instead of outcomes to industry is hubristic to say the least.”