Queensland govt releases six-month IT action plan
The Queensland government has released its new ICT Renewal Action Plan (PDF), the first in a series of six-month rolling plans replacing the ICT Action Plan, which was released in August last year to set out its goals under its overarching Queensland ICT Strategy from June 2013.
The new plan, published by the state's Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation, and the Arts, sets out a series of initiative objectives for the next six-month period, aimed at helping the government work towards its ultimate goals of effective digital services for Queenslanders and their government.
The initiatives in the new action plan aim to enhance services to Queenslanders by optimising the use of existing and emerging IT technology, improving productivity and gaining efficiencies from streamlined processes, and building capability in the state's "workforce of the future".
Among the initiative objectives is the proposal to "overcome the barriers to information sharing".
Under the objective, according to the document, the government would work with agencies to address the barriers to information sharing across "traditional boundaries", and gather and share "lessons learned, risks, and issues from recent information-sharing experiences".
The document also outlines an initiative objective to optimise a whole-of-government procurement system, with the aim of simplifying arrangements for government IT procurement and resulting in an increased adoption of existing procurement arrangements across government.
The plan seeks to establish a mechanism encouraging agency adoption of existing whole-of-government panels and procurement arrangements, establish the priorities for future procurement arrangements, and implement the government's IT procurement reforms.
Additionally, the document outlines an initiative objective to overcome the barriers to transitioning to "ICT as a service", which will see it gather and share lessons learned from recent experiences in adopting an as-a-service business environment.
In May, the Queensland government released an addendum to its overarching ICT Strategy outlining the state's cloud computing strategy, which will see its IT divisions become brokers for cloud-based services.
The new action plan will continue to be updated on a biannual basis.
The Queensland government's new IT strategy action plan comes as South Australia's Public Sector Minister Susan Close apologises for a computer glitch that closed down the state's customer service centres for vehicle registrations and renewals, according to the ABC.
On Wednesday, the ABC reported that Close had publicly apologised for the inconvenience to state residents following the computer glitch, and that people could still renew their licences and registrations at Australia Post.