Federal Government voom-vooms virtual

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 01 June 2011 17:33

The Federal Government is moving ahead with virtualisation faster than the private sector according to Ann Steward, the Government CIO, as it seeks an ICT trifecta of increased productivity, efficiency and sustainability.

Speaking at Cebit's e-Government forum Ms Steward who is also deputy secretary of the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) said that in 2008/9 the Government had achieved virtualisation rates of 1.45 operating instances per physical server. That had now reached 2.03 which was she claimed better than the industry average of 1.5 according to Gartner's figures.

In a presentation that was otherwise sadly scant on detail Ms Steward said that Government was also; 'Becoming more sustainable with fewer devices per user and more users per printer.' The Government is also using telepresence facilities to cut the amount of Government ravel required each year.

Ms Steward said that over the last three years; 'IT spending by Government has been stable.' ICT was however becoming more efficient through adoption of technologies such as virtualisation, she claimed.

In terms of other initiatives Ms Steward said she had put forward a proposal for an overhaul of parliamentary workflow systems. At present more than 600,000 pieces of work are managed by the 13 different systems managing parliament workflow, and that is increasing by 5-10 per cent a year.

Ms Steward plans to reduce that to a single system according to John Sheridan, first assistant secretary of the Department of Finance and Deregulation, in one of many tweets during Ms Steward's presentation. She acknowledged that; 'A number of the systems are outdated' and that her proposal tackled both a technology refresh and a process overhaul.

Mr Sheridan also revealed that Version 2 of the Government's open source guide would be released shortly.

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