GERSHON IMPLEMENTATION ‘QUICK START’
With Cabinet acceptance of Sir Peter Gershon’s ICT (Information and Communication Technology) recommendations in full and the Expenditure Review Committee taking responsibility for their implementation, Government review teams and auditors will be paying particular attention to ICT governance and finances for some time to come.
Government agencies now need to move quickly to position for the challenges and opportunities that the Gershon report presents.
The Gershon Challenges
Fujitsu’s “Quick Start” services focus on specific challenges presented by the Gershon recommendations to individual government agencies –
- Achieve significant reductions in business as usual (BAU) budgets ranging from 7.5% to 15% according to agency size; and
- Demonstrate that your agency has the capability in place to effectively manage the entire life cycle of its ICT services.
Both have significant implications for your agency with respect to the delivery of BAU services, its funding and particularly the funding of NPPs.
Effectively addressing the Gershon recommendations and achieving their goals will involve fundamental changes to your agency’s culture, behaviours, policy and processes, including the management of the entire life cycle of ICT services. The report will impact ICT and the role of business in the effective management of ICT, and we can provide practical experience and on meeting this challenge.
The Gershon Opportunities
There are a significant number of opportunities available to your agency through the implementation of the Gershon recommendations. You will have the ability to gain the benefits of increased efficiency, effectiveness and manageability of BAU operations; to increase your agency’s capability to successfully manage ICT enabled programs of change, with this latter capability becoming a factor in government decisions on funding of NPPs.
Agencies now have a choice –
- To wait for Gershon to come to them and react to its requirements in a compressed timeframe; or
- Start positioning for Gershon now, be seen to be proactively constructing a Gershon strategy and plan, and in doing so maximise the time you will have to successfully respond to the opportunities presented.
The ‘Quick Start’ Services
As part of the Gershon “Quick Start” service, Fujitsu will provide a series of fixed cost consulting engagements designed to assist your agency to better understand its present level of ICT capability and effectiveness, the target level required and a gap analysis. Under the recommendations this is an essential process: knowing where you are, where you need to be, and how you are going to get there. Without such a baseline on existing capabilities, a strategy and an integrated program of activities for capability improvement, your agency may put at risk day to day operations, and its access to funding for major ICT projects and new policy proposals.
The Quick Start Services are focused on the following agency capabilities –
- Investment Portfolio Management
- Benefits Realisation
- Value Governance
- Application Value Assessment
- Green ICT – Sustainability Assessment
Other Gershon relevant services are –
- Green ICT – Green Data Centres
Our Quick Start services can be provided as a standalone offering or use existing portfolio management software to capture and present the outcomes of each service. If your agency does not have portfolio management software, we are able to offer access to this capability through our relationship with Compuware. This relationship brings together Fujitsu’s consulting leadership in Portfolio Management and ICT Governance with Compuware’s leadership in ICT Planning and Control tools. Compuware are able to underpin Fujitsu’s Quick Start services with preconfigured software and default reports to quickly deliver key auditable outcomes to address the Gershon recommendations. The preconfigured software – Changepoint, Compuware’s market-leading IT portfolio management solution – can be purchased or inexpensively leased on a fully hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) basis.
E-mail:ian.linehan@au.fujitsu.com
