Governments should learn to be frugal with their tech spend, avoid big-bang digital projects and change the budgeting model to finance smaller digestible work that independently adds value, according to former CEO of Service NSW Damon Rees.
ASIC is taking back management of its core business registries, after the super registry scheme was ditched this week“Running big complex projects in government is really hard and has a high failure rate,” Mr Rees, also a former NSW chief information and digital officer, told“Government is an inherently complex environment that is arguably more challenging than almost any private sector organisation operating in Australia would face.
He said this was inherently different from the private sector which typically had one point of accountability. Mr Rees said a key driver for governments was the twice annual budgeting rounds that typically forced agencies to budget up front inherently uncertain costs. He said typical budgeting cycles don’t support progressive acceleration and learning. Mr Rees said the $2.2 billion NSW digital restart fund was a good example of how to progressively fund projects, but that mechanism did not exist in many other jurisdictions.
Mr Rees said digital projects were inherently knowledge-based and business cases were developed based on desk top research that were “conceptual and theoretical” rather than based on actual proofs from prototypes.He said large project budgets meant there was less discipline on spending, and created large hard to manage project teams, pointing to Amazon’s principle that no team should be bigger than what two pizzas can feed.