NSW Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care (DADHC) has given itself the mission to make its core Siebel system more user-friendly for its staff.
NSW Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care (DADHC) has given itself the mission to make its core Siebel system more user-friendly for its staff.
Siebel's a wonderful product but for a casual or intermittent
user it's quite intimidating as well.
Jim Hegarty
"Siebel's a wonderful product but for a casual or intermittent
user it's quite intimidating as well. So people who use the Siebel
system all the time really appreciate its power and its flexibility,
but for people who don't interact with it on a daily basis, its
flexibility becomes a liability," DADHC chief information officer Jim Hegarty told
ZDNet.com.au yesterday about the platform, now owned by Oracle.
Now in the second year of the $7.5 million project, Hegarty has
been upgrading the system from version 7.7 to 8 and has also been
putting in some improvements to help those intermittent users be
able to use it more easily.
Those upgrades include achieving a business function view
rather than a modular view. "One of the complaints we get from our
users is, to do x business function, they have to go to half a
dozen screens. What we want to do is we want to pull that view from
those half dozen screens into a business function," he said.
Hegarty agreed that this work was similar to
what the Department of Community Services was doing, yet on a smaller scale. DADHC
put in its Siebel system 18 months after DoCS, and learned from its counterpart's experience, he said.
Despite having DoCS and DADHC both working on Siebel, Hegarty
said getting skilled workers hasn't been a prohibitive problem. When
there's a shortfall, Businesslink, which supplies the department with
shared services, has an agreement with Accenture to supply workers.
They're
difficult things to answer. You know Facebook is not the
solution.
Jim Hegarty
Another focus at the moment for DADHC is forming a client-centric view in its
systems by recording information on client interaction, whether it's
done directly by the agency or by a non-government organisation
(NGO) funded by the agency.
"We're looking to open our back-end systems more to NGOs so that
they can provide that information," the CIO said. "We've implemented
server provider portal technologies that enable non-government
organisations to view and update a limited range of data at this
stage that relates to them. We want to extend that out so that we
can get more client data in that way."
Hegarty was also working on closer collaboration with other
agencies under the
People First agenda.
Such collaborative themes work in well with NSW parliamentary
secretary for Transport Penny Sharpe's new
NSWsphere effort, based on Kate Lundy's government 2.0 Public Sphere event.
Hegarty said he would likely attend the event and would listen
carefully in the hope it would shed some light on issues that concern him about web 2.0 in government. "I'm very interested in
it, because I think getting that balance right between what the
technology will enable you to do and what a responsible society
will want you to is a really interesting paradigm... They're
difficult things to answer. You know Facebook is not the
solution," he said.
"When people talk in generalities — about publishing the
information that can be published, citizens being able to take
their information with them, putting people at the centre of the
equation — all of that as ideals I have absolutely no problem
with whatsoever," he said. "It's translating that into a way which
you would actually deal with people and their information which I
think is the big challenge going forward."
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