Gillard government running out of tech-time

Beverley Head
Monday, 13 February 2012 16:48

By the reckoning of President Obama's first chief information officer, Julia Gillard's Government is fast running out of time to overhaul the nation's federal information technology systems.

Vivek Kundra, the former White House CIO and author of the Obama government's Cloud First policy, today told a Sydney audience comprised largely of chief information officers and C-level executives including NBN head honcho Mike Quigley, that he left the US public service because he always felt he was going to have the most impact at the beginning of the Obama administration.

He was, he said in 'a race for my life, not a marathon' where he would routinely start work at 4.30 am and finish at 10pm in order to drive change through the US Federal Public Service. After two and a half years Kundra, who was credited with delivering $US3 billion worth of efficiencies, felt his race was run and he moved out of the role and to Harvard for a brief stint before recently joining Salesforce.com.

Julia Gillard's administration turns two in June, and is fast approaching Mr Kundra's perceived deadline for achieving major change. However the information systems investment of the Australian government is a fraction of that spend by the US on IT - and has already benefitted from one round of reform thanks to the Gershon review of Government IT.

The Australian public service is however still grappling with a shift to cloud computing, and on Wednesday Mr Kundra will deliver the keynote address to a sell out AIIA cloud computing event in Canberra.

Mr Kundra said that on taking on the White House CIO role he found the US Government was spending $US80 billion on IT and had more than 12,000 major IT systems to manage. There was also more than $20 billion worth of IT projects that were behind schedule and over budget.

He introduced an IT dashboard which outlined the systems being used or under development, and identified which IT managers were responsible for them. This dashboard - which was accessible by the general public as well as public servants - helped focus attention on which systems were urgently needed and which could safely be abandoned.