Big drop in Queensland government ICT staff

The number of ICT workers employed by the Queensland government has plunged dramatically over the past two years.

The Queensland Public Service Workforce Quarterly Profile, released earlier this month, identified a little over 4300 full-time ICT roles as of December 2013. In September 2012 it was just over 5600 - a reduction of 24%.

With the government also planning to sell CITEC, its ICT service provider, by August 2015, up to another 400 jobs could soon be removed from the public payroll. CITEC provides internet, networking, data storage, data protection, data centre and support services across the state’s public sector.

Queensland Minister for Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts Ian Walker said 12 months ago that the kind of work CITEC does should be opened up to the private sector as soon as possible.

But many in the industry doubt whether CITEC will be an attractive-enough catch to inspire a purchase. The government is presently in the scoping phase for divesting itself of the 49-year-old body and has not ruled out the possibility of tying a CITEC sale into a wider outsourcing effort.

The Queensland public sector has been bedevilled by IT problems in recent years, including the disastrous IBM payroll services contract, which eventually led to a Commission of Inquiry and needed $1.25 billion in extra funding to fix. The system is still not completely operational, and IBM has been banned from being awarded any further Queensland government IT contracts.

The previous minister, Ros Bates, famously compared the state’s ICT infrastructure to a ‘1972 Ford Falcon clunker’ that needed up to $6 billion of repairs. A 2012 audit of government IT systems showed 1000 software applications that should have been replaced long beforehand. In the wake of that audit, the government sacked more than 350 IT workers, leading to overall savings to the public purse of approximately $40,000 per hour.

That audit also showed that the government was operating more than 1700 software applications, many of which of had been custom written and were more than 10 years old.

A more recent audit from June 2013 found that 90% of the state’s ICT systems were out of date and an injection of $7.4 billion would be needed to replace them within the next five years.

Currently, the state government spends about $1bn per year on IT products, plus around $600 million in staffing costs.

In other Queensland government IT development, earlier this month senior IT executive Peter Grant left the Queensland public service just 12 months after being demoted from his government-wide CIO role. Appointed to the position by the Bligh government in 2011, he came in at a time when the state was trying to come to grips with the payroll issue and other IT concerns. Previously, Grant had held the same CIO role between 2005 and 2008, as well as a career as a consultant and having held senior IT roles at Queensland Health and Queensland Transport