Queensland CITEC saved, shared services to stay

The Palaszczuk government has continued its push to de-Newmanise Queensland by scrapping plans to outsource government IT services.

There were fears of job cuts when the former Liberal National Party government, led by Campbell Newman, revealed it would divest its technology services provider CITEC as part of a cost-cutting drive.

But Innovation Minister Leeanne Enoch announced on Wednesday that CITEC would remain a Queensland government-owned information and communication technology provider.

"The decision to keep CITEC in public ownership provides certainty for its 344 full-time equivalent employees, as well as security for its government and commercial customers," she said.

Enoch said she would be focused on working with CITEC management, staff, government and commercial clients to build a future-proof business model.

"While there will be no job losses we will need a strategy to ensure that staff continue to grow their skills in order to meet changing technology and customer needs so that they can deliver ICT services now and into the future," she said.

Enoch said significant transformations had already begun, including data storage and protection upgrades that would reduce government costs by more than $12 million over three years.

The decision to outsource the IT services of the Queensland government was taken by then-IT minister Ian Walker in 2013, after an audit conducted by former federal treasurer Peter Costello said the cost to maintain and fix the government's IT systems would amount to AU$4.7 billion.

At the time, 5,000 government IT jobs were set to be outsourced.

Last week, Anna Bligh acknowledged that when the state government partnered with IBM to roll out its new health payroll system in 2010, it bought the wrong one.

"The single biggest failure of the project was failure around managing the program and governance of it," Bligh said.

"There was no real clarity of governance. There was one part of the government that was responsible for whole of government IT in a shared service provider model, and then we had the line agency Queensland Health."

"Between those two agencies there was not a single point of accountability. So everybody was in charge, which ultimately meant nobody was," she said.

"We basically got the product we bought, but we bought the wrong one, or we bought one that was not fit for purpose."

The reversal of the decision to outsource CITEC yet another legacy of the Newman government that the current administration has either scrapped or plans to.

The government has already reversed the Liberal National Party's changes to electoral donations laws, scrapped its cross-river bus and train tunnel and ended its surgery wait-time guarantee, among other things.

With AAP