The national Commission of Audit (CoA) has recommended the Australian Public Service consolidate its vast range of bespoke and off the shelf corporate ICT in order to facilitate a move to shared services. The incoming Liberal Government established the Commission of Audit in October 2013 to review and report on the performance, functions and roles of the Commonwealth government.

“Shared corporate services have been taken up to varying degrees by individual groupings of Commonwealth Government departments and agencies, but generally not at a whole of government level.”

It notes that even where agencies have off the shelf systems, they often differ. For example, many agencies use the SAP enterprise resource planning software – there are more than 40 versions of the package currently in use.

“The approach [to Shared corporate services] to date has been relatively ad hoc and would benefit from better strategic planning. The Australian Public Service Commission’s latest State of the Service Report noted agencies have been working together and coordinating the purchase of common goods and services, with two thirds reporting they had participated to some extent in a shared service arrangement.

It found the most common areas of shared services activities by agencies in 2012–13 are Payroll (29%), Security (27%), Property (25%), Finance (23%) and Human Resources (22%).

“Australia should follow the lead of the United Kingdom and implement a ‘digital by default’ strategy.

“The Department of Human Services myGov service should be the centrepiece of an aggressive new approach.”

 “The first step is to conduct a thorough audit of existing Commonwealth public sector corporate support services to understand costs, processes and models and the extent to which these can be standardised.

“As part of this exercise, the Department of Finance should also publish a register of other business systems (for example stakeholder engagement software) to prevent agencies from building new software that already exists.

“Agencies should also be grouped and corporate functions standardised within the groups. Grouping could be by: portfolios; ‘like’ agencies, such as economic or national security agencies; or according to the corporate systems currently in place, for example grouping all agencies currently using SAP accounting systems and moving to a common version, potentially in the cloud.

“Moving to a clustering arrangement will make it easier and more practical to benchmark corporate services performance. As well as increasing the overall performance of public sector corporate services, this would deliver the information to standardise services and improve IT purchasing power prior to moving to shared services.”

The report recommends that myGov, which is the online entry point to Medicare and the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) as well as the DVA, Centrelink and in future the Australian Taxation Office, be used as an opt-out system for much of the day to day transactions between citizens, businesses and government departments.

The Commission says myGov has around two million registered members and is accessed by over 150,000 users each week, with a further two million users anticipated to register by mid 2014 as the ATO begins to use it. The Commission recommends that the government accelerate the transition to online service delivery by making myGov the default means of engaging with government, supported by opt-out provisions.

“In 2012, 50 per cent of services provided by the Department of Human Services were not conducted online,” the CoA report says. “The growing awareness and popularity of myGov offers the potential for significant change in Australia.

“The Commonwealth government has made a commitment to ensure every government interaction that occurs more than 50,000 times per year can be undertaken online by 2017. It will also aim to make all government correspondence available digitally by 2017. The Commission considers government should do better than that.”

The full report is online HERE