I’ve just spent the last hour reading through the review that Sir Peter Gershon undertook of the Australian Government’s Use of ICT. There is plenty useful guidance in that document for any government around the world that is looking for ways to get more value out of their ICT assets.
One of the sections that stood out for me is a recommendation that can be found in section 5.4 and highlights the need for the Australian government to create and manage IT career paths for employees working in this field.
To address the issues around ICT skills shortages, the talent attraction and retention of ICT skills within the APS needs to be improved. I recommend two key measures.
Firstly, there needs to be the creation of a whole-of-government ICT career structure, developed by AGIMO in consultation with the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) and PM&C. This will include training and development programs for ICT professionals in key skills areas (for example, project management and systems architecture) and should utilise existing taxpayer funded initiatives wherever possible (for example, the Defence Materiel Organisation project management training).
Secondly, a whole-of-government strategic ICT workforce plan needs to be developed and maintained. The plan will be developed and supported by the APSC and AGIMO, and will leverage the work done by other agencies, such as the ATO, on a workforce planning tool. AGIMO should construct the plan annually based on inputs from agencies and recommend to the SIGB options for dealing with identified skills issues, including recruitment, training, and development in areas of skills shortages.
With the combination of a common career structure and a workforce plan, it should become much easier to plan to smooth peaks and troughs of demand for ICT skills in individual agencies.
This is a move that I have been advocating to many of our customers for several years now.
Well formed career structures within the system of government would provide a framework that allows the many contractors who circle around agencies to move into full time roles with little or no impact to their income, training programs or the tools that they need to get their job done.
In return government would be in a position to leverage the institutional knowledge that full time employees collect over time, which I am confident would help deliver projects at lower cost and more efficiently.
At a political and policy level you would over time see governments build a strong leadership capability based upon their real needs rather than, as you sometimes find, being based upon the many views of external third parties. These leaders would understand the impact of the massive scale requirements that government systems face, and how to deal with them.
As ICT has become more critical to government service delivery we have seen similar trends play out around the world, first of all with large scale outsourcing to help obtain the skills needed, then more recently consolidating strong ICT skills at the center of government allowing the setting of national policy and common guidance to agencies and departments.
Both of those strategies have served government well over the last decade, the next logical step does appear to be – as Sir Peter Gershon recommends – to distribute strong ICT skills across departments using full time civil service employees in a manner that is competitive to industry.