Thursday, 9 February 2012
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Central Government, Connected Government
New Zealand replaces failed govt shared network
New Zealand’s government has planned a six month project to shift agencies from the failed Government Shared Network (GSN) to a new platform called one.govt (Open Network Environment).
The GSN, a project led by the State Services Commission (SSC), was canned earlier this year because the service failed to attract sufficient demand. The project’s demise prompted the resignation of New Zealand’s first government chief information officer, Laurence Millar.
Stephen Crombie, head of Government Technology Services (GTS) at the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), is now in charge of ICT delivery functions previously performed by the SSC.
According to Crombie, the one.govt scheme is a very different project to its predecessor, and the transition of agencies on to one.govt will be one of the biggest immediate all-government tasks for the GTS.
The new arrangement provides broadly the same range of services that the GSN was planned to provide. One such service, the Government Logon Service (GLS), is a centralised authentification hub for government agency staff. The service is currently being trialed.
The Identity Verification Service, which is a way for people to verify their identity to government agencies online and in real-time, is well into its first practical implementation stage, with births, deaths and marriage records in place.
The Ministry of Economic Development is currently using the GLS, and more than 20 agencies are lined up to follow suit.
“We know the service is viable now with the current demand we’ve got,” Crombie said. “It is obviously cost-effective for the provider [Datacraft] to provide it at the current demand level, which is nine participating agencies. So any further demand — and there seems to be quite a lot of interest out there — would further improve the economics for the service provider as well as for the agencies themselves.”
“We’d like to see a significant proportion of government networking on this arrangement over time. But to be honest we haven’t really set specific targets for this,” he added.
“We need very strong governance processes and we’ve built all those so that the agencies participate in the decision-making. We’ve got a very strong steering group and we’ll be establishing a user group so that the agencies who wish to participate in this agreement are part of it and can influence the way the whole service develops. That’s been a very important part of how this arrangement will work.”
There are always challenges in all-of-government work, having to accommodate the needs of quite different agencies within an overall framework, Crombie added, but GTS is learning to engage the agencies more fully than they were with the GSN project.
“We’ve adopted best practice for how these shared services work from governments in other jurisdictions,” he said, but reasoned that it is no longer primarily the government’s job to encourage agencies to participate: “It is up to the provider to drive uptake”.
Running one.govt is a marginal increase on the work that the supplier is already doing, so pricing is lower than for the GSN, added Crombie. “This helps attract new clients.”
Agencies and industry sources say that the non-competitiveness of the GSN versus private-sector alternatives was one of its main drawbacks.
The agreement with Datacraft for the new service was signed on July 1.
An interview with Laurence Millar, in which he reflects on lessons learned during his five-year stint as New Zealand’s GCIO, will feature in the next issue of FutureGov.
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