Grabbing the goose that lays the Golden Eggs

James Riley
Monday, 07 September 2009 14:51

Opinion and Analysis

In Government, transparency is everything. Which is probably why large and powerful multinational vendors are so transparent about getting their hands on the Golden Eggs.

The Goose in this case is the Australian Government, of course; that fabled – nay, near mystical – buyer of more than $6 billion worth of tech sector goods and services every year. (Oh, and then there’s Defence.)

Anyway, it’s not quite that simple, as any Government supplier will tell you. But that’s a very big annual bucket/trough/Golden Egg in anyone’s language.

And if you want to know exactly what the Australian Government’s spending priorities are in the ICT sector, I have a fast and efficient new way to find out. Just ask an enormous, well-resourced multinational ICT services provider to send you some marketing material – all the boxes will be ticked.

This week in Parliament House’s hugely impressive Mural Hall, the global giant CSC is hosting a showcase of its products and services. Of course, it’s a sitting week, so a Minister will open it (in this case Kim Carr.)

The invitation to the event provides an excellent one page summary of every pressure point and ICT hairball/nightmare that currently exists within the Federal Government.

Of course the biggest global hairball of them all in the ICT sector is Health. That’s a given, so naturally one speaker is CSC’s Health Services director Lisa Pettigrew. (As if eHealth weren’t a big enough honeypot already, the CSC invitation dropped the nuclear explosion-sized marketing terms ‘Obama’ and ‘Health Reform’ in the same sentence in case anyone hadn’t got the message.)

Next speaker is Bob Hayward, CSC’s local CTO and Innovation guy. He will deliver an address titled: “Broadband Networks Enables Cloud and More Sustainable Computing.”

Hayward has always been a great communicator: I can count between four and six Government ICT spending priorities in the seven words of his presentation title alone. Now that’s impressive.

The next presentation is, naturally enough, laser targeted on Defence logistics. Seriously, the Australian Government could not spray more money into that particular hole in the ground if they used a fire hose …

Anyway, CSC provides a short, one paragraph summary of ICT areas where the Goose might find its services useful.

Health (Oh dear lord was there ever a government sector more fat and ripe for picking);
Government Cloud (did someone say consolidated data centre services?);
Maximising the NBN (I think I’m going to burst);
Defence (is it even possible to that these people could spend more on ICT in the next three years?);
Creating a Better Citizen Experience (just sign here please);
Knowledge Capital Management (… and here. Thanks, you’re all done.)

Finally there is something titled Innovation. This one I don’t get. What’s the go there? … oh, there, I see it now. Something called CSC’s Ignite Approach, whatever the hell that is.

I’m going to turn up at the Mural Room to find out.