GTR April 2013

APRIL 2013 • ISSUE 17 GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

Big data

Can the cloud save your back end?

Treat your citizens like numbers

Ballarat’s skills incubator

ROUNDTABLE: DATA CENTRES

●

BUILDING MOBILE APPS

Broadband policy smackdown: Labor vs Coalition

Stop typing, start talking and get the recognition you deserve

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 Professional is enterprise-ready speech recognition software providing security features, configuration options and administration tools for managing large user networks. Create macros to automate business processes. Use Dragon with a digital voice recorder, anywhere, anytime and automatically transcribe the text when you connect to your PC.

Dragon Speech Recognition boosts employee productivity by dramatically reducing documentation completion time. Creativity and detail is enhanced, with ideas appearing on the screen three times faster than typing - using natural, conversational speech.

Contact us today to find out about the great new features in version 12 including enhanced webmail, faster correction, the interactive tutorial and more.

SPECIAL OFFER: SAVE 25% on Multi-User Licenses Minimum of five licenses. Valid to 31st May 2013 Maintenance & Support available. Includes 12-month unlimited technical support plus all version updates and software upgrades

Contact your preferred software reseller for pricing and availability or call 1300 550 716.

data3.com.au 1300 232 823

voicerecognition.com.au 1300 255 900

voicex.com.au 1300 551 778

zallcom.com.au 02 6279 1700

cover story: Big data: Treat your citizens like numbers If you thought it was already hard to keep track of your agency’s data, fasten your seatbelts: big data is legitimising data hoarding and helping agencies release previously unknown value from both structured and unstructured information. It’s a hidden user manual for government reinvention – but are you ready to tap its potential?

SPECIAL features

22

10

54

regulars 2 Editor’s letter 4 News 38 Opinions: Kevin Noonan, ESRI, Efficiency Leaders, Nuance, Technology One, Ezscan, Datacom 64 NBN Update

Features 28 Regional centres, global innovation GTR looks inside Australia’s largest and most successful technology park, where a long-running public-private partnership is tackling the IT skills crisis.

32 e-government broadband: Labor v Coalition For all its many facets, the September election will in part be a referendum on the progress and future of the national broadband network (NBN). We canvas both parties’ positions on the future of broadband-enabled e-government.

32 City of Gosford An investment in virtual servers and desktops has improved Gosford’s operational resilience.

51 Conference wrap: DIMS, CCF 2013 Highlights from GTR’s Cloud Computing Forum 2013 and Digital Information Management & Security 2013 events.

Case studies 16 University of Ballarat A team of University of Ballarat researchers is repurposing old waterresource and sports-participation data to uncover striking new information.

26 Australian Bureau of Statistics A mobile app is literally putting the ABS’ vast repositories of data at the fingertips of its users – and empowering

Building mobile apps

Roundtable: Data centres

Mobile apps are powerful tools for engaging and empowering citizens. But be careful before you dive in: getting a mobile app working is one thing – but getting a useful mobile app working is something entirely different. GTR gets tips from those who have already gone app happy.

A glut of new data centres has spoilt Australian government agencies for choice when it comes to picking a data centre for their hosting cloudcomputing efforts. But where do we go from here?

We bring together four leading data-centre industry players to get their thoughts.

government in the process.

48 New Zealand Transport Authority

Migrating a data warehouse with 1.7 billion records was only part of a major systems modernisation for the NZ roads authority.

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 1

Far too much late-night TV watching has made me, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit, a closet fan of the show ‘Hoarders’.

If you have not seen it, this is a display of schadenfreude in which cameras linger over homes choked with the detritus of human existence: old furniture, newspapers, clothing, rubbish, pizza boxes and often the pizza itself. The residents are often blissfully unaware that they are suffocating themselves underneath ever-growing mountains of stuff – or they know it, but lack the will to fix it.

Managers of large enterprise data stores can no doubt relate. Many information environments have grown in quite the same way over the years, with accumulations of ever more voluminous corporate data creating the bizarre situation where IT staff spend more time maintaining the data than they do in helping the business actually do anything with it.

The growing popularity of big data cuts both ways. On the one hand, it’s encouraging businesses to feed their inner hoarders, accumulating data on nearly every aspect of their operations in the hope that it might be useful one day.

This requires an ever-increasing investment in data management technologies and processes, which take on increasing urgency when the corporate mandate becomes an explicit instruction to keep just about everything.

On the other hand, big data recognises that public and private-sector organisations are accumulating this data anyway – so they might as well use it.

Fed by evolving AGIMO policy and growing recognition that governments are a cornucopia of valuable but untapped information, big data has become government’s biggest threat – and its biggest opportunity – for years.

One of the many uses for big-data initiatives will be to deliver information to mobile devices that allow analysis by departmental executives, front-line staff – or even by citizens themselves. This sort of interactivity is the vanguard of the brave new world of e-government – but, as you’ll see in our building mobile apps feature, joining it requires a lot more than just a good idea.

In this issue, we also consider whether traditional monolithic enterprise business applications are set for a shakeup that could counteract the nightmare flood of failed government projects in the past. We also tour an innovative skills-development facility in Ballarat, Victoria where IBM, the Victorian state government, University of Ballarat and City of Ballarat have seen great results.

Speaking of results, there’s an election on the boil – and it’s going to be a fierce one. Whether the national broadband network (NBN) will be a major issue or not, remains to be seen – but this issue’s broadband feature nonetheless positions both parties’ policies to give you a sense of how their respective priorities might change e-government positioning depending on the election’s outcome.

There’s lots more buried in the following pages; the best way to find out what, is to start flipping those pages. And, as always, please flip me an email if there’s anything you’d like to say, share, or see from GTR in the future.

EDITOR David Braue e: editor@govtechreview.com.au NATIONAL SALES MANAGER Yuri Mamistvalov e: yuri@commstrat.com.au Tel: 03 8534 5008 ART DIRECTOR Annette Epifanidis e: annette@commstrat.com.au Tel: 03 8534 5030 DESIGN & PRODUCTION Nicholas Thorne CONTRIBUTORS Tom Scicluna, Lee Fisher, Demos Gougoulas, Brad Howarth, Adam Turner, Kevin Noonan, Jeff Segarra, Alicia Kouparitsas MELBOURNE OFFICE Level 8, 574 St Kilda Rd. Melbourne Vic 3004 PO Box 6137, St Kilda Rd Central 8008 Phone: 03 8534 5000 Fax: 03 9530 8911

Government Technology Review is published by CommStrat ABN 31 008 434 802

www.commstrat.com.au All material in Government Technology Review is copyright. Reproduction in whole or in part is not allowed without written permission from the Publisher.

To subscribe to GTR magazine

David Braue, Editor E: editor@govtechreview.com.au

2 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

phone: 03 8534 5009, email: subs@govtechreview.com.au or go to www.govtechreview.com.au/subscribe

eCopy

Paperless productivity for organisations of every size

Using eCopy, Government organisations can integrate paper documents into their digital document management systems, via existing scanners and copiers.

By integrating eCopy ShareScan with your exisiting multi-function device you can: • automatically convert hardcopy originals into accurate, formatted, editable digital files - including graphics & tables.

• transform static text images into searchable documents as they are scanned.

• transport information directly into Microsoft® applications such as SharePoint®, alleviating the need to rekey, distribute or archive paper.

• integrate with HP TRIM and other records management systems, making it easy to search and retrieve scanned information.

• use secure scan-to-mail, scan-to-PC and scan-to-file functionality.

• lower document-processing costs and keep your organisation moving faster.

The best-in-class user interface in eCopy Sharescan eliminates training, ensures rapid adoption and generates a fast ROI for your organisation, so talk to one of our team today.

Email: John.Broughton@nuance.com or call +61 2 9434 2382. Visit getecopy.com.au for more information

AGIMO shaping policy mandate for govt “drowning” in big data Federal government policy-setting body AGIMO has released a big-data strategy issues paper outlining the results of early efforts of the organisation’s big-data brainstorming to date, government CIO Glenn Archer said in announcing the release of the paper.

Addressing the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) backed Navigating Big Data Summit in Canberra, Archer noted that AGIMO had already conducted extensive discussions – with government bodies, privatesector organisations, and peers in the US, UK, New Zealand and Canada – in an effort to identify best-practice methods for aggregating, analysing and making use of massive quantities of data.

“Australian public service agencies collect very significant volumes of information,” Archer said. “They relate to citizens and businesses, organisations’ internal operations, the nature of interactions with external parties such as suppliers and communities.”

“Analytical tools…. Offer enormous opportunities to improve the way we deliver services to citizens,” he continued. “We’re looking to develop new policy about how we can use big data and analytic tools to get a strategic approach for a whole-of-government view of data

management – and to build better policy options for government and for ministers to consider.”

Open for comment into April and due for completion by mid-year, the big-data paper

Figure 1

Big data and cloud computing value graph

Investment / Capacity

Traditional Hardware Investment Cloud Investment Missed Opportunity

Time

4 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

Actual Usage

(bit.ly/154yLUP) isn’t AGIMO’s only nod to the big-data explosion: AGIMO and an Australian Taxation Office-sponsored working group recently brought together departmental representatives and academics from numerous institutions to define the terms of reference for a planned Data Analytics Centre of Excellence, which will serve as a centrepiece of the government’s efforts to tap into the benefits of big data.

Development of big-data guidelines, best practices and technological tools had become a key priority for AGIMO and other government bodies as government organisations were increasingly finding themselves “drowning in the data” they had collected, Dr Brenton Cooper, technical director for information superiority with the Defence Systems Innovation Centre (DSIC) told the audience.

“Rather than being task driven, they’re trying to make the processes they deal with, data driven,” explained Cooper, who has worked extensively with Department of Defence agencies to help them get on top of their growing data stores.

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/WJK7OK.

Employers focus on retention as ICT staff shortage, election bite The impact of a severe shortage of ICT skills is only being moderated by weakening demand from the government sector as the uncertainty around this year’s federal election bites the labour market, the latest Clarius Skills index has found.

Compiled quarterly by employment specialist Clarius, the index (bit.ly/Ze7xag) compares industry demand for a range of skills, with the supply in the market for those skills. A rating of 100 indicates that supply and demand are matched, while values above 100 suggest a shortage of particular skills and values below 100, an oversupply.

The latest figures suggested that demand for ICT managers has softened since December 2007, when the survey put that category at 100.7; the latest figure was 98.2, up slightly from a five-year low of 97.6 in September 2012.

The category called ICT Professionals, however, showed a less positive story. While the market balance had improved markedly from December 2007 – when the ranking of 110.4 put the category into an extreme shortage – the latest figures had it at 102.2, which Clarius classifies as a ‘very high’ shortage.

Taken together, the ICT-related categories represented a net shortage of 4600 staff – making ICT the industry sector in the most need of additional staff. This, according to Clarius Group CEO Kym Quick, will push employers to focus more intensely on retention strategies to avoid becoming casualties of the higher demand.

“Positive economic signals are reversing [past] poor business sentiment, and this should lead to increased hiring activity,” Quick said in a statement. “This encourages candidates, who have stayed put in recent years, to look for new opportunity – hence the churn. As a result,

businesses are concerned they will lose key talent and IP to competitors.”

“It’s even tougher for companies operating in sectors where there are professional skills shortages because competition for the best talent will be fierce.”

Another technology-related jobs category, ICT and Telecommunications Technicians, was in a better situation, with a rating of 98.1 suggesting there were enough skills in the market. But all areas of the jobs market are likely to see changes in the leadup to the election: while many will welcome the certainty provided by the announcement of the election, the Clarius report warned that the announcement of the election “is already beginning to affect decision making on certain projects, particularly in government sectors.”

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/148o8UA.

Open data, industry collaboration drive new Victorian ICT strategy Open data plays a significant role in the strategy, with organisations expected to make 1000 data sets available by September this year.

Among the other targets set by the minister are technology-specific goals, such as the requirement that major service delivery agencies transition three key transactions online by 31 December 2014; that they target a 15% reduction in customer effort from baseline by December 2014; and that they commence five service interoperability projects by July 2014.

A review of and implementation of ICT governance and organisational structures will be complete by March 2013. By June this year, all major ICT-enabled projects will have adopted High Value Risk processes and by July, the industry will be regularly engaged in the design phase of major government solutions. The strategy sets a goal of having ten government apps developed externally by March 2014.

“This is an unprecedented shift in the way in which government engages with the ICT industry for the delivery of ICT services and systems to government meet new demand,” Rich-Phillips said, noting that government

agencies will develop five policies, services or solutions using co-design and/or co-production

by December 2014.

“It is about effectively managing ICT expenditure by developing an innovative culture that manages risk, increases productivity, and delivers better services through innovation – and in doing so, helps to stimulate growth in the industry.”

By December 2014, the government will introduce analytics and reporting against agency KPIs. By that time, the strategy is expected to have delivered a 15% direct cost reduction through shared or reused ICT solutions.

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/14cVvpK.

Gordon Rich-Phillips

Victoria’s state government will overhaul its ICT strategy with aggressive open-data initiatives – which will see agencies releasing 1000 data sets for public use this year – and “unprecedented” moves to better engage with local suppliers, state ICT minister Gordon Rich-Phillips told the audience at an AIIA luncheon where he launched the new Victorian Government ICT Strategy.

Finalised after a public and industry consultation process over the course of the past year, the strategy outlines 50 hard action points for 2013 and 2014 that will seek to improve the process of ICT implementation – a process that, the minister noted, had been severely compromised by ongoing ICT-related issues with the likes of the Myki ticketing system and the state’s CenITex sharedservices organisation.

“ICT is fundamental to improving service capability,” Rich-Phillips said. “Byt with ICT expenditure of around $1.5 billion per year, we need to ensure that is appropriately managed and that we have the capabilities in place to manage this in a strategic and holistic way.”

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 5

Netsuite takes cloud skills to uni as ICT salaries stagnate Business-applications provider Netsuite has scored a vote of academic legitimacy for cloud applications by getting the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to integrate cloud training into its postgraduate MBA and Master of Business courses.

The partnership comes under the auspices of Netsuite’s SuiteAcademy educational program, which has been developed to boost the presence of cloud-based business tools within university curricula. This will see students trained on the use of NetSuite, a broad cloud-based business software platform, to learn how it mirrors realworld process flows and revenue cycles.

SuiteAcademy has already attracted over 100 universities around the world, all of whom are trying to update their business credentials

to make them as relevant as possible for the modern business world.

“Our partnership with NetSuite is about producing work-ready graduates for a market rapidly embracing cloud computing,” UTS Business School dean Prof Roy Green said in a statement. “Given cloud software automates many traditional professional functions, our graduates need to be lateral thinkers capable of adding value to organisations in new ways.”

Those lateral thinkers may be working smarter as well as harder, but that doesn’t mean they and their ICT-management peers will necessarily see the benefits of their efforts in the form of increased salaries.

The recently released Hudson ICT Salary & Employment Insights 2013 report

(bit.ly/Y02vmd) found that fully 75.1% of ICT professionals are taking on more responsibilities than they had a year ago, but that 56.1% said they had not been financially compensated for the added responsibilities.

In other words, job descriptions may be changing but employee value-add isn’t necessarily being recognised with commensurate pay rises. It’s also not necessarily due to the impetus of the employees themselves: in many cases, workers are simply being given more responsibility after a teammate leaves and – in four out of five cases – isn’t replaced by the employer.

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/1619i0B.

Australia no malware source but new security threats persist Australia is the region’s fifth most-targeted country for malware attacks but tight local regulations have kept it off the leader boards in metrics such as the number of malware host servers, the latest security threat report from security firm Websense has found.

The Websense 2013 Threat Report (bit. ly/13FahVE) found that, despite growing user awareness of some kinds of security threats, malware authors were continuing to gain ground through a combination of brute-force

attacks and subtle, below-the-radar activity through which their malicious code is able to evade technological security controls.

Noting that the number of malicious URLs was up 430% last year in the AsiaPacific region compared with 2011, Bob Hansmann, senior product marketing manager with Websense, said organisations’ actual susceptibility to this risk profile varied widely and often related to user behaviour more than technological protections.

2012 email total threat breakdown (content and urls)

2012 email breakdown (content only)

Malware Attachments 0.4%

Phishing 1.6%

Legitimate 21.6%

6 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

Spam 76.4%

Spam 6.1%

Legitimate 21.6%

“Today’s attacks are multi-stage and start with email or phishing,” he told GTR. “The kinds of things Australia has done have prevented Australia from being a host for these kinds of attacks, but you’re still going to find yourselves targeted victims as [Australian] users are perhaps a little more open to clicking things” than users in other countries.

Concerted education campaigns can impact infection rates, as in the case of oncemassive rogue antivirus malware, which tells users they’re infected with a virus and directs them to an infective URL to “fix” it.

“This had about an 18-month run,” Hansmann said, “and today there are still over 200,000 URLs Malicious that are active, fake antivirus 72.3% or rogue antivirus. But the number of people that actually encounter and click on it is very, very low because users have become aware of it – and don’t fall for it anymore.”

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/WVLI57.

Fujitsu PRIMERGY Server Portfolio Dynamic Infrastructure for Workgroups, Data Centers and Cloud Computing* German design with Japanese quality assurance, as used in more than 100 Fujitsu data and cloud computing centres in Australia, New Zealand and around the world. au.fujitsu.com/primergy servers@au.fujitsu.com *or as the designer‘s say: „Dynamische Infrastruktur für Arbeitsgruppen, Rechenzentren und Cloud Computing“

shaping tomorrow with you

BYOD makes employees happier, companies more profitable: survey Organisations embracing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) are seeing significant improvements in sales, profits and productivity after adapting their work processes around consumer technologies, a recent survey has found.

Many organisations have resisted BYOD because of its disruptive technology and the potential security risks it introduces. However, the research findings – by Avanade, a global solutions and managed-services provider, which surveyed nearly 600 C-level executives in Australia and 18 other countries – suggested overwhelmingly that embracing consumer technologies makes workers happier and more productive by letting them work with technology they know.

Within Australia, the results suggested, 83% of companies that have changed their business processes to accommodate consumer technologies, have seen positive benefits afterwards. This included 34% reporting increased profits, 40% reporting better work being produced, and 57% that have been able to respond to customers more quickly than before.

“Australian companies are embracing consumer technologies in the workplace at a higher rate than their global counterparts and are more willing to change business processes to accommodate emerging work trends,” Avanade’s Australian country manager, Jeyan Jeevaratnam, said in a statement. “This progressive approach is leading to tangible benefits.”

While some of the findings were consistent with widely-held ideas about mobility – for example, that 62% of employees use personal devices in the workplace or that an equal proportion use smartphones for basic work tasks like reading email, online documents and calendar invitations – others were something of a surprise.

Specifically, the Avanade research showed a strong preference for tablet computers, with one-third of respondents indicating they use tablets

for advanced business purposes such as CRM, project management, content creation, and data analysis. This figure was slightly lower than the 40% that use tablets for basic work tasks – but shows how quickly tablets have gained status as serious business tools.

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/YGUXAz.

BYOD sandbox tech gets Defence security tick Government organisations wanting to manage bring your own device (BYOD) rollouts using ‘sandbox’ security technology have a new option after Good Technology’s Good for Enterprise (GFE) received Defence Signals Directorate Cryptographic Evaluation (DCE) certification.

GFE’s presence on the Evaluated Products List, listing devices and environments that have been tested and approved for secure government use, makes it a tool of choice for other government agencies concerned about maintaining the integrity and security of their information.

The current certification provides EAL4+ recognition for GFE, which is the first mobilecontainer technology to sit on the list. It joins the likes of Apple’s iOS, Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5, and the BlackBerry 10 mobile

8 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

operating system – which was approved in a pre-release coup that helped the upstart platform make its case for government takeup.

Designed to provide a highly-protected workspace to which access can be tightly controlled and information protected, GFE supports iOS, Android and Windows Mobile devices. However, the DSD certification only extends to iOS devices at this point – allowing iPhones and iPads running GFE to access and store information classified at up to PROTECTED level.

The need to quickly certify mobile enablement tools has not been lost on the DSD, which continually revises its accreditation capabilities to provide relevant guidance for government agencies.

“DSD’s certification of Good Technology’s secure container enables Government

departments to unleash far more power and productivity from iOS devices without compromising on cyber security,” said Chris Roberts, vice president of world-wide public sector with Good Technology, in a statement.

“The key requirement for public sector organisations should be to minimise risk of data being compromised, such as ‘leaking’ from devices or networks.”

An early user of GFE is the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, which has deployed GFE’s encrypted container technology and found that it minimises ICT support overheads while maintaining an adequate security boundary around the government information.

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/WJL3ml.

Big-data storage needs big-storage data Organisations must run their numbers well to ensure they’re getting the most bang for their data-storage buck when adopting storage-intensive big-data strategies, a senior economist with storage giant Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has warned.

Noting that organisations must consider different storage architectures depending on their data requirements, HDS chief economist David Merrill has told GTR that a quick study in the dynamics of ‘storage economics’ – HDS, for one, has identified 34 different kinds of enterprisestorage costs – can be invaluable for organisations that haven’t revisited their storage costs in a while.

“For the past few years, storage has been highly deterministic,” Merrill explains. “We can talk about the total cost, and with a mapping system can map [requirements] to solutions that are proven to reduce costs. This leads to very easy discussions with senior managers, storage directors and CIOs who know how the economics of storage behave.”

Organisations trying to shovel massive volumes of big-data information into a data warehouse are likely to find their costs become unsustainable if they insist on using just expensive, high-performance disks.

The economic impact of such strategies quickly becomes obvious once they’re applied to careful storage-economics analysis –

and the results can be an eye-opener. “The economic model exposes architectural mistakes that were made in building up to big data,” says Merrill, who blogs regularly on the challenges and opportunities of costing storage strategies.

“When they first do big data, organisations build proofs of concept, then keep replicating that initial design. This is fine for a test-bed, but the economics change as you build out to several hundred or thousand nodes, and several hundred terabytes of data.

Storage economics helps us know when an architecture is economically unsustainable.”

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/YguhLk.

Vic ICT strategy drives telecoms procurement, Web revamp The state of Victoria is revamping the sourcing of telecommunications by state government agencies with a rebranded procurement arrangement designed to improve service levels, reduce costs and increase competition across the sector.

The new program, known as VicConnect, will modernise the decade-old Telecommunications Purchasing and Management Strategy (TPAMS) to reflect changes in the market since its introduction. Currently being floated past a range of ICT industry organisations for feedback, VicConnect will address connectivity, mobility and collaboration services.

VicConnect is among the first program deliverables to be kicked off in the wake of the state’s formal Victorian Government ICT Strategy, which technology minister Gordon Rich-Phillips presaged last year and launched at an AIIA event in February in which he anticipated “unprecedented” industry engagement around the 50 hard action points in the document.

“This is about effectively managing ICT expenditure,” he said, “by developing an innovative culture that manages risk, increases productivity, and delivers better services through innovation – and in doing so, helps to stimulate growth in the industry.”

VicConnect isn’t the only initiative to stem from the launch of the ICT strategy: the state government also recently debuted a totally

revamped version of the state’s top-level Web portal, which receives over 450,000 unique visitors per month.

The new version of vic.gov.au – the site’s first overhaul since 2003 – is mobileoptimised and has a focus on effective search capabilities, with linkages into a

range of social media services; lists of topic-based direct information feeds; a consolidated Twitter feed for the entire state government; and a directory of Victorian government mobile apps.

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/YFndaB.

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 9

b ig data

Big data

Treat your citizens like numbers

In an economic climate where government agencies are being pushed to do more with less, big data is emerging as a means to take an asset that agencies have in abundance and put it to good use.

Story by Brad Howarth

10 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

A

cross Australia government agencies are looking at how they can use new big data techniques for analysis of large volumes of structured and unstructured data, utilising a new range of tools that provide faster and cheaper analytics capabilities than traditional data warehouse and reporting tools. The goal is to gain greater knowledge from their data stores, and much more quickly than has been possible with traditional techniques.

While many of the technologies involved are based on open source tools and commodity hardware, big data is causing a rethink in how data is used and the types of data being analysed.

According to IBM Global Business Service’s partner for public sector Joana Valente, public sector agencies around the world are looking to big data to increase the efficiency of service delivery.

“With tightening budgets and an aging population with declining revenue coming in, and pressure on their ability to access skilled resources, the ability to deliver the same services more cost-effectively is critical,” Valente says. “Data is really the only lever available to government executives that can deliver them concurrently improved cost efficiency as well as improved customer satisfaction.”

She cites one long-running example in the US, where the Social Security Administration has been using data analytics to recommend which claims for disability entitlements require further investigation, and which don’t.

“What they did was look at all of the different kinds of cases that it had in train, and developed a business approach to ascertaining which of those cases could be approved faster, because they presented less risk and there was an obvious need to deliver the benefit to the individual,” Valente says.

She says that project has delivered more than US$2 billion (A$1.93 billion) in savings over a period of five years through more efficient use of the department’s resources.

Patrick Bodegraven

Real-time government In Australia, SAP is working with NSW Fire & Rescue to use big data analytics for real-time situational awareness. SAP’s head of industry and industry principal for Public Sector, Patrick Bodegraven, says Fire & Rescue is using SAP’s HANA in-memory database technology to analyse data to determine where events are happening and issue alerts, and even forecast where events are going to happen.

“Big data is going from knowing what you know today, to knowing what is potentially going to happen in the future, and anticipate and respond accordingly,” Bodegraven says.

He adds that HANA is also being used by public sector agencies around the world to find gaps in

“Big data can include ‘found’ data sources such as social media feeds….the relationship between those sources and the high quality measures produced by the statistical agencies is problematic.” revenue collection, such as non-compliance in the payment of infringements and penalties.

“By using big data and consolidating information from different data sources one agency was able to identify where debt existed, and was also able to identify the best ways of facilitating the payments,” Bodegraven says. “It has facilitated an increase in the velocity of payments, and determined the best time of day to call people and follow them up about these outstanding debts and penalties.

Numerous Australian public sector agencies are looking for their own ways to harness Big Data. At the federal level a big data working group has been formed to develop a whole-of-government strategy and determine the best ways to develop the practices, skills, frameworks and common infrastructure to deal with big data collectively (see sidebar overleaf ).

Treasury, in particular, is an agency that has long grappled with big data problems in terms of modelling the Australian economy. A year ago it commissioned its Odysseus data warehouse, based on Microsoft technology, as the repository of data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Reserve Bank of Australia and other sources. Odysseus was commissioned for modelling the domestic economy, but its use is now being broadened to other groups within Treasury.

While Odysseus represents a breakthrough for Treasury analysts, this data is generally considered to come from so-called lag indicators. Hence Treasury CIO Peter Alexander is excited by new frontiers in what he refers to as “true Big Data” – including analysis of unstructured social media data, and even data from environmental sensors.

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 11

b ig data

A b i g - d ata c a l l t o a c t i o n The extent of the government’s snowballing support for big-data analysis has become clear not only from successful early work by government agencies, but by the very vocal and explicit support for bigdata investments from the highest echelons of government.

Senator Stephen Conroy – who not only serves as minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy but acts as the minister assisting the prime minister on digital productivity – reiterated this support in opening the AIIA big data Analytics Summit in Canberra in March.

“The convergence of cloud computing and big data technologies is a pivotal development with significant implications for both business and government,” he said. “The byproduct of computing evolution means the amount of data available has exploded beyond anyone’s early imaginings.

“The challenge of creating structures so that data could be used, has been replaced by the use of computing power on unstructured data,” Conroy continued, citing figures from the UK Policy Exchange that suggested better use of big data could deliver £33 billion (A$47.9 billion) in productivity savings every year through improving efficiency of government operations, improving fraud and error detection, and “making further inroads into the tax gap.” “‘Lost’ data, that was previously unusable and unwanted, now has real and unrealised value,” he continued. “It is a mine of important information able to be tapped…. Business and government stand to generate significant productivity gains through its effective use.

“The question becomes, how do we make the best use of the opportunities presented by big data – and how can we do it in a transparent way that respects privacy and has the confidence and trust of citizens?”

Conroy’s call to action was echoed by AGIMO’s Glenn Archer, the Australian government CIO and a first assistant secretary within the Governance and Resource Management division of the Department of Finance and Deregulation.

As the peak body for Australian-government ICT policymaking, AGIMO has recently turned its sights to big data and, in mid March, released a draft of a big-data strategy (bit.ly/154yLUP) designed to provoke discussion and promote agencies’ moves to take advantage of big data.

Although the benefits of big data are incontrovertible, Archer said the policy will also focus on helping government agencies address privacy concerns such as the inadvertent surfacing of personal data through big-data data matching.

“It’s clear that the collection and correlation of multiple, disparate data sources will magnify the potential effect of seemingly innocuous data, which can expose or reveal sensitive information about an individual,” he said.

“We know this could be a problem and need to make sure that agencies think about it, and how to best manage this risk.

We need to have discussions with industry and others to ensure that government continues to get it right, and that the community has confidence in our ability to control access to that data, and to ensure it’s appropriately maintained.”

The final big-data strategy is expected to be published around mid-year, with comments open through April. – David Braue Glenn Archer of AGIMO: Steering the Australian government’s big-data agenda

12 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

“Data is really the only lever available to government executives that can deliver them concurrently improved cost efficiency as well as improved customer satisfaction.”

According to Alexander, Treasury is working with the CSIRO to adopt a tool originally developed for the Department of Human Services to perform sentiment analysis in real time using social media data.

“We’re not so much interested in the sentiment towards the Treasury brand, but we are asking what sentiment analysis could we do in terms of broader economics across cost-of-living and shopping prices and such,” Alexander says.

“If we can compare that with real time or lead indicators that come out of social media, we can see if there is a correlation between what people are saying and what we are seeing in these lag indicators as they come through.”

The goal is to be able to provide better data to government in relation to trends that may assist with policy setting. He cautions however that it is early days for the project, with participation stretching back only a couple of months, and no actual results delivered as yet. Ultimately however he feels that such initiatives may assist in Treasury’s broader role of growing the economic wellbeing of Australia.

“These are things that Treasury is thinking about, and if we can get real time data that may help,” Alexander says. “I think it is a real positive for government.

We now know that there are tools we can use where if we can grab all this data we can get something useful.

“The biggest change is the cultural, as you’ve got a kind of bricks-andmortar thinking that you’ve got to break. Big data, data analytics, data science – these things

Peter Alexander

are serious business. And Treasury is a serious data player and we want to do more with it.”

Structured, unstructured While Alexander is excited about the possibilities of Big Data, he is aligned with many other agencies in taking a cautious approach to its implementation. Indeed, for some agencies big data is a doubled-edged sword.

The ABS, for instance, is used to dealing with big data problems – but the collection methods and reliability of big data make it unsuitable for inclusion in many of the services that the ABS provides.

ABS director Ric Clarke says that big data represents a significant issue for statistical officers around the world.

“We think there are tremendous opportunities that it provides to statistical agencies in the way they gather data and provide national statistics, in a timely and relevant fashion,” Clarke says. “But we are still looking at how we might usefully apply the tools and techniques that are now becoming popular.”

Today the ABS collects 80 per cent of its data through targeted surveys and the Census, and only 20 per cent through administrative and transactional data sources. This controlled method of gathering data produces high quality results.

However, big data – which can include ‘found’ data sources such as social media feeds – often lacks a firm data provision agreement, and the relationship between those sources and the high quality measures produced by the statistical agencies is problematic.

Clarke acknowledges that the promise of big data may lead to new models that are suitable

“big data is going from knowing what you know today, to knowing what is potentially going to happen in the future, and anticipate and respond accordingly.”

Robert Wickham

b ig data

for specific use cases, as big data technologies make possible types of analysis that would have been too time consuming and, therefore, too expensive to explore.

“Increasingly operational decision makers want to have access to information that may not be as accurate, but is fit for purpose and able to support decision making in a short time frame,” he says.

The ABS has created a big data Laboratory, although Clarke downplays is significance within the overall activities of the bureau. But overall he is excited about the possibilities that big data delivers: “It’s a fantastic time to be in this industry,” he says. “It’s a watershed moment for us.”

Big-data technologies The range of big data solutions in the market today is staggering, especially when considering that the term itself has barely been in use for two years.

Many of these tools are built around the NoSQL concept – which breaks free of the conventions of building databases around tables, and is embodied in open source programming models for processing large data sets, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Cassandra. These enable massive volumes of data to be processed at low cost and at high speed across distributed commodity hardware.

These technologies have been implemented in numerous commercial products, such as the Greenplum analytics platform acquired by EMC

“For some agencies big data is a doubled-edged sword….The ABS, for instance, is used to dealing with big data problems – but the collection methods and reliability of big data make it unsuitable for inclusion in many of the services that the ABS provides.”

in 2010. Other tools include the Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing (AMPP) architecture developed by Netezza, which was acquired by IBM in the same year.

Oracle has also released a range of NoSQL big data appliances, combining hardware and software into pre-engineered systems, including a pre-built Hadoop cluster, which SAP is tackling big data through a combination of Hadoop and HANA. While the technology solutions are still emerging, one factor holding back big data is finding the people with the skills to use it.

This issue was noted by, among others, Senator Stephen Conroy – who, in opening the AIIA big data Analytics Summit in Canberra in March, highlighted the government’s role in promoting the development of big-data experts: “There is high demand for new, unique and highly specialised skills to support work in the area of big data,” he said. “These include the ability to engineer software to work across different storage systems, and the mathematical and machine learning known-how to analyse the data.”

Robert Wickham, Oracle’s general manager for Exadata and big data Solutions, says big data hinges on analytically minded people – often referred to as data scientists – who are in short supply.

“And you would probably think the private sector might get first dibs on those skills rather than the public sector,” Wickham says. “So I think the public sector is going to have to do a really good job of attracting and retaining and making it interesting for people who have those skills.”

T h e b i g - d ata e l e c t i o n It is not just the bureaucracy that is grappling with the potential of Big Data. Politicians are learning that its tools and concepts can go a long way to ensuring they align their messages with the moods of the electorate, and even swing the vote on election day.

Use of big data techniques is widely recognised as being a decisive factor in the re-election of US President Barack Obama in 2012. In 2009 the Democratic National Committee hired analytics expert Dan Wagner, who created a data analysis model that predicted the outcome of a special congressional election in New York down to an accuracy of 150 votes. Not surprisingly, his techniques were used extensively throughout the 2012 campaign.

Intel Corporation principal architect Parviz Peiravi is one of many who have paid close attention to the work of Wagner and the Obama campaign team. He credits their victory to a decision to look at creating a genuine analytics process, rather than just viewing it as a simple tool. The campaign team used HP’s Vertica analytic database management software, and hired a team of data scientists and analysts.

“The goal was to accurately profile the voters, and that led into figuring out how many people were going to definitely vote for Obama, how many were not going to vote for Obama,” Peiravi says. “So they focused on undecided voters.”

They also used analytics to determine the best ways of swaying the opinions of these undecided voters, choosing a more direct approach over traditional advertising.

“Based on the data they collected, based on more accurate profiling of the voters, they decided to take action and take a persuasive method of approaching voters,” Peiravi says.

“Obama had a very specific targeted campaign that was able to be tailored to people and the way they wanted to hear messages.”

Door-knockers were trained on how to communicate the value of Obama’s campaign to each swinging voter, and to collect additional information to continually refine their models.

While the Romney campaign used some of the same techniques, Peiravi says it started later and ran a smaller analytics team, and failed to take an integrated approach to accumulating and managing data.

He believes that the success of the Obama campaign means big data will play a big role

15 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

in the future of the political system around the world, especially as voter registration and government data sources are mixed with social media data to determine people’s moods.

“Correctly influencing the subjects – in this case voters – to make that 50/50 decision to vote for one or another, is something that they’d like to do, and it will be something they can do in the future,” Peiravi says.

According to Oracle’s general manager for Exadata and big data Solutions in Australia, Robert

Wickham, these same technologies will play a key role in the upcoming Australian election.

“The Gillard campaign is certainly exploring that right now, but beyond that we are not at liberty to explain what they are doing,” Wickham says.

“They are certainly paying close attention to what was done there. But if you don’t have the compute power to process large volumes of data sets in near real time fashion, you can’t execute that kind of strategy.”

Application of big-data techniqu es is being credited with helping US president Barack Obama’s re-election campaign target undecided and disenfranchised voters.

Old data, new understanding

O

ne of the biggest benefits of big-data analysis is that it allows reuse – and, in many cases, use for the first time – of masses of disaggregated data that may have been languishing in databases but paints an important picture when combined in meaningful ways.

Just ask Dr Helen Thompson, a national broadband champion and director for e-commerce and communications within the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) at the University of Ballarat.

Thompson and her research team have been working to apply bigdata analysis to a range of public databases, to better understand how emerging analysis technologies can “foster the type of multi-disciplinary collaboration that’s required for some of the big research questions to be effectively addressed”.

Speaking at GTR’s recent Digital Information Management & Security 2013 conference in Canberra, Thompson highlighted an analysis of sportsclub participation data that was giving unprecedented visibility into the distribution of particular sports participation across Victoria.

Concise, accurate information about which citizens are playing which sports is crucial to most effectively distributing physical-education funding, but a lack of information meant that the most vocal sports have typically taken precedence over other popular but less well-organised sports.

In a joint project – combining the efforts of the Australian Sports Commission (ASC), Victorian Department of Health, Victoria University, and eight sporting bodies including Cricket Victoria and Basketball Victoria – Thompson’s team had aggregated “millions of records of individuals” to paint an unprecedented, spatially-linked view of sports participation across the state.

The ASC alone surveys tens of thousands of people annually about their recreation and sports engagement. Aggregating that with other data – for

16 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

Helen Thompson

b ig data

example, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures around socioeconomic status – and then using big-data analysis to project it into a spatial environment, is offering unprecedented insight (through the Sport & Recreation Spatial Project, at www.sportandrecreationspatial.com.au) into local variations in the nature and extent of participation.

“Looking at changes in participation over time, is the sort of thing that hasn’t been easy to do in the past,” Thompson said. “Some survey results have been presented as itemised report numbers, but not spatially represented.”

The team’s statistician has calculated the new model offers over 1 million possible routes users can take while drilling down into the data – and she’s confident this will lead to better decision-making around sports resource allocation.

“In the past,” she explained, “it’s been the best written application that gets that new $500,000 sports facility – and not necessarily the community that has the biggest need. [Big data] enables a deeper understanding of change – and we think that leads to increased resource allocation.”

Another project saw Thompson’s team collecting historical data on groundwater bores from seven different catchment management authorities across Victoria. The project was intended to improve natural resource management by making the data accessible through a single user-searchable point of access.

The result – Virtualising Victoria’s Groundwater (www.vvg.org.au), a Web-accessible portal that allows searching and analysis of groundwater bore data through a map-based interface – offers data on more than 300,000 groundwater bores, with records on “still hundreds of thousands probably missing”, Thompson said.

“Until the commencement of this project, all of the information that’s now represented, already existed,” she continued. “It’s just that it was really difficult to locate. The data has only ever been accessible to the state government, and to water authorities, through their own internal systems.”

Although the project applied big-data techniques to provide a single view of the data, the actual data continues to be curated by the individual authorities. Consistent with the spirit of open data, the raw data is available for public download and independent analysis.

“Once we were able to access those models, it enabled us to deploy functionality that empowers business to answer questions. Feedback and analytics through the site suggest water authorities are increasingly referring consultants, farming enterprises and even their own staff to use this service – because it is more efficient for people to meet their information needs.”

– David Braue

e nterprise

Crunch time for enterprise monoliths?

The complexity and risk associated with enterprise applications are well-known – and have come back to bite more than a few government agencies in the process. Yet as the granddaddy of all back-end stuffups comes under scrutiny, it may be time to ask whether the cloud is hastening the end of the massive enterprise system as we know it.

A

two-week enquiry into the Queensland Health payroll debacle wrapped up in late March, shedding light on a longrunning fiasco in which development of a new payroll system went catastrophically wrong, causing a series of delays that ultimately cost the state of Queensland $1.2 billion.

Evidence suggested that due-process practices had been all but circumvented by a new contractor within the state’s then-new

18 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

shared-services agency, CorpTech, which was thrown in the deep end to manage the replacement of the agency’s aging LATTICE human-resources system.

That contractor favoured a single supplier for the SAP rollout project and in December 2007 gave the contract to his old employer, IBM, at a bid that was around $100m cheaper than its nearest rival. Three years later, the system was a disaster and the project has become synonymous

with everything that’s wrong with massive enterprise business-systems implementations.

Nick Gruen, CEO of policy thinktank Lateral Economics, pins the underlying problems with such projects not only on individual failures of process, but on the failure of public-sector executives to make what they see as risky decisions by advocating for a slowly-slowly approach to systems implementation.

“It fails totally, fails slow and fails big because

nobody is prepared to fail fast and small,” he said during a recent Cisco Systems-hosted panel on changing public-sector technology imperatives.

“Public-sector projects are often huge – for example, [complex] desktop implementations when you could get 80 to 90% of what employers actually do using a notebook and Google Chrome.

I find it extraordinary that some agencies are spending 10% of their budgets on IT.” Grant Ardern, chief technologist with New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty District Health Board, argues that…such failures often stem from the vagaries of political-driven mandates. ”In my experience, one of the policies is risk aversion at the executive level,” he explains.

“Politicians have goals and outcomes that they want to see achieved, but sometimes they wait so long that when you have to do it, you have to do it too quickly. Everybody procrastinates until the last moment, and then they do it wrong.”

Whether such delays played a role in the Queensland Health disaster, or whether it was an isolated failure compounded through repeated failures of process, will soon become clear. The Queensland Health Payroll System Inquiry

(www.healthpayrollinquiry.qld.gov.au) will run through April, under the guidance of retired Supreme Court justice Richard Chesterman, and will report its findings to the Queensland Premier on 30 April.

Modernising the workhorses Despite their chequered reputation, not all business systems implementations go so horribly awry: as critical systems for supporting the operation of government agencies of all sizes, many such implementations are quietly humming away in the background, administering functions like payroll, HR, financial accounts, and more.

These unremarkable success stories, however, are starting to heat up again as enterprise vendors work to open them up to the new possibilities posed by models like cloud computing and mobile access.

Cloud computing, in particular, is emerging as a way of simplifying the actual delivery of enterprise capabilities: SAP, Oracle, Technology One, and other longtime government-systems suppliers are all priming their systems for cloud

delivery through infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers offering much higher degrees of infrastructure protection than was possible in the past.

Shifting enterprise apps to the cloud may seem like unnecessary complexity for many government agencies – particularly resourcestrapped local governments – but many are already there, points out Ben Dornier, director of corporate and community services at the Northern Territory City of Palmerston.

“Local governments are doing everything on a shoestring already,” Dornier told GTR’s Cloud Computing Forum 2013 conference. “They’re fast in some things and slow in others – but we are already heavily involved and engaged with the cloud, and have been for years.”

He pointed to the increasing popularity of cloud-hosted enterprise apps from vendors like Technology One – whose success with the LGONE software-as-a-service model in Queensland has been extended into the NT with a number of local-government contracts.

“Risk is the big thing,” Dornier continues.

“Seeing where we can gain rewards from the

Grant Arden GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 19

e nterprise

cloud providers we already have – and leveraging that to maybe build and provide information to consumers as efficiently and effectively as possible. Think about who your providers are, what they’re providing in the cloud realm, and how you can leverage that.”

The new architecture Cloud-hosted systems are just one part of moving government organisations into the modern era; another, particularly in environments with a large number of complex systems, is the need to extend existing enterprise systems using a service oriented architecture (SOA) model based not on monolithic applications, but on a bevy of loosely-integrated systems tied together to support the business.

While architecturally elegant, the decadelong push towards SOAs has often lacked one major thing: a killer use-case scenario. Sure, SOAs were useful for rearchitecting enterprise apps with Web-based front ends – but they are truly coming into their own as the new Webbased world, and the mobile devices that are hastening its expansion, drive fundamentally different user models.

In the mobile world, extensible and modular applications are the order of the day. Today’s enterprise platforms are expected to allow for straight access, mashups, and the distribution of relevant data – formatted or unformatted – to third-party applications. Those applications, in turn, must be deliverable to smartphones

Brian Prentice

20 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

and tablets just as easily – and with equivalent functionality – as to officebound desktops.

The process isn’t just about adding APIs to existing applications, warns Gartner research vice president Brian Prentice. “We need to think about modularising the architecture of an application,” he explains. “But on the other side, we need to think about modularising the experience the user has with the software. They’re not necessarily the same thing.”

Failure to realise that difference can easily lead government developers towards faulty decision-making processes, if they fail to strike the right balance between back-end capabilities and end-user concessions.

This can be difficult given well-entrenched software-development processes under which government agencies have long been operating: agencies must answer questions like how they identify what the purpose of an app is supposed to be, and how they make sure that the app maintains its focus and purpose over time.

These questions “are massive in terms of their impact on the entire set of assumptions that have been running software development for the past 40 years,” Prentice says. “It fundamentally alters the processes that go around creating software – and it definitely impacts the skills, staff levels, interactions and culture that needs to exist in a software development environment.”

With the idea of the single-purpose mobile app now well accepted, Prentice sees a growing shift towards the use of such apps to provide capabilities that complement the core functionality of enterprise systems. This trend dovetails with their desire to push a broom through what is often the accumulation of decades’ worth of applications, many of which have long ago outlived their usefulness but lacked the champions to bring them into the SOA era.

Many times, this housecleaning accompanies a push towards server virtualisation – but “virtualisation is not a magic wand you can wave over a disaster portfolio,” Prentice warns.

“If we have apps that require specific purposes, that means we require lots and lots of apps as opposed to fewer [large] applications. Instead of having monolithic code bases, we want to have modularised, component-based architectures.”

In other words: the best-of-breed app is back – and it’s going to be living on your end users’ mobile devices. The technology of SOA already

well-established, the challenge for developers is to decide where the functional boundaries between back-end systems and user-side systems should lie – and to maintain this separation in code over the long term.

“The end result is that we have to almost completely throw out the age-old definition of what an application is,” says Prentice. “The old definition is holding us back; we need a whole new design oriented process focused not on technology, but on people.”

From avoiding risk to embracing it Modern information architectures are pushing this point further and further from the enterprise-apps centre of gravity – but this runs the additional risk of putting them further and further out of executives’ sphere of influence.

And while many public-sector executives therefore see monolithic enterprise platforms (and their tight sphere of influence) as the lower-risk option, the preponderance of cloud-hosted solutions is rapidly changing that dynamic.

This, in turn, begs a simple question: If the technical infrastructure supporting business process can be delivered from somewhere else and its results seamlessly tapped into by a government application, is this any worse than the traditional practice of maintaining the entire infrastructure internally?

Embracing the opportunity for change is going to be essential for relaxing government agencies’ obsession with owning and running everything – but it’s going to require a change of mindset that extends far beyond simply extending apps with a few APIs. “You get a lot of innovation coming from within government and outside government but your best tool for revealing it, is opening up the conversation,” says public-sector policy consultant Rod Glover, who notes that governments also need to consider internal change to match the reinvention now possible around flexible enterprise applications.

“Suddenly old conversations about hierarchy, and saying ‘this is not compliant with process’, start to look to everyone else as silly as they are.

It’s exposing the practices of government to other stakeholders that will force change. And government is getting smarter at understanding that many of those processes will be shared.”

TechnologyOne has been delivering enterprise software solutions to all levels of government for more than 25 years. Today, more than 100,000 people from 500 public sector organisations use our products.

We understand the public sector. Our software has been designed to transform business, and make our government customers’ lives simple.

Power of One

lution o v E of r e ow

not Sim Co plic m p

, ity xity le

P

Our approach

Transforming business, making life simple

sio

rp Ente Ente

ri s

r pr

i V e

ise

Vi

is no

r oC aM

ent & m t s m i Fo c u m et k

n

ar M Co

k m et F m i ocu tm s & ent

TechnologyOneCorp.com O fo rewoP

Australia | New Zealand | South Pacific | Asia | United Kingdom

making life simple Transforming business,

Freecall 1800 671 978 (within Australia) | +617 3167 7300 (outside Australia)

mobile apps

Rebuilding government, one app at a time The mobile boom is changing the way government agencies interact with the world around them, but it’s important to have a strategy in place before you jump on the app wagon.

Story by Adam Turner

22 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

H

alf of Australians now own a smartphone, plus you’ll find tablets on a growing number of coffee tables. These mobile devices present a powerful tool for government to inform and engage constituents and other stakeholders – so it’s hardly a stretch to suggest that all government agencies with a public-facing role should be considering a mobile and social media strategy.

In many cases, this strategy may end up revolving around a purpose-built mobile app, running on Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, or perhaps the challenger Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10 operating systems. However, think before you rush into building an app, simply to keep up appearances: it can be a recipe for disaster.

Successful government apps tend to be only one part of a larger mobile game plan. Victoria’s Better Health Channel, for example, was regularly judged Australia’s number one health and medical information website by Hitwise before launching an app for Apple iPhones and iPads in 2011. Last year that app won Best Medical App in the Australian 2012 Mobile Awards, and plans are now underway for an Android version.

Rather than rushing in, the Better Health Channel started with a limited app containing the content most popular with mobile users. The second version of the app expanded to include all available health and medical information, says Simon Blankenstein, digital media manager with the Victorian Department of Health’s Digital Services and Strategy Unit.

The key to the Better Health Channel’s mobile success was to look at how mobile users were accessing its resources, implement a mobile strategy in stages and learn along the way, Blankenstein says: “There’s no point in developing anything unless you’re solving a problem and delivering clear benefits to your target audiences.”

“That involves thinking through how people are going to interact with you, particularly in a mobile setting,” he continues. “An understanding of how people use the technology, and in what context, informs what you should be doing as a priority. Start small and iterate. Where you can, optimise for location-based services.”

The Better Health Channel favours a multiplatform approach to interacting with the public, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube. The mobile app also integrates with Google Maps, allowing users to search for nearby health services such as general practitioners, hospitals and pharmacies.

“The Internet has fragmented audience consumption of media but equally it’s providing an opportunity to interact with people in more tailored ways. Our objective is determining what has the greatest utility to consumers, rather than simply focusing all our efforts on an app.”

Look beyond the Web One key to building a successful app is to make it useful and go beyond simply replicating your website; Apple’s vetting process is known to reject Apps which are not ‘sufficiently different from a web browsing experience’.

In one high-profile example, the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s “big red button” cybersafety app was rejected from Apple’s App Store, because pressing the button simply forwarded users to a website.

“An understanding of how people use the technology, and in what context, informs what you should be doing as a priority. Start small and iterate. Where you can, optimise for locationbased services.”

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 23

While its iPhone app makes it easy for Australians to keep their finger on the pulse of the nation, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is also prepared to help other government agencies make the most of their data via the internet and mobile devices.

“Our mission is basically to assist people to use information to make better decisions for the country,” says Merry Branson, assistant statistician in the ABS’ Customer Services Branch. “We don’t think our job is done by just getting the stats out there. We want people to use those stats and make better decisions.”

The ABS Stats iPhone app was written by ABS mobile developer David Sullivan. It grants the general public easy access to more than 30 popular statistics including a population clock, the Consumer Price Index, employment rate and more. Location-based features also let users view statistics for their local area, or search by postcode.

“Government agencies are conservative by nature, so if you’ve got an idea like David’s you’ve got to work it through the system,” Branson says.

“He had a great idea and it fits with our mission, although it took us a while to get it through the process and you’ve really got to show a bit of resilience.”

The ABS has long been a leader in government technology, in 2006 declaring all the data on its website free to the public under the creative common copyright license. The bureau’s long-term strategy is to supply ‘data as a service’ through web portals that third parties such as other government agencies can draw on, Branson says.

“We’re part of the National Statistical Service and we’ve got a mandate to help other government agencies do better with their statistical collection too,” she says.

“So what we would say to all government departments is: consider opening up your data. We can help them with their data management and to protect individual privacy. We’re even happy to share systems and approaches to assist agencies in getting their data out there. If you’re ready to embrace this, we’re ready to help.”

24 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

Keren Flavell

A B S : h e l p i n g g o v e r n m e n t get app happy

Apple’s advice for the app’s developers was to go back to the drawing board: “We encourage you to review your app concept and evaluate whether you can incorporate additional features to enhance the user experience. Alternatively, you may wish to consider building a web app using HTML5.”

An HTML5-based web app is designed to run within the Web browser on most smartphones, with the ability to create a link on the home page similar to an app icon. Building an HTML5-based web app can save the trouble of developing multiple native Apps for various platforms such as Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8. The trade-off is that HTML5 Web apps have limited access to the handset’s advanced features such as the camera and GPS. Some Australian government agencies have decided to forgo native apps as part of their mobile strategy and focus on other mobile-friendly alternatives that also leverage social media as part of a wider social engagement strategy.

A Facebook-based app underpins the ‘TownHall’ social media engagement undertaken by Melbourne’s Moreland City Council as part of the wider Community Plan 2025 public consultation process.

Rather than build a standalone native App, an online app running within Facebook seemed a natural fit when Moreland went in search of the interactive functionality to conduct online polls and engage with the community, says marketing and communications manager Marco Bass.

“The purpose of TownHall is to engage the under 40 demographic on the platforms that they use,” says Bass. “Obviously mobile is a key part of that, but Facebook doesn’t limit us to mobile devices like a native app might.”

TownHall, Bass adds, is only one part of Moreland’s Community Plan 2025 project – which, in the tradition of all community-planning efforts, seeks to engage the community on its terms.

“To be honest I’m not married to Facebook,” he explains, “but it’s about finding the best tool for a specific job. The starting point is to be really clear about what information you’re

“It’s about finding the best tool for a specific job. The starting point is to be really clear about what information you’re seeking from the community. Just because you’re operating in a relatively new digital space, doesn’t mean that sort of research discipline should get lost.”

“Sometimes councils only think about the front end, and don’t think about the backend impact on the business by opening up another channel of communication.

Talking a half-hearted approach to your mobile and social media strategy can end up doing more harm than good.” seeking from the community. Just because you’re operating in a relatively new digital space, doesn’t mean that sort of research discipline should get lost.”

Using Facebook is about “fishing where the fish are”, says Keren Flavell of social media engagement specialist Wholesome Media, which is working on Moreland’s TownHall project.

“We tend to step back with our clients and ask what is their actual purpose for engagement.

If someone simply says up front ‘build us an app’ then we’d say we’re not the people for you,” Flavell says. “People are really sucked into thinking that the app is a panacea, but unless it’s developed to be social by nature then you’re just creating yourself the problem of how to market it and get people using it.”

Meanwhile, millions of people are already signed up with Facebook and when they participate they’re giving you information about their age, gender and location. You’re able to better understand the demographics of the people you’re engaging with.”

Not ‘just an app’ An iOS app was deemed the right tool for the job as part of Kingston City Council’s ‘Living

Digitisation specialists High speed document batch scanning Automated data entry Seamless EDRMS integration Local support

Talk to us !

Flexible licensing options Value for money www.ezescan.com.au Call: 1300 EZESCAN (1300 393 722)

26 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

Danny Gorog

These Apps let users Australia-wide identify areas of concern and automatically forward them to the appropriate local council. Both Apps are available for Apple and Android, while NeatStreets also adds Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 versions.

The challenge for local councils is ensuring that mobile support requests are treated as seriously as if they’d been reported over the counter or over the phone, says Coleman.

“Social media doesn’t belong just in the marketing and communications department,” he says. “A huge amount of the interaction belongs in the customer service department, which has customer relationship management systems and escalation procedures in place.”

Many citizens will continue to prefer those channels despite the availability of an app: “You might develop an app and hardwire it into your system, but that doesn’t mean the community will use it,” he explains. “The challenge for councils is to be able to interact with residents through their preferred channels. There’s a real fear in councils that it’s going to massively increase their workload, but if it’s done correctly it should actually be able to minimise the workload.”

Snap Send Solve has around 50,000 users and processes several thousand reports per month, says Danny Gorog of developer Outware Mobile.

Apart from reporting broken footpaths, Snap Send Solve users treat it as an ad-hoc public Lembit Pikkat

Kingston 2035’ visioning project. The app takes advantage of the iPhone’s built-in camera and geo-tagging to allow residents to submit photos and comments relating to areas of concern or ideas for improvement.

Initially the council was “pretty hell-bent on just an app,” says Symphony3’s Fergal Coleman, a consultant who has worked with the council on its social engagement strategy for several years.

“The discussion evolved into the idea that an app is just one channel of the Living Kingston 2035 project and you should also have a Web site. These should work seamlessly with what’s happening in the traditional sphere, plus they should tie into the likes of Facebook and Twitter.”

The app lets residents raise issues of concern with Kingston City Council in a similar vein to the popular Snap Send Solve and NeatStreets.

consultation channel – making requests such as improving play equipment in parks and other local facilities. The app was developed as part of Victoria’s app My State competition and isn’t tied to any one council.

“Snap Send Solve has taken on a life of its own,” Gorog says. “Local councilors and even mayors use it. We get a lot of enquiries from councils because they want to integrate it with their own customer relationship management systems for logging reports.”

Pumping up the volume Volume can be an issue, he concedes: “Once government agencies open those channels they have to be able to deal with the deluge of comments that are going to come through them. I think sometimes councils only think about the front end and don’t think about the backend impact on the business by opening up another channel of communication. Talking a half-hearted approach to your mobile and social media strategy can end up doing more harm than good.”

The Country Fire Authority’s FireReady app offers a cautionary tale of the demand that can be placed on public-facing apps.

Born out of Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, the FireReady app allows the general public to track the progress of fires. User numbers leapt to 400,000 at the height of fire season, says

Lembit Pikkat, co-founder of app developer Gridstone, which built the app for the CFA. The CFA website ground to a halt on January 4, with bushfires raging across Victoria, due to the traffic spike created by the FireReady app. Architectural changes to backend systems have alleviated the problem, although ongoing issues have seen the app become a sensitive political issue.

One key lesson to be learned from the FireReady app is that it’s important to treat sensitive public-facing apps as potentially mission-critical infrastructure from the beginning, Pikkat says.

“When we started off on this project it was coming from the marketing and communications budget, but it’s become critical infrastructure up to the point where the Premier was asked about it in a radio interview,” he says.

“When organisations roll out enterprise resource planning systems, catering to a couple of hundred users internally, they pour millions of dollars into them. If you’re building a sensitive public-facing app with the potential for 400,000 users then you need to treat it with the same level of respect.”: As with all IT projects, stakeholder engagement is crucial to making the app work: “You need have the right internal people involved,” Pikkat says. “We’re now seeing the IT departments getting involved in the decision making process of building apps, rather than just the marketing team.”

Mob i le us e r s know w h at t h e y wa n t Thought about ways an app would help your operations, but not just whether it will resonate with your citizens? A recent survey from application performance management firm Compuware may offer some guidance.

The survey, entitled Mobile apps: what consumers really need and want (cpwr.it/iwa3b), involved 3534 respondents across the US, UK, France, Germany, India and Japan. It drew out a number of interesting statistics about the ways consumers use their mobile devices.

Among the 2012 findings: • The average number of apps owned by a smartphone user is 41, up 28% over 2011.

• Apps are used, on average, for 39 minutes per day, compared with 37 minutes in 2011.

• In sheer market share terms, Google’s Android (56%) has more than twice that of Apple’s iOS (23%) and eight times that of Blackberry (7%) – but around 30 billion iOS apps have been downloaded, compared to less than 15 billion Android apps.

• Most users (85%) prefer mobile apps over mobile Web sites. They are perceived as being more convenient (55%), faster (48%), and easier to browse (40%) – and are expected to load within 2 seconds (the median, reported by 31% of respondents).

• Quality control is important: of the more than half of users who have had a problem with an app, 62% reported a crash, freeze or error; 47% experienced slow launch times; and 40% have tried an app that simply would not launch. In such cases, 79% of users would retry a mobile app only once or twice before giving up on it completely.

• Once a user has given up on an app, they’re likely to spread unfavourable reviews in person and online: 31% said they would tell others about their poor experience, 26% would give the app a low rating, and 11% would announce it on social media.

• This can have a major impact on future users: 84% of users said app store ratings are important in their decision to download and install a mobile app. – David Braue

Mobile apps make things happen.

Governments that get things done are those that connect effectively with their people.

Datacom has years of government experience. We can develop flexible mobile applications to improve staff efficiencies and engage citizens in fresh and exciting ways. The result?

More open, responsive government.

What’s more, our local and national presence means assistance is on hand, not off shore.

Tie that in with our professional, fully managed service offerings and you’ve got a complete, tailored end-to-end solution. Problem solved.

Visit datacom.com.au/Solutions/Mobility or email our sales team at ACTSales@datacom.com.au

Call our ACT team on (02) 6112 0200 or visit www.datacom.com.au

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 27

technology

Ballarat: Incubating a tech revolution

Private-public partnerships have a chequered history, with varying degrees of success for efforts to bring together private-sector resources with Commonwealth, state and local governments’ ability to get things moving through varying degrees of carrot and stick.

Story by David Braue

A

Ben Tulloch

lthough many models for partnerships have been tried within the ICT sector, perhaps the most successful has been IBM’s partnership with the University of Ballarat (UoB). Their efforts to create the University of Ballarat Technology Park (UBTP), a skills incubator and service-delivery centre whose 1500 employees are actively delivering services to blue-chip IBM clients, has become a major driver of economic activity in the regional-Victoria city.

It has also created new career options for UoB graduates who might otherwise have

28 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

struggled to find opportunities in the market.

That was a key goal for the venture, which was established in 1995 and now occupies 25,000 square metres of office space across nine buildings near the University of Ballarat’s Mount Helen academic campus.

That makes it the largest regional technology park in the country, and it’s been more than paying its way: the centre produces $300m per year in direct and flow-on outputs, as well as $180m in annual value-add and $100m in direct household income for Ballaratarea employees.

Furthermore, each job generated within the UBTP has generated an additional job within the Ballarat area. That’s made it a significant economic stimulus driver for Ballarat, a oncethriving regional manufacturing centre that, like many other regional centres, has increasingly embraced innovative ICT-sector strategies as its historically strong manufacturing industries have weakened over time.

“If you look at what we’ve done as a city around manufacturing, we’ve taken a number of businesses that were at risk, and helped them to evolve,” says Jeff Pulford, executive director for destination and economy with the City of Ballarat. “These were businesses that didn’t have fax machines, business plans, email addresses

or a Web presence. And every time they lost a contract they’d sack more people.”

Support of the UBTP’s focus on skilled ICT graduates has therefore become crucial to the city’s long-term forward planning, explains Pulford, who notes that industries like retail are going to be among the most responsive to the right guidance. Healthcare, too, is on the agenda: the city’s target is to increase employment in that area from today’s level of 4500 jobs, to 7500 jobs fifteen years from now.

“We need a continued pathway where people can say there is a good career pathway in Ballarat,” he explains, “and it’s all on the platform of the technology.”

“As a city, we’re trying to use the tech park as an enabler. If we can get our businesses to understand that in fact there is a technology solution to those business problems, that’s where you start to get those evolutions. It’s really about how sectors can innovate and create what fundamentally have to be tailored solutions for businesses.”

Earn as you learn The core conceit of the program is that UoB students pursuing the Bachelor of IT (Professional Practice) degree will not only have the opportunity to work in client-support

The centre produces $300m per year in direct and flow-on outputs, as well as $180m in annual value-add and $100m in direct household income for Ballarat-area employees.

engagements on a casual or part-time basis, but have a guaranteed job with IBM – which could include transfers to other sites in Australia or overseas – upon graduation.

IBM and UoB call the program ‘Earn as You Learn’ (EAYL) – and UBTP director Mal Vallance says that, since its introduction in 2001, it has proved popular with students in a climate where universities are struggling to attract students to ICT courses.

“We talk to our clients and ask them ‘where is your future talent coming from?’” says Ben Tulloch, strategy and innovation head within IBM’s Global Process Services organisation.

“That talent is in universities, which are struggling with how to get students trained up and develop the best leaders.”

For an industry struggling with increasing government scrutiny of use of temporary work (skilled) 457-class visas, the appeal of a reliable

technology

Jetstar and Qantas check-in kiosks are developed, tested and

domestic source of skilled ICT talent cannot be overstated.

For those students willing to commit to EAYL, the UBTP offers a broad range of exposure to real-world projects through customer support and other roles. Customers and employees of several dozen IBM outsourcing clients including Qantas, Jetstar, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, NBN Co and Fiserv are all serviced from IBM’s Service Delivery Centre, which includes live office spaces staffed with EAYL students.

“If someone had said to me when I was at uni that I would be guaranteed a job after graduating, I would have jumped at it,” Vallance says. “Yet there are some things happening in the psyche of Gen Y that we don’t fully understand, and there is a lot more work that needs to be done to understand it.”

“Even EAYL doesn’t mean you’re going to be doing IT for the rest of your life: there are plenty of cases where you might start at IBM and end up elsewhere.”

“As a city, we’re trying to use the tech park as an enabler. If we can get our businesses to understand that in fact there is a technology solution to those business problems, that’s where you start to get those evolutions.”

– Jeff Pulford, City of Ballarat 30 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

The site is more than a glorified contactcentre hothouse: focused efforts to harness local innovation have resulted in the establishment of IBM centres of excellence such as an Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL). UBTP is also the site where Qantas and Jetstar self check-in terminals – now ubiquitous throughout Australian airports – were developed, integrated, tested and supported.

“The key really is flexibility,” says Tulloch.

“This is not about [providing services at low] cost, but about being able to respond really quickly. Customer demand is always up and down, and your normal business outsourcers work on averages of demand. But this approach drives lower cost and higher responsiveness, and ensures the customer needs are met on the day.”

Strength to strength Last November saw further investment in the UBTP, with the announcement that IBM would create up to 150 new technology jobs at the facility with the establishment of an

Jeff Pulford

Stephen Abruezzese

supported from the Ballarat facility.

The UBTP was established in 1995 and will soon expand across 22 more

in the Service Delivery Centre features old-school IBM.

hectares in proximity to the University of Ballarat’s Mount Helen campus.

IBM Asia Pacific Centre of Excellence for Software Testing.

Announced with fanfare and support from the state government, the new facility will include jobs involving software application development, application support, application management, consulting services and high level technical specialists.

There’s more expansion in the future for the UBTP, which has been working with the Ballarat City Council to scope and rezone 22 hectares of neighbouring, additional land for commercial development. This expansion will see eleven new buildings that will eventually support another 1500 jobs – and generate another $400m per year in outputs as the IBM-backed venture courts other innovative ICT, biotechnology, and renewable-energy companies.

One strategy is to position the facility, which is just over an hour from Melbourne’s CBD, as an alternative, cheaper home for emerging hightech innovators. With a steady supply of students from UoB and Ballarat offering a more-relaxed, lower-cost lifestyle, it’s a promise the UBTP may be uniquely positioned to keep.

“If someone had said to me when I was at uni that I would be guaranteed a job after graduating, I would have jumped at it.”

– Mal Vallance

Further development will see the UBTP expand operations to an abandoned University of Ballarat-owned building in the Ballarat CBD, which Vallance expects to have up and running by July 1. “This will provide us with a bit more flexibility,” he explains. “This precinct is important and this will give us significant presence in the CBD.” Strong support from state and local governments has helped keep the venture on track – be it through council’s support for rezoning the land for the expanded facility, or help in the form of $3m in state-government funding that was recently directed to supporting the site’s expansion.

Half a million dollars of that money will go to refurbishing the CBD building, with the remaining $2.5m to support construction of infrastructure across the new site.

“If you go to other states in Australia, you don’t necessarily see the level of support,” says Vallance. “That’s just a fact of life; we’ve talked to various companies and they say it’s a lot easier to do business in Victoria.”

Steve Davies

Mal Vallance

A reminder of how quickly things change: a mini-museum

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 31

broadband

The NBN election: two visions for e-government The ongoing, heated and immensely politicised debate over the future of Australia’s broadband has for years revolved around the best approach towards the national broadband network (NBN). Yet with the September 14 election closing in, it’s also important to remember that – no matter which government is victorious in the polls – it will need to ratchet up its efforts to not only deliver the network, but to help government agencies help their own citizens make the most of the network.

Story by David Braue

32 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

T

hat fact presents a significant challenge for government agencies, who face the need to get ready to service NBNconnected citizens who will need to be progressively turned on to the benefits of broadband-based services like telehealth, remote education, online council interactions, and more.

Many of these applications will be videobased, revolving around the much higherquality high-definition (HD) video that’s possible over next-generation networks. Smooth videoconferencing relies on having a robust upload channel as well as a fast download channel – and it is in this respect that current broadband is woefully inadequate.

The ability of a fibre-to-the-premise (FttP) NBN to meet this demand has been a major reason behind the efforts of the Labor government to promote its current rollout, which has been savaged by the Opposition after suffering a number of delays in its execution thanks to delays in negotiations with Telstra, and difficulties by subcontractors to find and engage enough skilled staff.

The Opposition’s alternative, fibre-to-thenode (FttN), would focus on reusing existing broadband where adequate, and improving subpar speeds with a combination of new fibre, upgrading of Telstra’s existing copper network, fixed wireless links, satellite services in remote areas, and increased utilisation of Telstra hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) networks currently used to deliver broadband and TV services.

For his part, Turnbull has repeatedly argued that FttN – which runs fibre to neighbourhood ‘nodes’ that then offloads data traffic onto Telstra’s copper network, which reaches nearly every home – can be built across Australia in onethird to one-quarter as much time, at one-third to one-quarter the cost.

The debate between the two side has spawned millions of words of invective, most of it to no end until the election raises the possibility of an actual change in the NBN’s technological direction.

Regardless of who is elected in the end, however, the victorious government will need to not only deliver the network, but lay out a comprehensive and wide-ranging strategy for building a digital economy and e-government framework that will capitalise upon its capabilities.

To get a sense of what kind of digitaleconomy policies citizens – and the government agencies that support them – can expect after the election, GTR approached both Stephen Conroy, current minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy and Malcolm Turnbull, shadow minister for communications and broadband, to share their visions for e-government, the digital economy, and the NBN-enabled world.

Senator Conroy’s interview appears on the following pages. Mr Turnbull, however, declined to be interviewed on his e-government vision – possibly because as of press time the Coalition was still yet to release its formal election policy.

GTR will cover the Coalition’s policy, when it’s released, through our Web site (www. govtechreview.com.au). For now, however, we have balanced Conroy’s perspective with excerpts from past speeches in which Turnbull expressed his thoughts on these matters.

Taken together, they offer some guidance around the future of Australia – and of e-government – in a broadband-enabled world.

After all, while the election is still months away, it’s never too early to start planning how your organisation will make the most of the opportunities the new world of broadband will deliver.

Labor in 2013: Business as usual As the chief political force behind the realisation of the government’s $37.4 billion fibre-to-the-premise (FttP) project, Senator Stephen Conroy long ago learned how to bulldoze his way through all manner of opposition.

Y

et whether you like his acerbic style or hate it, there’s no denying his effectiveness: his tenure has been a beehive of activity around pulling the NBN up by its boostraps; the reassignment of ‘digital dividend’ spectrum from analogue TV to next-generation mobile data services; controversy over proposed Web filtering; recent efforts to push through strong media laws; and much more.

GTR sat down with Conroy to hear a bit about the current NBN debate and how he’ll use it to promote e-government and the digital economy if the party is successful in September.

GTR: Malcolm Turnbull has repeatedly refused to even estimate the price of a Coalition NBN, blaming NBN Co for refusing to release more financial details. Is he correct?

Conroy: He hasn’t answered any questions about his policy; at the end of the day, he keeps dodging and weaving on the costings. I got him to admit [during a debate on the ABC’s Lateline] that the whole cost [of a nationwide FttN build] would be around $15 billion in old dollars.

But his policy is built around FttN, which requires around 80,000 nodes to be installed in cabinets every 400 to 500 metres across the whole country. He keeps saying the Coalition’s option will cost one-third of Labor’s, but he won’t admit how many cabinets he’s going to need. And the distance between cabinets relates to the speeds users will get. But he knows that as soon as he commits to a given speed, that requires a given number of cabinets. And he

doesn’t need any costings from NBN Co to say the cost of that.

GTR: Turnbull often refers to the experience of British Telecom in arguing for his FttN policy.

What can we learn from BT’s experience?

Conroy: He keeps quoting BT, who last time I checked were an incumbent [with full control over their own network]. Can he point to anyone other than an incumbent, anywhere in the world, that has rolled out FttN? He has to stop pretending that he can do it as cheap as he is saying. I can’t find anybody who will back up his claims he can build 80,000 cabinets in 2.5 years. This is a comedy number.

The architecture of FttN is totally different to FttP, so he has got to justify his claim that he can do it faster. His claims of FttN being cheaper and faster are challengeable without needing to know one single costing from NBN Co. But he will keep hiding.

GTR: The Coalition has announced it will honour NBN Co contracts. There have been suggestions Labor could try to ensure the NBN’s longevity by signing a flurry of contracts before the election; is this on the cards?

Conroy: NBN Co have taken a very responsible, business-like approach to the NBN, and have behaved properly when it comes to contracts.

There could be no business justification for having contracts that lock you in for ten or even five years, in the construction industry.

These are serious and credible business people on the NBN Co board. They have not and will not engage in that behaviour. They’ll continue their build because that’s what their mandate is, until they’re given an alternate instruction by a government – whether it’s a successfully elected [Labor] government or a newly elected [Coalition] government.

What I wouldn’t expect them to do is to sign any major new contracts during the caretaker period, once Parliament is dissolved. I don’t

think it would be appropriate, and I don’t think they would consider signing any sort of contract in the period after Parliament is dissolved.

GTR: What kind of election can we expect, in terms of the NBN debate?

Conroy: Turnbull will continue to pretend that he’s going to build “the” NBN, and that is a complete deceit of the Australian public. He has no intention to finish the NBN; he’s going to build a copper to the home network, and pretty much keep what’s there, there. That is not “the NBN”.

He will try to dodge and weave and reveal as little as he can, because – as he demonstrated on Lateline, as soon as he actually starts to tell the truth, he’s got a real problem. Malcolm is in a position where he will try to hide his policy, hide the costings, and blame others for that until the day after the election.

GTR: What kind of work are you doing to translate the NBN’s potential into e-government policy?

Conroy: Malcolm mentioned it for the first time last week, so I posted him a copy of the government’s Digital Economy Strategy [www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy]. We’re also engaged in the digital whitepaper at the

“While some of the state governments can be a little hypocritical, in truth they all want it to work. There’s an ideological argument, but when it gets down to practical questions about how we can deliver a better educational or aged care service, they’re in for it.”

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 33

broadband

moment, arising out of the last conference we held with the business community in the tech sector.

GTR: How has your department engaged with the government sector to date?

Conroy: We’ve given $13m to 30 local councils so far, who have gotten around $375,000 each.

In Armidale and Moreland, they’re taking bookings using HD videoconferencing. Yesterday I went to the Brunswick enterprise hub, where you can now book appointments with the council offer using the NBN without leaving your home. We’ve got four Tasmanian local councils allowing planning and development applications online, and running consultations through the NBN as well.

In Kiama, they’re running online sessions for residents about waste management, after a new bin was introduced. Tasmania’s Sorell Council set up emergency meetings over the NBN during their bushfires earlier this year. They were sharing data in real time online.

GTR: It sounds like local governments are finding many different uses for the NBN. Do they need much prodding from the department?

Conroy: If there’s one tier of government that from day one has been onboard for this, it’s local councils. They are incredibly creative.

A whole range of councils are using it for different things. We hope they will ultimately share so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. We’ve given money to 23 of the 36 councils in Tasmania, and they will have online services by June. They’re running with it.

I speak to the Australian Local Government Association quite regularly, and they are very supportive. We give them information, work with them, make sure they’ve applied for grant money – and now they’re doing fantastic things with it.

GTR: What about at the state level? Is there strong buy-in around the NBN, or do you get a lot of resistance from the Coalition-led largest states?

Conroy: Some of our programs have been in co-operation with state governments. But there’s an ideological hypocrisy: they criticise the pace of our rollout and they tell us they want it here, here, and here. The National Party, in particular, like to criticise the NBN for not reaching far enough.

So while some of the state governments can be a little hypocritical, in truth they all want it to

work. There’s an ideological argument, but when it gets down to practical questions about how we can deliver a better educational or aged care service, they’re in for it.

In education, for example, they’re doing interesting things. A school in Willunga, SA used the NBN to virtually attend a rehearsal of a Bell Shakespeare production at Sydney Opera House, and afterwards they were able to go ask the actors questions.

Yesterday I saw four Year 10 students taking their third class of astrophysics from the John Monash School in Melbourne. This is a class that would never be available to them, because there aren’t enough teachers to teach at this degree of specificity around the country. Instead of the teacher having to go to the different schools of these kids, they’re all in the one spot – and they’re loving it. It’s a fantastic story.

GTR: In what other areas do you see government agencies being empowered by the NBN? Conroy: We’ve got some trials underway in telehealth: diabetes trials, acute care management, and veterans’ affairs for example.

We’re funding programs in about four to eight different areas with the providers, who are signing up existing patients and going to be able to save money themselves.

In one area, they run an aged care program where they drive to the homes of dementia patients to make sure they take the right pills every day. At the moment they drive to the patients – but in the trial, they’ll do that by videoconference. They’re making 400,000 car trips every year just to make sure people take the right pills – and they can be eliminated using the NBN. These things take a while to roll out, but by June, you’ll be able to see people in their homes using the NBN to improve their health outcomes.

There will be some really good stories to talk about in the next three to six months, and all are funded by programs that we’re running at the moment.

GTR: And at the federal level?

Conroy: We’re working on Centrelink, trying to take people online for government services – tax, for instance. We’ve got DHS and Centrelink looking at ways to help people do more of their regular business with smart devices. The Department of Immigration & Citizenship will

“If there’s one tier of government that from day one has been onboard for this, it’s local councils. They are incredibly creative.”

34 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

be delivering virtual English classes over the NBN to migrants in Brunswick. So, we’ve got a whole range of departments that we’re trying to bring along with us. All these things are enhanced by having the NBN. GTR: The Coalition says you can do these things over existing networks, and over its cheaper FttN network.

Conroy: Malcolm keeps trying to pretend that you can do all those services with less than FttH. But [good-quality video] requires much faster upload speeds than his plan would provide.

I’ve talked with patients and doctors – for example, a psychiatrist in Adelaide who has been using the NBN in some of his programs. He was saying that in a situation like this, non-verbal cues are important – and to get those non-verbal cues right, you’ve got to have perfect definition. You can’t just have some dodgy Skype service because you can’t really tell what the patient is doing.

GTR: Government agencies are all dealing with the cloud-computing trend; how will your policy affect its uptake?

Conroy: The rest of the world is moving to cloud based services, and if we want everybody to have ubiquitous cloud access, you’ve got to have FttH. Big organisations might say I can keep it in my IT department and it’s under control, but their next big competitor won’t have a server rack or an IT department; he will be in the cloud, so his cost base is immediately reduced.

FttH turbocharges the cloud, and FttN will slow things down because it will leave you playing node lotto: your speed will depend on how good your copper is, and close you live to the nodes.

GTR: How will you promote e-government opportunities if Labor is returned on September 14, and you stay in this portfolio?

Conroy: I would want to stay in this portfolio.

There’s a lot of hard work still to do: the task for the NBN is very challenging.

Without pre-empting what is in the Digital Whitepaper, we want to try and put into place the policies that are needed to meet the targets that we set in our Digital Economy agenda.

We’ve got several targets and we haven’t got all the policy levers in place yet to achieve those. For example, we want more people to understand telework, and to understand the benefits of telework.

So, we’ll be following through on those and helping drive it through the public service.

There’s a number of targets that, if nothing else was to happen by government, we wouldn’t achieve them.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

NBN&

FUTURE ONLINE SERVICES CONFERENCE 2013

Sydney | May 8 & 9 2013

www.govtechreview.com.au/lgnbn

■ TWO DAYS OF PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE & EXPERT ADVICE ■ VISIT WWW.GOVTECHREVIEW.COM.AU/LGNBN

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

CONFIRMED PRESENTERS INCLUDE

The 2013 Local Government NBN and Future Online Services Conference will provide Australia’s local governments and regional development authorities with the latest knowledge and advice on how to ensure councils and their communities benefit from the rollout of the National Broadband Network and availability of fast broadband services.

This conference has previously been staged in 2011 and 2012, and attracts professionals from local governments and RDAs across Australia. Previously a one-day event, it has now been expanded into a two-day conference in recognition of the need to provide greater depth of information for attendees.

This event will provide valuable information and advice for councils and RDAs whose communities are yet to experience the NBN roll-out, as well as for those who are experiencing the roll-out and are now actively seeking to take advantage of high-speed broadband.

•

NBN Co

•

Broadband Today Alliance

•

Nathan Burbridge, Economic Development Strategist, Blacktown City Council

•

James Scott, Director Corporate Services, Moreland City Council

•

INTERNATIONAL SPEAKERS: Wanganui District Council Mayor, Annette Main, and Digital Facilitator, Marianne Archibald, New Zealand

•

Chris Quigley, Director Corporate and Commercial Services, Kiama Municipal Council

•

Matthew Schultz, Regional Digital Economy Coordinator, Ipswich City Council

•

John Vandyke, Project Manager Online Service Development, City of Tea Tree Gully

•

Anne Petch, Revenue Development – Business Life, Town of Victoria Park

•

Steve Harrison, Director Business & Economic Development, City of Prospect

Presentations at this conference will include: •

Learnings and experiences of councils and RDAs already participating in the NBN roll-out.

•

Leading examples of how local communities and businesses can be assisted to benefit from participation in the Digital Economy.

•

How fast broadband can be utilised by local governments to enhance online services and communications.

ATTENDEES WILL INCLUDE • • • • •

Senior local government managers Economic development professionals Local government ICT professionals Regional Development Australia representatives Councillors

TO ATTEND

The national Broadband Today Alliance of local governments will also host a Conference Session as part of the event.

Visit www.govtechreview.com.au/lgnbn to register online or to download a printable registration form.

Conference Registration & Attendance Enquiries Registration Manager Ph: (03) 8534 5050 E: registration@commstrat.com.au

Sponsorship & Exhibition Enquiries Nicholas Damilatis Sales Manager – GTR Events Ph: (03) 8534 5058 nicholas@commstrat.com.au

GOLD SPONSOR

ENDORSING ORGANISATION

ORGANISED BY

broadband

Piecing together the Coalition’s policy The Tony Abbott-led Coalition has been no friend of Labor’s broadband policies, arguing its NBN model is too expensive to deliver successfully. But with timelines slipping and contractors pulling out of the build, it has recently come to seem that they may be right.

T

hat said, the dogged determination of Malcolm Turnbull, shadow minister for communications and broadband, has seen him take Labor’s FttP model to task time and time again – often resulting in bitter confrontations with an industry and analyst community that wants more detail about his party’s alternative NBN policy.

That detail had been promised to be published months out from the election – a massive change from the Coalition’s 2010 approach, when it delayed its broadband policy launch until just 11 days before the election – but had not surfaced by the time GTR went to print.

Furthermore, Turnbull declined repeated opportunities to clarify his policy pronouncements or share his e-government vision with GTR readers. That may have been because he didn’t want to pre-empt the impending launch of the Coalition policy – or it may be because, as telecommunications analyst Paul Budde argues, the Coalition simply doesn’t have one.

36 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

“The reason Turnbull wouldn’t provide an interview is that they don’t have a policy on this as yet,” Budde told GTR. “They are working on it, but do have some problems with it. [I’ve told] Turnbull that it’s great you will continue to the NBN – but what is your reason for it? Do you see the NBN as social economic infrastructure?”

“If they agree with that,” he added, “then their view on the investment in the NBN will also need to change. If it is not just a telecoms network but a national utility, then the benefits are more than just the telecoms ROI. [Promoting] e-government and the digital economy should be the reason why we do an NBN – and if you don’t have any policies on this, you are building your NBN policy on sand.”

Although we don’t have a formal policy from the Coalition, Turnbull’s frequent speeches offer some guidance about what to expect if they’re victorious in the election. Here are some recent excerpts:

On NBN policy: “There are some very real concerns with the way in which this project is being undertaken. As I think honourable members understand, the coalition is thoroughly committed to completing the National Broadband Network.

We are thoroughly committed to all Australians having access to very fast broadband.

Those points are not in contention. The issues are, relevantly, how much this is going to cost and how long it is going to take. On the issue of cost, it is obvious that the Commonwealth is spending more money than is absolutely necessary and it clearly is a matter of the more you spend on it the less affordable it becomes.

And, of course, the longer it takes the longer people who do have inadequate broadband are going to have to endure that situation. We have suggested a different approach that we are quite satisfied will ensure the broadband network is completed sooner, cheaper and, consequently, more affordably.” – 13 March 2013

On NBN management: “The NBN Co should be an open book. It doesn’t have any competition.

It belongs to the taxpayers. You can find more about what Telstra’s doing as a publicly listed company than you can about the NBN Co. And I can tell you – and this is a very important point for those of you who have very different views than I do or indeed most of the telecoms sector does about the economics of new generation networks.

What we will do as soon as we get in – we will get a cost-benefit analysis done by the Productivity Commission as we have promised.

But we will, very, very quickly, ensure that there is produced by the NBN Co – because they are in the best position to do it – a fully transparent, you know with all the assumptions, analysis of what it is really going to cost in terms of dollars and time to complete the build on the current plan.” – 20 February 2013 On innovation: “In terms of Australia and innovation, since 2004, there has been a broad

decline in what economists call multi factor productivity – the overall output per unit of input from labour and capital. It has been declining an average of 0.4 per cent a year after a decade when productivity growth was averaging almost 2 per cent.

When two Reserve Bank economists looked at this question a few months ago, they examined two of the frequently cited reasons for the slowdown. First of all, the growth in commodity prices has resulted in mining companies extracting less-economic mineral resources — lower grade mineral resources. Secondly, there has been inefficient investment in utilities.

State governments have implemented onerous energy security standards, which require more investment for declining incremental benefit to consumers. And yes, despite the wonders of broadband, the NBN is also a utility so overinvestment can create perverse outcomes for consumers.

But the researchers make the point that these factors alone cannot account for the slowdown in productivity gains. There are really two things, they argue, that account for rising productivity. The first is technological change, the frontier of what an economy is capable of. And the second is the management and adoption of technology, which is how close a particular country is to the frontier. ….There are still many impediments to overcome. The annual Australian Innovation System report in 2012 found that of the barriers to business innovation, by far the two biggest were access to skilled persons in a particular location, and lack of access to additional sources of funds (particularly when it comes to small businesses).” – 20 February 2013 On developing IT skills: “In terms of educating our workforce, there is evidence that we are starting to fall behind the world in key areas.

Australia’s Chief Scientist recently wrote that globally, graduates in the so-called STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – account for 26.4 per cent of all graduates. But in Australia, the ratio has fallen from 22.2 per cent in 2002 to 18.8 per cent 2010. The report concluded “the fall reflect[ed] the halving of graduations in Information Technology” in the last 10 years.

Another barrier to innovation is access to technology. Now the narrative that Labor has created here is that the National Broadband Network will alleviate all of our problems and create a digital nirvana for young entrepreneurs.

….We really need to do a better job at commercialising our technology here in Australia. And that really gets back to the question of the links between corporate R&D , innovation and academic or published research such as articles in scientific and technical journals. And it points to the lack of linkages between start-ups and other important areas of innovation such as universities and larger corporate companies.

Which brings me to two important questions: What can Government do? And where is Government doing too much? Few startups in Australia look to the Government for help.

A recent white paper by Pollenizer and Deloitte found that of the start-ups interviewed, only 39 per cent had applied to for a Government grant of some kind.” – 20 February 2013 On promoting R&D: …. I have been critical of the changes to the R&D tax concession introduced in 2010 by the Labor Government.

They narrowed the activities eligible for support.

And although Labor claimed the new regime would be simpler and easier to administer, they actually created uncertainty by changing the eligibility rules – in particular the new distinction between ‘core’ and ‘supporting’ R&D and the ‘dominant purpose’ test.

The Coalition is absolutely committed to making it easier for businesses to get on without excessive regulation. The Productivity Commission has estimated cutting unnecessary red tape could generate an extra $12 billion a year in GDP. And we’ve pledged to cut that cost by at least $1 billion for each year that we’re in office.

What we really have to do is to make sure we create an environment and some judicious support whether it is by way of R&D concessions or supporting venture capitalists, we’ve got to make sure that what we are doing is really supporting [innovators] and your counterparts around Australia because you are the future of the industry. It’s your innovation that is going to make the difference. And above all, not put any unnecessary barriers in your way.” – 20 February 2013 On broadband benefits: “All of that connectivity has not in fact benefited the periphery at the expense of the centre. If anything, it has benefited the centre at the expense of the periphery. The financial centres, the technology centres are more powerful than ever. And we can talk about that a bit more later. But this is a very significant issue.” – 16 November 2012

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 37

Mobile productivity drive is challenging the

dominance of Moore’s Law

By Kevin Noonan, Research Director, Public Sector Technology

For almost fifty years, Moore’s Law has been a dominating influence on IT thinking. Smaller, cheaper, faster technologies have driven down cost and have created new business opportunities for business and IT. However, over time, Moore’s Law has tended to focus too much attention thinking on IT cost-cutting and on technology as an evolving commodity, rather than technology as a disrupter and agent for change.

O

ther approaches take a very different perspective. For example, the creators of social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter have instead focused on the extraordinary value created when the use of a tool becomes widespread in the community.

Unfortunately, enterprise IT has often become hamstrung by Moore’s Law based expectations leading to cost containment rather than value creation. Today’s mobile technologies provide a significant opportunity to re-evaluate this traditional thinking and to break free from the constraints of cost containment.

In recent times, for example, Apple has been very successful in creating a value-creation model built around a simple mantra: “there’s an app for that”.

Quick, low cost solutions have provided a simple business case for personal productivity that has resonated with the community in large numbers.

The simple value proposition of mobile technology has also sparked the imagination of traditionally hardnosed business leaders. Business leaders have been lining up in numbers to give press interviews about their favourite mobile app and about how their mobile device has influenced their personal productivity.

Despite this enthusiasm, the mobile value proposition has failed to translate to enterprise IT.

38 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

Bound by privacy, security, legacy systems, complex conditions of use, restrictive panel contracts, and shrinking budgets, many enterprise IT managers have seen mobile as desirable but too hard – and just one more distraction from core responsibilities for traditional business systems.

In some agencies, IT managers have become reluctant gatekeepers for a growing array of devices, and an expanding cohort of hopeful staff. A gatekeeper role is a no-win position. It places IT as an arbitrator who is charged with holding back the use of technology rather than encouraging its use.

IT cost containment is clearly necessary for government agencies, particularly in an increasingly budget constrained environment. However the small incremental savings on personal technology can easily be overtaken by the potentially significant productivity gains through workplace reform.

Moore’s Law has been one of the constants of the IT industry since its inception 1965, and has been used to predict inevitable changes in the industry from mainframes to minicomputers to laptops and now to handheld devices.

However, the problem with Moore’s Law is that it can focus too much attention on the commoditisation of IT and completely misses more significant savings that can be gained through increased productivity and innovation.

“Something extraordinary happens when entire populations suddenly decide to use a particular technology.

The challenge for enterprise IT is to leverage these waves of change, while still in a budget-constrained environment.”

“Moore’s Law has tended to focus too much attention thinking on IT cost-cutting and on technology as an evolving commodity, rather than technology as a disrupter and agent for change.”

An alternate position is to see Moore’s Law as just another fact of life. It is part of the normal rhythm of technology and is no longer a dominating force in driving IT strategy.

Metcalfe’s Law, which relates to the network effects of communications technologies, is just one alternative example that comes from a very different perspective. Early applications of Metcalfe’s Law were used to demonstrate the business value of primitive networked equipment such as fax machines.

According to Metcalfe’s Law, one fax machine by itself has little intrinsic value limited to the cost of the device. However, as the number of fax machines increases, the business value of the network skyrockets at logarithmic rates.

Over time Metcalfe’s Law has been used at the heart of explaining the business value of social networking phenomena such as Facebook and Twitter.

Something extraordinary happens when entire populations suddenly decide to use a particular technology.

The challenge for enterprise IT is to leverage these waves of change, while still in a budget-constrained environment. A number of government agencies have approached the problem by delivering small, appbased solutions that act as “a thin veneer” over the top of outdated legacy systems.

Such approaches can be used to justify the value of IT on new platforms, while keeping costs contained. Similar logic is driving the move to Cloud SaaS solutions. It is all about demonstrating value quickly, so that productivity gains can be demonstrated.

The underlying principles are: • An 80% solution reliably delivered today is worth much more than a 100% solution promised to be delivered next year.

• IT’s future lies in creating value through delivering productivity and innovation rather than through commodity cost-cutting.

Kevin Noonan is a Research Director in Ovum’s Australian government practice. Based in Canberra, Kevin specialises in IT strategy, policy, and supplier engagement.

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 39

Jim Waugh

Health agency manages budget cuts with

smart software approach Tasmania’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) saved hundreds of thousands of dollars while undergoing a major restructure by eschewing costly consultants and upgrading existing enterprise software in-house.

40 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

DHHS realised it could import the data into TechnologyOne Financials, format it into individual PDFs and email them out. “This cost us nothing and saved us $100,000 a year,” Waugh said.

D

HHS is Tasmania’s largest Government agency and delivers thousands of services through a network of more than 300 facilities and centres covering hospitals, mental health, dental, aged-care and housing.

In the 2011/12 financial year it was charged with making $100 million in savings within a $1.8 billion budget and decentralising by establishing three new regional statutory authorities, Tasmanian Health Organisations (THOs), as per the National Health Reform.

DHHS has used TechnologyOne’s enterprise solution since 1995, and has performed free upgrades to new evolutions of the software, taking on new tools when required.

The agency worked with TechnologyOne to analyse business processes, determine the system configuration and module requirements to meet its business needs. The flexibility of TechnologyOne’s software meant DHHS was able to easily add modules without a large investment of external consultancy services.

During this process, DHHS also discovered numerous ways it could save money by using the TechnologyOne software to handle work previously outsourced.

DHHS now has an enterprise licence across a range of TechnologyOne products including financials, supply chain management, customer relationship management, contracts and grants management.

Jim Waugh, Acting General Manager, Shared Services at DHHS, said when the agency started using TechnologyOne products, they realised how much scope there was to push the boundaries.

“We started our planning by looking at our requirements, not the system,” Waugh said.

“TechnologyOne builds simple and flexible software on one consistent platform so we were

able to do recent upgrades in house and change the configuration to do jobs we used to outsource, saving us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“This approach also means our systems are integrated, giving us one version of the truth.”

One example of savings is the processing and printing of 13,000 payslips, which was previously undertaken by an external supplier.

DHHS realised it could import the data into TechnologyOne Financials, format it into individual PDFs and email them out.

“This cost us nothing and saved us $100,000 a year,” Waugh said.

DHHS also used TechnologyOne software to create a Contracts Repository and a Grants Management solution, which is expected to save a further $50,000 to $100,000 per year once implemented.

“We had documents sitting in drawers, but now we can track them all electronically. Soon we will be able to administer grants for services across the private and non-government sectors, and offer online access for recipients and agency employees,” Waugh said.

Another area of focus was Housing Tasmania, which moved all assets in its $1.8 billion social housing portfolio, into TechnologyOne’s Enterprise Asset Management.

The solution seamlessly integrates into organisational and operational systems from purchasing, managing and maintaining all assets.

“The old system was not flexible enough to meet the diverse needs of residential and specialneeds facilities,” Waugh explained. “We also wanted to make life easier for mobile workers such as inspectors and maintenance staff, with enhanced asset code structures, maintenance tracking and good workflow approval processes.

“The TechnologyOne software met all our needs, with modern asset management tools and improved reporting.”

A complex transition The new decentralised THOs also presented a unique set of hurdles, as they are statutory bodies, each has its own Australian Business Number (ABN), and will have to apply for funding from the Commonwealth based on their activities.

The change required multiple new ledgers and charts to facilitate Activity Based Funding (ABF) requirements, daily reconciliation and transfers between different bank accounts. All the stationary generated by the system had to be updated, interfaces altered and purchasing redesigned – in short a major system rewrite.

DHHS’ Business Systems team managed this complicated transition at their busiest time of year, with the help of just one external consultant from TechnologyOne, brought in for 20 days.

“By saving money using existing software, taking things as far as we could in-house before hiring consultants, doing our own development and installing our own upgrades, we managed to meet our savings targets,” Waugh said.

“Every Tasmanian Government agency uses TechnologyOne, so we can share knowledge.

And, because the company is Australian with a local presence, we have fortnightly meetings with the state manager.

“We always look for ways to streamline our services and make use of new technology. In fact, we have already started to investigate the cloud and have discovered similarities in how the Tasmanian Government and TechnologyOne are approaching this.”

TechnologyOne’s executive chairman Adrian Di Marco said the company developed its software for customers to own in-house and did not rely on future revenue from consulting.

“We build, sell and maintain all our own software, providing customers with an enterprise solution that evolves based on their requirements,” Di Marco said.

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 41

Ask not what your

citizens can do for you…

By Tom Scicluna, Datacom Systems ACT

A great man once said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’. It’s a profound statement – but does it really resonate with Joe Public?

D

oes the average citizen really believe they are indebted to the government beyond paying their tax bill? It’s hard to fathom.

In government, as in business, our job is to (continually) improve the quality of services for our stakeholders.

Penny Wong, minister for the Commonwealth Department of Finance and Deregulation, emphasised this in her address on delivering better government: “We can always improve; we can always find new ways to be more efficient; we can always do things better.”

The public demands better service, more efficient interactions, and quicker speed to transact information.

As the ripples of a looming election lap at departmental budgets, the ability to improve

citizen centric service by sheer manpower will erode. Departments need to consider how they reengineer business processes to be cheaper and more effective without extensive human effort.

Fortunately, there are answers.

The perpetually connected world we live in is an enabler for government to provide anytime, anywhere services. Mobility solutions should form part of the critical decision making logic in any business interactions, be they conceived or actual.

Is a shopfront still necessary where there is sufficient logic to enable a mobile interaction?

Is a piece of paper submitted in person required where a digital identity is sufficient?

After all, unlikely is the conversation that opens with a citizen saying “I thoroughly enjoyed waiting in queue for two hours to submit this form”.

Consider how you can give your stakeholders minutes back in their day: this is true value

“Consider how you can give your stakeholders minutes back in their day: this is true value add.” add. Reduce your cost and divert your focus to delivering better customer service. Get in touch with your community directly and improve your decision making inputs.

It’s imperative to make the connected world work for you and not against you – which is why you should find a good mobility partner to support you in transforming your citizen centric services.

Taking invoice automation

to the cloud

By Lee Fisher, Efficiency Leaders

Cloud computing isn’t just about productivity applications anymore: Efficiency Leaders has brought business process automation to the new model with the release of a cloud-based invoice processing platform.

T

he Efficiency leaders Automation Platform (ELAP) is now available as a cloud-based business process automation solution, initially catering for invoice processing in the first release and due to be expanded to cater for additional document types over time.

The platform allows anyone to upload invoices of various formats. ELAP Cloud will automatically convert the uploaded files for optimal data extraction and processing.

An intuitive status graph provides real time feedback to the users of the system wishing to query the status of a document throughout the processing life cycle. The Upload screen also allows suppliers to login to a customer’s portal and upload the invoices that they wish to be processed by their customers and again, provides real time status of the invoice processing life cycle.

Following the document upload process, by either the customer or their suppliers, the solution extracts critical data from the invoice pages, including table information, and then applies business logic specific to the region of the customer.

For example, if a customer’s region is New Zealand, the GST Number validation and business logic will be actioned as opposed to a customer in Australia where the ABN will be extracted and validated and the appropriate tax calculations applied.

Exceptions are presented in a Verify screen whereby the user can view the image associated with the extracted data and correct any errors that are highlighted.

Training has been applied for both header and table details, meaning the system accuracy will improve over time, reducing the need for human rework / validation moving forward.

ELAP Cloud will then export the appropriate validated transactional data to the customer’s backend of choice and maintain the invoice images and associated data for ease of retrieval at a later stage.

The solution performs live database calls to internal and external systems of our customers to provide feedback regarding data validity at the point of process so that exported data will not be rejected by their backend system.

If a customer chooses to export the details to another system at a later time, they can simply login to access their document and select the new export they desire.

ELAP Cloud users can also retrieve various reports and view analytical information by logging into the system’s Analysis screen to view details such as number of invoices processed, dollar value, tax and other charges component, processing times, purchase history from suppliers, most purchased items, cost per item over time, dollars spent per supplier to name a few.

ELAP Cloud is a transactional based processing model catering for organisations of all sizes. Efficiency Leaders believes the cloud model removes previous barriers that some organisations have encountered around financial viability of on-premise solutions that usually require a large up front expenditure.

Unleash the power of automation in the cloud now at www.elapcloud.com

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 43

Australia’s public sector

goes 3D

By Alicia Kouparitsas, esri australia

Australia’s public sector is turning to cutting-edge 3D mapping technology to gain a new perspective of their assets – and even entire cities – with Australia’s most famous man-made icon the latest to receive a ‘virtual world’ makeover.

R

eaching up 134 metres from sea level, and measuring 48.4 metres across and 1,149 metres in length, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is the world’s tallest, widest and fifth longest steel span bridge.

With the relentless battering it receives from gale-force winds, corrosive saltwater and the 160,000 cars that cross each day, ‘The Coathanger’ presents unique maintenance challenges for the NSW Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) agency.

To manage the perpetual attention the bridge requires to keep it in top condition, RMS partnered with Geographic Information System (GIS) technology specialists Esri Australia to create a maintenance

44 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

system built around highly-detailed, interactive 3D maps.

RMS GIS application developer John McGlynn said engineers and maintenance crews ‘fly through’ the digital maps on their PCs and laptops to examine each of the bridge’s thousands of different structural components.

“This up-to-date, scalable 3D view of the bridge enables our personnel to fly in, out and around the bridge without leaving their offices,” McGlynn said. “Each bridge component is colour-coded based on its condition and the different condition levels can be ‘switched’ on or off to isolate them for the viewer.

“For example, everything except the urgent maintenance jobs can be hidden. We can also click on a piece of the bridge and bring up a

picture of it with individualised maintenance information – including the material it’s made of, the type of maintenance to be conducted, and the cost involved.

“In this way, our maintenance officers can visualise which components need attention, determine the cost of carrying out the work and then set up a maintenance schedule.”

The 3D model itself is detailed enough that users can ‘fly’ back until the bridge is just a pinpoint, or zoom close enough to see the individual hand rails on the chords that secure the span.

Esri Australia NSW business manager David Purkiss said the concept, which was conceived by the bridge’s maintenance manager Peter Mann, was a prime example of how GIS technology was modernising traditional infrastructure management.

“In some cases in Australia, maintenance schedules and bridge condition records are still being kept on paper – a system that is incredibly difficult to organise, store and retrieve information,” Purkiss said.

“GIS technology is light years ahead of this type of archaic maintenance system and RMS is certainly at the forefront of modern infrastructure management technology.

“And while they use the technology to service the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it could be the Eiffel Tower or the Snowy Mountains dams.

“The same 3D GIS technology can be tailored to manage the maintenance of any manmade structures.”

McGlynn said the technology also accounted easily for the constantly changing nature of maintenance tasks.

“GIS technology is light years ahead of this type of archaic maintenance system and RMS is certainly at the forefront of modern infrastructure management technology.”

“GIS technology allows inspectors to take laptops on to the bridge itself and update its condition live into our system.

“This ensures the condition of the bridge is constantly being kept up to date.

“In fact, the technology has been so useful, a 3D model has also been built of the nearby ANZAC Bridge with plans to adopt the same system for its maintenance.”

The 3D council It’s not just infrastructure being mapped in 3D. In Far North Queensland, Townsville City Council is providing residents with a glimpse into the future with a 3D model of the city that that is expected to help shape the area’s planning and development for decades.

Council’s geospatial solutions manager, Kenneth Melchert, said residents can experience their first taste of this new technology when Council’s new planning scheme is released for community consultation and public notification in the second half of this year.

“Historically planning schemes have been presented on hardcopy paper maps or using flat 2D digital images with coloured areas representing the various planning zones,” Melchert said.

“Later this year, Townsville residents will have access to a ‘fly through’ 3D video of key components of the new planning scheme that will contain a range of virtual structures to allow viewers to see potentially what a zoned area might look like.

“For example, if an area is zoned ‘mixed residential’, we can place a hypothetical three

storey building on that part of the 3D map to illustrate the type of buildings that may be expected there.

“As well as being visually exciting, the 3D models enable us to better inform the public and help them gain a more complete understanding of the new planning scheme.”

Council has developed a spatial 3D modelling and visualisation strategy, which includes expanded applications for the 3D Townsville model, such as development assessment and eventually interactive simulations for Council planners and residents alike.

“From a development assessment perspective, 3D modelling will enable our planners to conduct detailed analysis on how proposed developments will impact existing buildings and structures,” Mr Melchert said.

“By adding the proposed buildings to the model, planners will be able to assess how these developments will affect the city’s skyline and other resident’s line of sight, as well as the shading impact on other buildings.

“This will provide an invaluable tool for our planners to explain development guidelines and

legislation and remove confusion about why certain decisions are made.

“Eventually we will extend the application and capability of 3D modelling technology to environmental modelling, disaster management and hazard assessment.”

Esri Australia 3D specialist Kellie Persson said GIS technology now enabled town planners to answer a range of critical questions.

“A vast range and depth of data can now be entered into 3D GIS technology, making it possible to create highly realistic virtual worlds,” Persson said.

“The 3D models generated can display everything from a city’s geological terrain, to its road networks, to building heights and the flight paths above it.

“They contain everything Council planners need to know to begin to model the shadows of multi-storey building proposals or anticipate the effects of varying flood levels on city infrastructure.

“Better still, the 3D models are ‘living’ files, and as Council gathers and adds more information about the city, the 3d map becomes more detailed and comprehensive.”

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 45

Integrating the cloud

into your PDF strategy

By Jeff Segarra, Nuance Communications

As every business and organisation knows – particularly those in the service industry – time is money. Creating efficiencies in serving your clients and customers is the best way to simultaneously increase client satisfaction and the profitability of the organisation.

T

he cloud offers the opportunity to significantly improve your ability to find, gather and share information through a document management system (DMS) – but there are a few basic things you should consider to make sure a cloud-based DMS solution will serve you well in the long term.

How’s the security?

One of the greatest sources of anxiety with cloud services is the perceived lack of security and control. In reality, organisations and individuals have all been using secure cloud technologies for a long time to send mail, make purchases, manage financial accounts, and more.

Most cloud offerings have the same robust security options as the services you already use, but it doesn’t hurt to look at specific features when evaluating a new service. All services offer password protection; however, make sure your account passwords are encrypted during transmission and storage – both in the cloud system and on any local computers or mobile devices.

As documents are sent and received from the cloud service, 256-bit SSL encryption should be employed at a minimum and preferably ASE-256-

46 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

bit encryption. All working sessions should automatically timeout after a set period. And it would be helpful if your service can demonstrate some additional monitoring, scanning and protection against hacking or viruses, much like the kind of protection you would have on your own PC.

Can they properly handle PDF files?

All cloud DMS services have methods for searching, organising and accessing content. You’ll have to evaluate these features based on your current work processes and methods. But what most firms overlook is the vital role that PDF – and paper-capture – play in the overall process.

PDF and a derivative of the format called PDF/A are the most significant file formats used in storing, sharing and accessing documents.

You should make sure that your cloud DMS service handles these formats adequately – and, if it doesn’t, you should consider additional desktop software to help close the gaps.

It is essential to address this format issue because PDF files come from a variety of sources and have different amounts of accessible information.

PDF files can include scanned paper pages that contain text, embedded images, annotations, file properties, layers and much more. Many cloud storage services will simply take the PDF files you give them – even if they have no text information or are not in the PDF/A file format. This will severely limit your ability to search for information in these files, which is basically invisible to the cloud DMS. To ensure your cloud service can address this issue, you should gather a sample set of documents with varying degrees of text and see if, after your cloud solution handles the files, you can find whatever information you are seeking.

If your service cannot automatically expose non-text-based PDF file to a comprehensive search, you may need to employ desktop optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert all your PDF files into a the proper formats before sending to your cloud DMS. The critical part here is to make sure that whichever solution – or combination of solutions – you select, you are able to convert PDF files into fully searchable documents without changing, modifying or losing vital information that’s contained in the file.

For more information on Nuance’s suite of PDF and digital imaging solutions, please contact Karen Raccani, Marketing Manager, Productivity Solutions, Asia Pacific on (02) 9434 2343 or Karen.Raccani@nuance.com.

Better batch scanning

needs better integration

By Demos Gougoulas, Outback Imaging

S

canning and management of images and documents may have once been a complex and timeconsuming process of its own, but these days it’s a core function of enterprise information systems.

Isn’t it about time your information environment treated it that way?The latest upgrades to EzeScan, whose advanced document batch scanning solutions have been supporting document-management and forms-processing processes since 2002, do just this. Thanks to deep integration with Microsoft technologies and a more feature-filled email capability, EzeScan’s solutions now work closer than ever to the heart of the organisation.

Integration with Microsoft technologies recognises the role the company’s technologies

play in supporting most modern enterprises.

Together or separately, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 have fast become the workhorses of the modern digital economy – and EzeScan’s support for both will ensure customers can utilise their new features within existing and planned documentmanagement environments.

Customers that prefer to remain on previous versions of Windows Server or SQL Server can rest assured that Outback Imaging will continue to support those releases in current and future versions of EzeScan.

As well as better support for Microsoft environments, the latest enhancements to EzeScan offer better integration with corporate email systems through the introduction of a built-in IMAP client.

Complementing the existing POP3 Mailbox client, the new IMAP client recognises the predominance of IMAP as the email client of choice within a growing number of enterprises.

Many corporate IT departments have superseded POP3 capabilities with IMAP client support, which is broadly supported across mobile devices as well as desktop environments with the extensive local storage that POP3 demands.

As well as adding IMAP features to reflect changing client demand, Outback Imaging has expanded the security options available when accessing user mailboxes. This ensures the highest security is used when accessing corporate mail servers.

For more information please contact Demos Gougoulas on 0433 144 522 or at demos@ezescan.com.au.

Frustrated with unsuitable candidates?

Make an impact in local government. With over 22,000 subscribers, more than 55,000 unique visitors per month and an average of 700 local government jobs listed at any one time, why advertise anywhere else?

LGJobs is the best way to find the right applicant for your local government position.

lgjobs.com.au GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 47

For all your niche industry employment needs.

case study

T CC BY-SA 3.0: Benchill

hat love was starting to flag by the time the IT team at NZTA – the federal government agency responsible for land transport in New Zealand – began working with Unisys four years ago to overhaul and modernise its complex IT infrastructure.

After years of expansion, the agency’s midrange systems were handing more than 1 million daily transactions and supporting a range of core business operations within the NZTA. However, natural technological obsolescence and looming end-of-life support issues finally tipped the scales – pushing the team into the thick of a massive ‘mission critical modernisation roadmap’ that audited current capabilities and business goals, laying down firm strategies to bring them into the present.

New channels

Trafficauthority mandate drives data reinvention The New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) has capped off a massive four-year IT overhaul with the successful migration of 1.7 billion driver and vehicle records to a Microsoft server-based environment that’s helping business leaders rekindle their love of business-focused IT solutions.

48 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

A core element of this strategy was to rearchitect the company’s third-party interchange techniques.

In the past, data exchange with around 680 NZTA partners was through bespoke interfaces that required extensive support and effort to maintain. It was clear that in the new environment, these interfaces could be much better handled if replaced with a Web-services interface and APIs to enable standards-based access by a broad range of partners.

“Instead of having one core system with hardwired interfaces to all the partners we do business with, we will be having a services approach whereby we expose services to any of them,” explains Craig Soutar, CIO with the NZTA. “That’s the fundamental change here, and it will allow us to configure the interfaces, lower our total cost of ownership, and – because it won’t be so complex – improve our ability to make changes. This, in turn, will improve our ability to be more customer-focused: instead of being product-aligned, we can be more customer-aligned.”

The Web-services interfaces will help NZTA support a government mandate by which 70% of New Zealand citizen transactions with government will be conducted online by 2017.

That percentage currently sits at around 15%,

“Ministers are not normally that interested in a project like this, because normally it’s a boring platform migration and the business would just tell us to get on with it. But in this case, it was a major enabler of all the other things we need to achieve… they gave it extra support. If we didn’t have those dependencies, we might not have had the success that we did.”

which leaves a significant gap that Soutar admits presents a significant challenge.

“We have a long way to go,” he admits. “All our efforts will be around exposing more services, through more channels, to enable customers to do their transactions online instead of by mail or having to go through agents. What we’ve done with this project enables that.”

One of the major new channels for NZTA’s new approach will be mobile devices, which are being addressed through a mobile-payments application that has recently been tested as a proof of concept.

“Previously we couldn’t expose this part of the system to mobile payment services,” says Soutar. “Now we can, and our aspiration is to have the ability to deliver mobile payments capabilities to our customers by the third quarter of this year. There are also lots of other services that would be lined up for proofs of concept and putting in the mobile space.”

Business on board Mobile enablement may have been one of the endgames for Soutar’s team, but it was far from their first priority as the four-year effort picked up steam.

One significant challenge was the sheer scope of the migration: NZTA’s core database included some 1.7 billion records spread across more than 350 database tables, 500 reports, 65 APIs and around 700 green screens.

Moving such a massive and mission-critical database is no simple task. A carefully staged migration to Windows-based Unisys ES7000 and ES3000 servers – running the company’s Unisys Agile Business Suite and hosted in two redundant data centres – required extensive

planning, execution, and a massive enterprise transformation and loading (ETL) program with numerous drills that each improved the speed of the ETL process.

“We got it sorted out, but the Achilees heel was that we initially failed the ETL on the driver license and motor vehicle registrations,” Soutar says. “If we had gone for it on the first weekend we’d have had to have had another go on another weekend. But we did four or five dry runs, and had a 50% improvement in elapsed time thanks to the quality processes Unisys helped us put around it.”

Migrating to the new environment presented its share of challenges: many of the agency’s employees, for example, had different configurations for their printers and other aspects of their IT environments. Ditto third parties such as local councils, which needed to work with NZTA to ensure a seamless transition.

“It’s bloody hard to have a test environment that replicates that,” Soutar says. “In our final phase we came across some printing matters where we didn’t fully understand, and there were some incidents where we had to put in place workarounds or rearchitect the way we did workload and print sharing, and so on.

Our third parties all have their own ways; we can’t mandate those, but we got distracted by them.”

In the end, the project team worked around these issues and helped deliver a new datamanagement platform that will underscore a broad range of new policy initiatives by the New Zealand government. With the data in a large data warehouse, for example, NZTA is positioned to do extensive business-intelligence analysis to

derive considerable value from its 1.7 billionstrong – and growing – transactional database.

The NZTA estimates the modernisation project has saved it approximately NZ$80 million compared with the cost of a rip-andreplace upgrade: “We achieved our business transformation without the need to completely rip out and replace our systems, and continued to deliver services to our customers in the process,” Soutar said.

Although careful planning and execution was naturally crucial for the project, the support of business leaders – and their taskmasters in NZ Parliament – also proved invaluable for seeing it through to its successful conclusion.

Government support was broadly available because the data migration was part of a larger package of business reforms that included changes to road-user policies and other government administration. Since the successful completion of the database modernisation was widely recognised as being core to this project, ministerial attention and assistance was readily available.

“We had to deliver a lot of other projects successfully, and there were a lot of business changes going through and many that the ministers were keen on,” Soutar explains.

“They’re not normally that interested in a project like this, because normally it’s a boring platform migration and the business would just tell us to get on with it.

“In this case, it was a major enabler of all the other things we need to achieve. Because they saw in preliminary reports that those changes were dependent on this, they gave it extra support. If we didn’t have those dependencies, we might not have had the success that we did.”

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 49

case study

Gosford’s virtual backup pays real benefits

G

Byron Twilley

osford’s virtualisation efforts gained momentum several years ago, when it began shifting commodity servers to its VMware ESX Server based virtualisation environment. Several years and versions later, the server virtualisation investment has paid off significantly, says systems administrator Byron Twilley, and now includes more than 130 virtual machines constituting around 85% all of the council’s environments.

“The only environments that aren’t virtualised are our very high-tiered environments that require very high-end storage and resourcing,” Twilley explains. “Our accounting and document management system are the main two, and there are a couple of other stragglers.

This is mostly because management want to be guaranteed performance, and have all the resources possibly available to those systems.”

With an increasing number of systems being virtualised, however, Gosford found itself having to revisit its approach to system backup, which had previously been accomplished using

50 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

conventional tape-based procedures that ran through the night.

This approach had worked in the past, but with virtual servers aggregated onto single machines the increased volume of backup data meant “the backup window was close to being breached, and our production system performance was being threatened,” Twilley says.

Adding to the complexity was the need to support the implementation of a hot disaster recovery (DR) site, to which the virtualised environments would be backed up on a regular basis via a dedicated 400Mbps microwave link between the two facilities.

VMware tools for that task weren’t up to scratch, so Gosford’s team went to market to evaluate alternatives. After evaluating several possibilities, it settled on Veeam Backup & Replication for VMware, which offered the performance Twilley was looking for and the flexibility the council needed – as well as license savings of more than $5000 per year.

In the council’s reworked backup and DR environment, the virtualised servers are replicated to the DR site on a regular basis. The images are live and ready to go, offering the ability for the council’s approximately 1500 employees to get back up and running within minutes in the event of an outage or disaster at the council’s primary site.

“We’ve brought in a well-performing, reliable backup solution as well as replication,” Twilley says. “We can fail over to that DR site in a matter of minutes; by comparison, our previous process would have taken up to a day to fail over a VM, given that we were using traditional backup to tape methods.”

The new setup has not only improved the management of Gosford’s heavily virtualised

CC BY-SA 3.0 by Ansend

A progressively expanding investment in virtual server and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has paid off for Gosford City Council, which has seen both cost and time savings as it moved away from nightly tape backups towards an always-on backup environment.

server environment, but paved the way for an increasing council investment in VDI, which is being implemented across around 600 desktops to start with.

The VDI push will focus on users with relatively unexceptional requirements, with power users running CAD and similar systems able to retain their current full-specced desktops.

Despite these exceptions, however, Twilley is confident that the eventual move to VDI – expected to extend to 800 of the council’s 1000 desktops before it’s complete – will not only play into the council’s efforts to simply its environment, but save costs and improve overall system reliability.

Extant virtual-backup capabilities will encompass the VDI environment, allowing desktops to be regularly backed up to the DR site and rapidly recommissioned in the event of a problem.

“We’ll be using the replication features to improve the redundancy of the environment,” Twilley explains. “As the VDI environment is centralised, if our central office went down we would need to be able to keep our central site productive. With the solution we’ve put in place, we’ll be able to do that.”

c onference wrap

Conference wrap: DIMS 2013 and CCF 2013

C

loud computing remains a dominant agenda item for any government department this year, and big data – tied, as it is, with broader concepts of information management and data analysis – is running neck and neck.

Both were themes of GTR’s February conferences – the Cloud Computing Forum 2013 (CCF) and Digital Information Management & Security (DIMS) 2013 – which were held in grand style at the Rydges Lakeside hotel, Canberra, on February 20 and 21.

Featuring a slew of speakers from across government and private sectors, the conferences brought together over 100 attendees to hear the latest experiences and industry developments across the cloud-computing and data-management fields.

Speakers at CCF included Chris Gilmore of the Victorian Department of Business and Innovation; Scott Wilkie of GovCloud; Ewan Perrin of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority; and Alex Evans of the WA Department of Local Government.

Concurrently, DIMS saw presentations from the likes of Sheryl Mapp of the Reserve Bank of Australia; Kelly Hart, from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner; Helen Livingston of the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library; Toni Kennedy from Corrective Services NSW; and others.

Here are a few of the highlights from the conferences, which will be repeated in 2014.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Councils must not fear giving data to citizens: Palmerston exec

Sasha Biskup, Australia Post

Far too many local-government organisations are hampering their ability to engage with citizens because they’re too scared to provide information which should rightly be in the public domain anyways, the head of community outreach at the City of Palmerston has warned.

Speaking at GTR’s Cloud Computing Forum 2013 conference, Ben Dornier, director of corporate and community services at the Northern Territory council, said councillors were often so nervous about sharing the wrong information with the public that they were swinging too far in the other direction.

As a result, much of the data managed by the council on a regular basis was not ending up in the hands of the public that it might benefit most. “We’re not exactly governing state secrets,” Dornier said.

“Disclosure of information can reasonably be expected to promote open discussion of public affairs and enhance government’s accountability. We’re not hiding a lot of things, and typically what we do hide fits into legislation – particularly with the very clear Information Privacy Principles and new Australian Privacy Principles coming out. These effectively govern what you cannot share.”

Some council staff, however, fear releasing the wrong information and, as a result, end up erring on the conservative side. When the data they’re holding back is brought into the spotlight, it’s often far from controversial – and would be of great usefulness to a general public that’s readier than ever to do their own analysis.

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 51

conference wrap

“If you’re not capable of spending money on developing applications and different views and cool ways to view your data, why not just give the data away?” Dornier said.

“A lot of municipalities around the world are finding all citizens want is the data; they will come up with the way to interpret it. Just make sure that data is as real-time as you can make it. You’ll be surprised at the amount of people who will consume it.”

Even information that is perceived to be confidential by some, must be assessed against

objective measures to determine whether it can be effectively shared under the law.

“Embarrassment, discomfort or unwanted media attention towards elected members, as a whole or individually, or towards council as an organisation, are insufficient grounds for confidentiality of information,” Dornier said. “A big chunk of this information is supposed to be public already – and the reason the public doesn’t get it, or understand or analyse it, is because of us as an organisation.”

Agencies struggling with open data transition: OAIC Government agencies of all sizes are struggling to build internal discipline around the management and publication of open-data resources, according to a recent survey from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).

Speaking at the DIMS 2013 conference, Kelly Hart – a director of the Regulation and Strategy Branch of the OAIC – cited the results of a recent survey (bit.ly/12U0niT) of 191 government agencies that found most were struggling with the idea of making public information more accessible and discoverable for publication to the public.

Fully 30% of respondents identified this as the most challenging of eight open public sector information (PSI) principles broadly outlined

by OAIC as necessary for promoting opengovernment strategies.

Other obstacles included adapting that information to new publication standards such as WECAG accessibility requirements (87.8%); establishment and maintenance of an information

Kelly Har t, OAIC

52 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

asset register (76.9%); adequate budget (29.2%); a lack of technical capability; the need to harness “vast stores” of legacy documents in paper and digital format; and challenges in building an open data-focused culture.

“Applying metadata to information is considered to distract from the core business,” Hart said, noting that two out of every five agencies do not routinely apply metadata to the information they publish.

Fully 28% of respondents said the first OAIC principle – to make open access to information a default position – was proving challenging, with less than one in ten agencies adopting such a position.

“We found it rather remarkable that agencies are still having difficulties transitioning from a culture of secrecy, to a culture of openness as a default,” Hart said.

“Many agencies’ existing recordkeeping systems have not been designed for the new era of open PSI. But there is a need for cultural change, more active sponsorship of open PSI by agency leaders, and clarity and awareness on opengovernment policies.”

Many agencies were holding back on open PSI initiatives because they feared legal liability from incomplete or inaccurate data,

ornier, Ben D erston f Palm City o

or inappropriate use of the data by citizens or private interests. Despite their prudence, Hart said the Creative Commons license – recommended as a default informationpublication license for government agencies – already limited that liability.

“We’ve seen them balancing risk with the need to make information available,” she said.

“That has had the unfortunate consequence of some agencies taking the risk-averse approach and publishing less rather than more.”

“However, we feel the CC license does include limitations of liability and clauses that are appropriate. The fact that data is incomplete, or may have errors, should not be a barrier for publishing it. Agencies can take steps to clearly explain the data they’ve published, and to inform people if it is incomplete or has errors.”

Hart pointed to the example of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which stopped charging for its publications in years ago in a move that cost it $4.5m in revenue and generated cost savings of around $945,000.

Releasing the data under CC licensing caused an annual loss of approximately $3.5m – but a 2011 Australian National Data Service analysis found the move had generated between $6m and $25m in other annual benefits.

“PSI is a public resource that should be available to the private sector to increase economic growth,” she said. “If the private sector is able to extract value by value-adding to that data, that meets the overall policy objective.”

Cloud risk can be managed with govt assessment: Sidoti Government organisations concerned about the risk of cloud-computing solutions can effectively manage the issue through existing risk-management policies – as long as they look at it the right way, a risk-management specialist has warned.

Addressing the audience at the GTR Cloud Computing Forum 2013 conference, Sal Sidoti – director for risk services with consulting giant Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu – said the real threat of cloud risk to government organisations comes not from the model’s inherent risks, but from the fact that most agencies aren’t managing their risks properly.

“Many people talk glibly about the need to reassess risk,” Sidoti said, “but rarely is it done well, comprehensively and in a full understanding of the context in which that risk is being assessed. When people talk about risk in the cloud, the discussion quickly degenerates into technical specificities.”

“In some cases, agencies are looking at putting up the crown jewels with the rigour and risk assessment you would go through when choosing your car.”

Sidoti outlined four risk-management ‘fails’ that he said regularly manifest themselves in discussions about cloud computing.

The first – inadequately understanding the objectives and operating environment – involves setting clear goals from the transition: in a cloud context, for example, goals may include everything from cost reduction or control and improved availability and continuity, to

Larry

Samu N EC

improved security, data integrity, and capability for deploying new IT environments and services.

Another common fail is inadequately conceiving the risks to which organisations are exposed: “it is not hard to quickly populate a comprehensive ‘worst case’ risk universe,” Sidoti said, noting the massive number of regulations and non-compliance risks that the typical organisation faces.

“The art of due diligence is a science that has been refined in environments where there are significant capital acquisitions,” he continued. “It needs to be revisited for the cloud, and to have a very clear understanding of the stakeholder universe. A risk in the cloud may be perfectly acceptable to you, but perfectly unacceptable to your stakeholders – so consider what risks you inherit from your cloud providers.”

The third fail is the failure to employ sufficiently sophisticated risk assessment techniques – something Sidoti referred to as ‘heatmap addiction’ after the tendency to focus only on the most obvious risks even though other low-probability risks may have higher consequences. This also requires careful attention to controls and their management to ensure they remain effective.

“Cloud has suffered in the past from a historical lack of transparency,” he said, noting that many organisations are still succumbing to the final fail – inadequate monitoring of identified risks and not noticing when exposures have changed.

Sal Sidoti, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu

“By their very nature, cloud implementations often reduce the inherent ‘hands-on’ control you have over the information, infrastructure and services,” Sidoti said. “People feel handicapped by that perceived lack of control.”

Working around this handicapping and taking a holistic approach to the cloud – and not assuming that risk can be too easily managed – is key to making the transition effectively, Sidoti continued.

“This cuts to the core of any informationrich service or organisation,” he said. “Cloud is a business transformation of the scale that many businesses will not see in this form in their lifetimes. It’s not a cost cutting exercise, so don’t let the discussion degenerate into technicalities from the get-go.”

els, GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 53

round table

Data Heads in centres: the cloud After years of focusing on internal efficiency such as improving cooling strategies, dealing with increasing power density and retrofitting old facilities to meet new environmental mandates, the data centre industry has exploded in a frenzy of new investment as new and old providers retool their offerings to meet rapidly-evolving customer demand.

T

he past year has seen an acceleration of this trend, both through the federal government’s issuing of a formal data centre as a service multi-use list (DCaaS MUL) and through the entry of a number of major overseas names into the local market. Customers are increasingly spoilt for choice – but what do the data-centre providers think about it all?

54 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

This month’s roundtable brings together the expertise of Ross Dewar, CEO of DCaaS provider Emantra; Craig Scroggie, CEO of data-centre operator NextDC; Malcolm Roe, general manager of data-centre operator Metronode; and Paul Tyrer, Pacific region vice president of IT business with data-centre infrastructure specialist Schneider Electric.

GTR: The past year has seen the entrance of several major data-centre and cloudcomputing operators to Australia. How has this changed the data-centres market?

Dewar: It has commoditised the bottom end.

These are the Woolies and Coles of hosting, and it is impossible to beat their supermarket pricing.

But specialist players can still challenge and win

metronode

round table

“Australia does not want to wake up in five years and realise that we’ve sold out all our local cloud skills and capability to cheap offshore product.”

Ross Dewar, CEO of Emantra on B2B support, service flexibility, software customisation, and ongoing account management.

Scroggie: It’s great news for us because infrastructure platform and SaaS providers are the people we sell to, not the people we compete against. The more of those guys that come to Australia, who are chasing the Amazons and Rackspaces, will be good for the industry and great for NextDC. This year you will see some other big players coming into the market.

The important thing to recognise is that whilst many of them do need primary and secondary sites, they will want them in multiple cities. So caching has become important,

particularly in Australia where 80% of users are in Sydney and Melbourne. Where these guys are doing peering, they want to do it in the two major cities.

time that tenant mix will move towards managed service providers and cloud providers. As cloud gains traction, it will take an increasingly large share of the ICT pie.

Roe: It’s reinforcing the demand that our program anticipated: Rackspace and Amazon Web Services are going into what we’d call largescale facilities. Obviously they’ve got operational and energy efficiencies as a result of that, so that’s really reinforcing the move into purpose-built, large-scale facilities.

We can see that the tenant community we currently deal with – the large corporations and telcos and large government organisations – over

GTR: AGIMO made a major change in datacentre policy with the release of its data centre as a service multi-use list (DCaaS MUL). How will this change the industry going forward?

“Customers are still interested in power, efficiency, and green ratings. The primary consideration is, with the introduction of NABERS, that customers will have the capacity to ask their providers for information about the efficiency of their facilities.”

– Craig Scroggie

56 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

Scroggie: We’re redefining the industry for DCaaS by solving problems that customers used to have to solve for themselves, all the way down to the rack. Customers are making the decision not to operate their infrastructure, so they just bring the equipment. We do the real-time management, enable locking and unlocking of infrastructure through our iPhone solutions, offer real-time analytics so you can see how the data centre’s working – these are the types of things we’re focused on when it comes to meeting customer requirements.

Roe: For contestability, data-centre operators are looking at multiple DCaaS providers that are inside facilities they control, so they can leverage their scale and demand.

Dewar: Demands around DCaaS will be central.

Customers going to a data centre for secure tenancy are buying a business input to manage, but they still have to manage their servers and

With us, your data is a shore thing Partner with the only wholly Australian independent data centre operator with the security that your sensitive data stays right here on our shores.

1

1.3

CONTRACT

one set of master terms and conditions for multiple facilities

POTENTIAL FOR

TARGET PUE in all our new build data centres

POTENTIAL FOR

35

9000

MEGAWATTS

RACKS

abundant power density at full fitout

capacity for any size customers at full fitout

100

B1

NEUTRAL

vendor and carrier neutrality gives you a wide choice

P1 S1 C1

With five locations nationwide we’re the only partner you’ll need.

B1

BRISBANE

M1

MELBOURNE

C1

CANBERRA

P1

P E R T H*

S1

S Y D N E Y*

M1

* S1 operational Q3 2013. P1 operational Q4 2013.

Find out more at www.nextdc.com or register today for a tour of your local next generation data centre www.nextdc.com/bookatour

round table

support their applications. Customers looking for DCaaS are buying an outcome.

Companies like Emantra can provide a whole lot of services over and above what a data centre operator would be able to deliver: for example, we can take a position on the platform, provide service on the software, arrange backups, and host ISV applications for you – all the stuff that a data centre operator won’t do.

AGIMO are shining a light in that regard, and I don’t see that quality of leadership happening in other government spaces in Australia. They are trying to divorce the physical elements, and the economic realities of owning a data centre – and needing to make a return on a major investment like that – from smaller companies who just want to service. The UK government’s DCaaS model has been branded a success after a year, and I think AGIMO’s model is headed there.

GTR: How is customer demand changing as cloud, DCaaS and other trends kick in?

Roe: We’re seeing customers seeking flexibility around how they are taking their space – with a range of different power densities, for example.

One capability we are seeing is that they’re seeking flexibility to mix high power density and low power density and racks in a common area.

Others are seeking flexible cross-connect infrastructure that they can change. A third requirement we’re seeing, and this has been driven more by government contracts, is that where in the past we’ve been a pure wholesale provider, we’re now seeing demand to asset-track.

The landscape of services provided is starting to look more and more like a retail, colocation sort of server suite.

We’re in the process of defining a new product that’s a subtle twist on DCaaS where you’re mixing some quantity of standard white space or colocation and management IT services, and giving the tenant a way of flexibly diminishing those at a time. They want a largescale, efficient facility but they want a layer of facility above the raw floor space which is more like DCaaS. Dewar: The big ones for us are redundant path, diverse carrier connectivity, protection against power cost increases, and security of gateway.

There is a lot of competition in the commercial space – and there is a whole range of quality providers from commercial up to huge telcos – but not so much in the federal government because the hurdles are higher.

As a company we’ve decided we don’t want to be in the low-quality, cheapest bracket; the services we offer to federal government sit behind

a gateway that’s certified to a high level. We have decided it’s worth the investment in quality infrastructure and quality facilities to go after that market.

Tyrer: Consolidation is still absolutely top of mind with customers. If you look at how IT has changed over the last few years – with cloud, virtualisation and the like – this huge intensification of IT is putting a lot of pressure on the traditional data centre infrastructure.

A few years ago, there was a fear that the cloud was going to compromise the data centre industry. But with cloud accelerating, it’s very much driving a lot of the data centre industry today – and it’s fuelling the expansion and growth that we’re seeing.

GTR: Does that require a design change in terms of what you’re providing?

Roe: Not in terms of the facilities, but it does mean we’re seeing a need to get involved.

The pure IT-neutral position is starting to be challenged: whereas in the past a wholesale provider like Metronode could sit back from the IT services space, we’re seeing companies now valuing us getting involved in their IT infrastructure. It’s a sort of halfway house to a full cloud.

“History is littered with examples of governments trying to run IT projects and build them from the ground up; there are enough runs on the board now for state governments to have a rethink about whether they can do this stuff officially themselves, or whether it’s better to go to a service provider that can provide them with an outcome that’s supported by an SLA.”

Malcolm Roe, general manager of Metronode 58 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

ReliableReliableFast to deployFast to deployEasy to manageEasy to manageEasy to man

ergy-efficientEnergy-efficient ScalableScalableVendor-neutralVendor-neutralVendor-ne

The only high-performance data centre infrastructure for any business and budget Our promise: 24/7/365 availability, speed, and efficiency-driven cost savings Introducing Next Generation InfraStruxure Whether your company just doubled its sales or staff, you need to make sure that its data centre can support such business growth — not hinder it. All too often, though, businesses feel constrained by the capabilities of their information technology (IT) and supporting infrastructure. Is there enough rack space to handle more servers? Can power capacity accommodate larger IT loads? Today, Schneider Electric™ eliminates these hurdles with its proven high-performance, scalable, and complete data centre architecture solution: InfraStruxure™.

InfraStruxure data centres mean business!

We say that InfraStruxure data centres mean business. But what does that mean to you? The answer is simple. A data centre means business when it: is always available 24/7/365 and performs at the highest level at all times, is able to grow at the breakneck speed of business, continues to achieve greater and greater energy efficiency — from planning through operations —, and is able to grow with the business itself. What’s more, InfraStruxure is an integrated solution that can be designed to your exact requirements at the start, while still being able to adapt to your company’s changing business needs in the future.

The promise of InfraStruxure deployment InfraStruxure fufils our promise of superior quality, which ensures highest availability; speed, which ensures easy and quick alignment of IT to business needs; and cost savings based on energy efficiency. What better way to ‘mean business’ than to enable quality, speed, and cost savings — simultaneously?

InfraStruxure data centres mean business!

Only InfraStruxure ensures that your data centre can adapt effectively, efficiently, and quickly to business growth and other changes via the following benefits: Availability: 24/7/365 uptime is made possible through best-in-class critical power with ’snap-in’ modular power distribution units, close-coupled cooling, and proactive monitoring software.

Speed: Deployment is fast and simple because all system components are designed to work together ‘out of the box’ and the system can grow at breakneck business speed.

Efficiency: True energy efficiency and savings are achieved via advanced designs, including threestage inverters in UPS units and variable speed fans in cooling units.

Manageability: InfraStruxure Management Software Portfolio enables you to see and manage capacity and redundancy levels of cooling, power, and rack space for optimal data centre health.

Agility: Flexibility comes from enclosures with any IT vendor compatibility and whole system scalability for both power and cooling.

APC by Schneider Electric is the pioneer of modular data centre infrastructure and innovative cooling technology. Its products and solutions, including InfraStruxure, are an integral part of the Schneider Electric™ IT portfolio.

Business-wise, Future-drivenTM.

Plan your data centre growth simply and effectively!

Download White Paper #118 “Virtualisation and Cloud Computing: Optimised Power, Cooling, and Management Maximises Benefits” and go in the draw to WIN an AppleTV & iPad® Mini!* Visit www.SEReply.com Key Code 53051K ©2013 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, Back-UPS, and Legendary Reliability are owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. e-mail:esupport@apc.com • 78 Waterloo Road, Macquarie Park, NSW 2113 AUSTRALIA • 998-3810_AU • Tel: 1800 652 725 * Promotion commences 1st January 2013 and closes 31st July 2013. Full terms and conditions available online.

round table

“We’re redefining the industry for DCaaS by solving problems that customers used to have to solve for themselves, all the way down to the rack.”

Craig Scroggie, CEO of NextDC Tyrer: It varies from facility to facility, and no one size fits all. Six or seven years ago, the typical power draw of a rack in a typical data centre would have been between 1kW and 2kW. We’re now north of 10kW per rack, and some are going as high as 20k to 30kW per rack.

Now, if you look at a typical data centre, you assume it has a 15 to 20 year lifespan. So if you have a seven year old data centre today you’re probably struggling, just to cope with the power required to power the IT – and also to power all of the mechanical plant to cool it. We’re

“AGIMO are shining a light, and I don’t see that quality of leadership happening in other government spaces in Australia….The UK government’s DCaaS model has been branded a success after a year, and I think AGIMO’s model is headed there.”

– Ross Dewar 60 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

spending a lot of time helping clients design new data centres that have flexibility for changing requirements in the future, but also helping clients retrofit or upgrade facilities to cope with increased demands.

What we’re seeing is that clients or agencies, if they’re in the scenario where their existing facility is struggling, take this as a point in time to consider their options. And we’re seeing a lot of organisations moving into a hosted environment for the obvious benefits it provides them.

GTR: Is there enough capacity out there to meet growing demand?

Scroggie: There’s lots of capacity, but it’s in different places. Some markets have shortages, and others have plenty of supply. The thing that’s best to ask – using Sydney as an example – is who you’re going to buy it from.

There is lots of data centre space in Sydney, but carriers come to us because they can’t have back-to-back data centres. You might find a carrier in Sydney that desperately needs space, but they will not buy it from a competitor if those guys are in the data centre space as well.

Telcos recognise us as a leader in this space, and they see value in partnering with us as a carrier and neutral provider because we don’t compete with them.

Dewar: There will be a continual need for new, more efficient rackspace in Australia.

Hopefully, some new meaningful facilities will grow up around regional NBN hubs, increasing geographic diversity. Increasingly, the NBN will be front and centre in terms of national broadband direction and strategy. However, there will always be the need for quality Private

IP service, especially as more critical systems and data become connected.

GTR: What about trends like big data? How are these changing the nature of the data-centre engagement?

Roe: Big data is the result of consolidation and aggregation, so it drives additional demand. Our own capacity planning and market forecasting has already got a large amount of those drivers included in them.

I think government, at all levels, are increasingly realising they need to buy an IT outcome versus trying to buy the different components of a solution and making it work themselves. History is littered with examples of governments trying to run IT projects and build them from the ground up; there are enough runs on the board now for state governments to have a rethink about whether they can do this stuff officially themselves, or whether it’s better to go to a service provider that can provide them with an outcome that’s supported by an SLA. Scroggie: Broadband is another defining trend.

The NBN is fantastic, and I have to applaud Senator Conroy for his vision and the support Labor have to see the future capability we have to do something extraordinary in this country after the mining industry.

I couldn’t be more excited about what the potential looks like: all of that will drive more information, and will start to give birth to industries that we haven’t even dreamed up yet.

Broadband will mean customers can take services from more than one provider, selectively source best of breed applications and be less likely to want to house and develop these things themselves.

GTR: The Uptime Institute’s PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) rating has long been the benchmark for comparing data-centre efficiency. Is it still a meaningful metric?

Tyrer: PUE is continually referenced and continually marketed, and it’s absolutely useful for an organisation to have an understanding of their PUE measure. But it’s more of an internal benchmark than an external benchmark: there are different ways of calculating it, and not everyone calculates it in a consistent way. It’s not the be-all and end-all; I prefer to use PUE as a measure to monitor performance in the long term.

Dewar: PUE information is becoming a common request in government RFTs.

Canberra Forecast: Cloud Increasing

Emantra Secured Private Cloud Services for Australian Government.

Roe: But we’ve also recently been given a rating under NABERS for Data Centres [developed by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage] – being quite a significant development for the data centre industry. The Uptime Institute has been quite actively defending their rating, and on the reliability stakes we have now started to see a common benchmark for the industry to step up to. That’s good.

But on the efficiency stakes, there has never been a formal measure. There have been informal claims made, but nothing as robust as what NABERS is proposing. PUE was not substantiated, but the harsh reality is that there will be no hiding behind a NABERS claim: you’re either rated or you’re not. It’s based on 12 months of readings, and not many ways to fudge it.

Call Emantra 1300 728 953

“The pure IT-neutral position is starting to be challenged: whereas in the past a wholesale provider like Metronode could sit back from the IT services space, we’re seeing companies now valuing us getting involved in their IT infrastructure. It’s a sort of halfway house to a full cloud.”

Visit our service catalogue on the AGIMO DCaaS MUL

Featuring all latest versions: Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, CRM, Servers on Demand, back-up, rack-space etc.

DC is Canberra located, ICON connected, AGIMO facilities panellist.

DSD Certified Gateway, 99.9% SLA, pay as you use.

– Malcolm Roe

Gold Hosting Partner

round table

“If you have a seven year old data centre today you’re probably struggling, just to cope with the power required to power the IT – and also to power all of the mechanical plant to cool it.”

Paul Tyrer, Pacific region vice president, Schneider Electric Scroggie: Customers are still interested in power, efficiency, and green ratings. The primary consideration is, with the introduction of NABERS, that customers will have the capacity to ask their providers for information about the efficiency of their facilities. The introduction of that is fantastic for good-quality operators, and not so much for operators of old or inefficient facilities.

Prior to the carbon tax, we had made the announcement that we were putting a 400kW solar array on the roof of the facility in Melbourne. It’s enough to power the actual office building itself, which means we’re not taking power from the grid and paying the 22% in costs as a result of that. The desired effect is to look for ways to be greener, and ensure that we’re finding ways to reduce our carbon footprint.

GTR: Will that shake down the industry and pressure data centre operators towards improving efficiency?

Tyrer: We’re seeing a lot of customers and operators looking at co-generation, to drive efficiency and reduce costs. It’s a more commonly talked-about concept with our clients, and we’ve built some good inhouse capability and competency to advise clients in that area.

When we look at some of the data centres we’ve built, we show the pre and postconstruction scenario, and we’re driving energy usage reductions north of 30% just through best practice, in new designs.

Even if we completely revamp an existing facility, we can drive some very significant cost reductions in energy consumption using a modularised approach: rather than building out all your physical infrastructure and plant from day 1, we scale it up as demand increases and create pods of localised cooling to drive far more efficient operation.

The data centre industry is waking up to really understand its environmental impact, and it’s expected that in the next ten years the carbon footprint of IT and data centres will exceed that of the airline industry. Airlines are always getting bashed for their carbon footprint, but IT is approaching those levels and will exceed them.

Roe: We’ve seen buildings with small-scale data centres inside the building fabric, are moving outside the office building to protect their NABERS rating. The real big move here is away from small-scale facilities into largerscale, energy efficient facilities. People who have run from a data room inside their office building are now thinking twice about continuing with that strategy.

Scroggie: Efficiency is important, because the way you maintain temperature, cooling, hot aisle-cold aisle containment or don’t have containment at all – all that goes to the cost of running your infrastructure.

It’s not just a financial issue; it’s about sustainability as well. After the carbon tax was introduced, our power bill went up 22%. Not all of that is due to the tax, but no customer costs have increased as a result of the introduction of the carbon tax.

That’s what it was designed to do – to get people to look at more efficient and cleaner energy.

62 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

GTR: How do you think the upcoming election will change government data-centre strategy and procurement?

Roe: It can cause a delay in capital procurement activity, particularly for federal or state government departments. What it won’t do, is change the demand: whilst it may delay demand or delay a decision, the underlying demand gets caught up at some point after the event.

Government agencies are dealing with aging facilities and aging ICT infrastructure, and a move to electronic service delivery to their constituents – so all of those drivers remain exactly the same.

Dewar: I would regret it if there was some sort of political positioning that affected this.

I think the way forward is clear. There are now beginning to be some established, successful models around the world that we can look at; for example, it’s good to see that the Victorian government has just announced an IT services advocate. To the extent that government can influence the market, I think there is a national interest in ensuring that quality private cloud service providers can survive in this market.

GTR: Are you still seeing hysteria over data sovereignty, or are customers getting over their concerns?

Dewar: I think this is an old argument.

Onshore data is an important part of the local differentiation, but this is by no means all. By itself, it won’t win the day except for the few entities with a critical stand in this area.

A newer concept perhaps is ‘service sovereignty’. The Australian government, increasingly in its own procurement and in its influence over the commercial market, should not and will not as a matter of interest allow lowcost international providers to drown the local capability for delivering quality cloud services at scale. This is the future of software delivery, and Australia does not want to wake up in five years and realise that we’ve sold out all our local cloud skills and capability to cheap offshore product.

Scroggie: Australia is a pretty mature IT buyer, and there are a lot more mature risk providers.

We’ve gotten over the ‘information has to live in my data centre in my server’ ideal. Australia keeps pushing data sovereignty as a competitive differentiator, but do I think necessarily as a strategy the government has a hard and fast line?

No, unless of course you have to store personal information such as health records. Most of their information can be stored offshore. It’s more a practical issue, and that is if you’re moving very large amounts of information on international networks it costs a lot of money. Bandwidth out of Australia is enormously expensive – which is why we need to build more undersea cables to get more competition into the market.

Latency is also an issue: people don’t want the impact of latency, particularly for large-scale database transactions. If you’ve got a bank branch accessing the database, you don’t want that query going to the US and back again: you’re concerned about the time it takes to serve the customer.

So, what we’re seeing is customers selectively sourcing a mixture of high-quality, highly price services. Anything people can do that’s not time sensitive, and can be done after hours, can be

“The data centre industry is waking up to really understand its environmental impact, and it’s expected that in the next ten years the carbon footprint of IT and data centres will exceed that of the airline industry. Airlines are always getting bashed for their carbon footprint, but IT is approaching those levels and will exceed them.”

– Paul Tyrer done in another country at lower cost. We’ll start to see more maturity in the buying decisions in those categories, just like we’ll start to see more maturity in the selective sourcing of work components.

GTR: How will the data-centre industry change over the course of this year?

Roe: By next year, we will have major facilities and comparisons between different facilities’ star ratings. The cloud phenomenon is going to continue to train traction, and there will be some consolidation around. Given the capital intensive nature of this business, you’ll need access to good capital resources in order to stay in the business.

Scroggie: One very strong driver this year is obviously mobility: the larger and more mobile

the workforce it creates, customers will be using hosted applications rather than hosting those applications themselves. We haven’t even really started to see how much this industry is going to expand over the next 12 to 24 months, and we’re really just starting to scratch the surface.

Another is applications: people want ease of use, and real-time access to information.

Mobility, combined with brilliant applications that can be developed very quickly anywhere and any time, are very powerful drivers of the industry at large. The last one that excites me is all these organisations driving platform infrastructure and SaaS. We’ll see more competition, more providers, and better services – and, hopefully with more cable and international pipes we’ll see a reduction in the cost to shift that data around. And everyone in our economy will benefit as a result.

GTR FEBRUARY 2013 | 63

broadband

NBN complexity changing training, outsourcing mix NBN Co subcontractors may be struggling to find enough qualified workers to keep the pace of the massive rollout – but public and private sector enterprises may soon face similar problems as they get hit by a drought of staff with adequate network skills to take advantage of the NBN, a recent study has warned.

In a survey of over 200 Australian IT managers, IT management vendor SolarWinds found 52% of respondents expect IT skills will be a key challenge in managing IT environments in the NBN era. Fully 56% agree network complexity will be a core challenge of the NBN. “IT managers are looking forward to an era where the NBN is fully deployed, and available to both consumers and small businesses,” SolarWinds vice president and market leader

NBN Update There’s never a lack of news around the National Broadband Network (NBN). Here, GTR runs down the latest developments.

Sanjay Castelino told GTR, noting that the NBN will bring about the same complexity to network architectures as server virtualisation did to what used to be a “pretty straightforward job” as a server administrator.

“When you have ubiquitous broadband like the NBN is going to provide,” he explained, “you end up having a whole new set of services that people want to consume over that broadband.

When you add that in, you tend to be deploying more and more complex technologies. As a result, you need further specialisation.”

This was expected to drive an uptick in outsourcing of network-management capabilities, with 59% of respondents expecting a greater level of outsourcing in the next three to five years. This includes two-thirds of respondents that already outsource over a fifth of their IT functions – suggesting that the depth and commitment to outsourcing is increasing.

Not all functions will be outsourced, however: the survey found that areas involving particular risk management, for example, will be brought inhouse for tighter control. For example,

61% of respondents – and 75% of respondents in organisations with over 100 employees – planned to “reintroduce” data storage and access, while 56% planned to bring cyber-security protections back into the organisation.

“Local and other governments will have challenges in delivering some of the new services, and organisations will outsource many things where they don’t have the expertise or the staff,” Castelino said, noting that a rise in NBN-related and networking-specific certifications will help many IT managers stay current. “Coupled with outsourcing in areas where are skills deficiencies in the organisation, organisations will be training IT staff that want to learn.”

“You’ll see a balance around how skills are developed in organisations, and things identified that are strategic to the ability to develop applications and services. The balance between the number of people wanting to insource and outsource, is a healthy sign that the market recognises that while there are things that need to be outsourced, there’s not such a skills shortage that the organisations can’t take it inhouse.”

• Passed 1 million premises in its network design phase

Rob Oakeshott:

• Signed a $300m contract with Arianespace to

• Called for NBN Co to release a complete NBN

launch two NBN satellites • Contracted Visionstream for up to $1b for the east-coast rollout • Signed a $300m contract with Transfield Services for a fibre cabinet rollout

rollout plan • Said Mike Quigley’s call for a review of technology options was “sensible” • Attacked NBN committee members for favouring party dogma over a bipartisan approach to overseeing the project

Stephen Conroy: • Denied the NBN favours marginal electorates

Local councils:

• Said Turnbull’s policy could cost $6000 per home

• Dubbo, NSW mayor hopes the NBN will

• Waded into a stoush between The Australian and ABC over NBN coverage • Got the support of his French counterpart

attract businesses • Mount Alexander Shire, Victoria dismissed resident concerns over NBN fixed-wireless towers

after France invested over €20 billion in fibre With pre-election political rhetoric heating up and a

infrastructure

shortfall in NBN Co’s performance against targets raising many questions, the discussions around the project have been getting more and more frenzied. Here’s what the major players in the debate have been up to:

Malcolm Turnbull: • Promised to release the Coalition broadband policy months before the election • Claimed Labor’s NBN could take 20 years and

NBN Co: • Downgraded its estimates for June premises

Analysts: • Suggested Telstra and Optus could both own part

cost $100 billion • Attacked NBN Co for playing political games

of a Coalition FttN network • Suggested it could cost $21b to upgrade a Coalition FttN NBN to FttP in the future • Suggested NBN Co should charge customers based on download volumes rather than service speed

passed, from 341,000 to 220,000 • Took over the Northern Territory rollout from subcontractor Syntheo • Replaced chairman Harrison Young with Ten Network executive Siobhan McKenna

64 | GTR FEBRUARY 2013

Tony Abbott:

Surveys:

• Claimed the NBN will triple the price of broadband

• Found 89% support for the NBN in first-release

• Confirmed Malcolm Turnbull would be communications minister in a Coalition government

site Brunswick, Victoria • Found 73% of Australians support the project.

3rd Local Government & Public Sector

Building Maintenance & ManageMentConference 19-20 November 2013 | The Hotel Windsor | Melbourne www . buildingmaintenanceconference . com . au

About the ConferenCe This practical conference will cover all the key issues relating to the maintenance and management of Local Government, Government and Public Sector buildings, including the implementation of technology solutions. Many of these buildings can be small in scale and due to this have particular maintenance and management requirements. Their particular use also often creates particular demands.

This year’s conference expects to attract 150+ building maintenance managers/officers, leisure centre managers/officers, facility managers, engineers, surveyors, consultants and building asset managers over two days.

A comprehensive conference program will include two speaking streams to allow for a wide coverage of different building types and uses, rural and urban locations as well as issues that will be addressed.

The aim of this conference is to provide practical guidance to all delegates that can be immediately used.

Our conference venue has specially discounted hotel room rates available for all conference participants. Details on the venue facilities, car parking, location and other important delegate information are on the conference website.

SPonSorShIP & exhIbItIon oPPortunItIeS

CALL for SPeAkerS

Join us in Melbourne and take up this ideal opportunity to showcase your products and

Please submit an abstract of 100-300 words to

services at what we believe will be a memorable experience for you and our delegates.

Scott Matthews via scott.matthews@commstrat.com.au

We offer a variety of sponsorship, exhibition and advertising opportunities that can be

or + 61 3 8534 5004

tailor made to your requirements. To obtain a prospectus or for further enquires please contact Scott Matthews. e: scott.matthews@commstrat.com.au t: +61 3 8534 5004

who ShouLd Attend

ConferenCe toPICS As a guide, topics and papers may be in the following areas:

• Building Maintenance Managers and Officers • Facility Managers

• Building Systems

• Asset Management

• Leisure Centre Managers/Officers

• Smart Building Technologies

• Green Power

• Building Asset Managers and Owners

• Buildings Management

• Air conditioning

• Engineers, Building Surveyors and Consultants

• Building Information Modelling

• Security & CCTV

• Project Delivery and Financing

• Contracts and Models

• Maintenance Delivery & Management

• Building Condition

• Design, Management & Operation of Specific Building Types

• Cleaning

froM • Local, State and Federal Government • Educational Organisations • Not-For-Profit Organisations • Art Galleries • Sporting Facilities

• Energy Efficiency, including Retrofitting

• Any organisations that are within the broad Public Sector

• Power for Buildings + Facilities

• Building Audits • Toilets • Ground Maintenance • Building Repairs

Early Bird Registration | Book now for only $800+gst contact us: p +61 3 8534 5050 e registration@commstrat.com.au

REINVENTING GOVERNMENT CUSTOMER SERVICE Conference 2013

June 25 & 26 The Hotel Windsor Melbourne REGISTER ONLINE AT www.governmentcustomerservice.com.au

PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS FOR TRANSFORMING GOVERNMENT CUSTOMER SERVICE PROCESSES AND PERFORMANCE The conference will provide the three tiers of government with practical information on key themes including: BEST PRACTICE: Gain insights into best practice in customer service and client relations, including policies and procedures NEW TECHNOLOGIES: Reinvent customer service by using technologies such as social media, CRM software and mobile CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: Manage customer expectations and complaints, and optimise the customer experience DOING MORE WITH LESS: How to improve customer service on a budget

CALL FOR SPEAKERS To be considered for program selection, please email a 100-word presentation abstract and brief bio of yourself to Kim Coverdale, Conference Convenor, at kim.coverdale@commstrat.com.au

SPONSORSHIP & EXHIBITION OPPORTUNITIES Nicholas Damilatis National Sales Manager T: +61 3 8534 5058 E: nicholas@commstrat.com.au

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATIONS JUST $800+GST