Digital Transformation Program
Year: 2018
Scope and summary of activities
Geoscience Australia (GA) is an Australian Government Science agency with approximately 800 staff. In late 2014, GA commenced a major ICT Transformation Program in line with the Agency’s Strategic Directions and Science Principles that focussed on changing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to enable “scientific computing” and reduce the focus on “commodity services”. The ICT Strategic Plan also focussed heavily on cloud computing as a target environment, particularly for how it enabled on-demand self-service (removing ICT as a bottleneck) and elastic scalability.
The strategic direction for ICT was not only based around reinvesting the savings made through cost reductions in innovative services that support scientific computing but also to improve a range of operational issues within ICT.
Outcomes and Benefits
Strategic Reform (SR) was engaged in in February 2015 to develop a business case for the implementation of the Agency’s ICT Strategic Plan. This plan, described in its simplest form, focused on two key streams of benefits:
- reducing the cost and issues associated with the management of commodity ICT services, and
- reinvesting the savings made through those costs reductions in innovative services that support scientific computing.
SR identified that GA could expect cost reductions through leveraging architectures and business models with the following characteristics:
- commodity services, where vendors can achieve economies of scale
- outcome-based service levels that are defined by vendor service offerings
- consumption-based, incremental pricing; and
- a layer of abstraction between GA and the technical implementation.
SR continued their engagement with the Agency by providing procurement expertise to undertake the end-to-end procurement of a Managed Service Provider (MSP). SR has also provided resources to supplement GA’s current workforce to manage the transition into the current state environment by the MSP and the transformation to the target state including communications and change, project management and workforce planning (due to staff redundancies), and ICT capability review.
