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Australia and New Zealand’s Best IT Practises for Government CIOs

Vladas Leonas, a speaker at the marcus evans Government CIO Summit 2010 addresses some of the challenges facing government IT leaders in Australia and New Zealand. Interview with: Vladas Leonas, Chief Information Officer, New South Wales (NSW) Housing Board

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Information Technology is transforming everyone’s lives, creating capabilities and efficiencies beyond anyone’s imagination. While government CIOs play a key role in ensuring citizens get the most out of IT, making decisions on thoroughly tried and tested technologies remains a luxury. Yet they can not afford to miss out on the latest trends, by implementing too early or too late. Vladas Leonas, a speaker at the marcus evans Government CIO Summit 2010 taking place in Australia, 1 - 3 February, shares his thoughts on the changing role of the public sector CIO, cloud computing, the IT strategies that could transform the ICT landscape and his long-term goals.

How has the government CIO’s role changed in the past few years, and how do you expect it to evolve in the next few years?

Vladas Leonas: Government CIOs have become much more dynamic and strategic over the last several years. It is absolutely clear that the pace of change that was characteristic of commercial enterprises has caught up with the government. Now there is much more focus on cost savings, on improved service delivery and enablement of new service delivery models. I believe that this trend will continue as the pace of change is not slowing down; it is ever increasing.

What are the challenges facing public sector CIOs in Australia at the moment?

Vladas Leonas: From the NSW perspective, the challenge I see is in the implementation in the amalgamation of the “super departments”, with a very strong focus on efficiency and cost savings. Just for background information, in June the NSW government announced the integration of more than 120 agencies into 13 super departments, so it is a massive amalgamation.

What challenges are you experiencing, and what strategies or solutions are you implementing to overcome them?

Vladas Leonas: From being a stand-alone agency, we are becoming part of a super department. We need to integrate with a number of other agencies, we need to ensure that all the strategies are aligned, that service delivery is aligned. This is, probably, the biggest challenge for the moment.

In terms of other CIO type challenges, we are in the process of replacing our core operating system. That will deliver among other things, significant productivity benefits. On the integration side, we are working closely with other agencies that form the newly announced Department of Human Services, because we now are part of that department. We are also working very closely with our shared service provider NSW Businesslink.

What initiatives have you undertaken to improve efficiency?

Vladas Leonas: As I mentioned earlier, number one is replacement of the core operating system. Recently we also implemented new initiatives called Rentstart by phone, which significantly simplifies and improves certain types of applications for social housing in NSW. We have moved to 100 per cent VoIP telephony in our department, and this in combination with least cost routing has resulted in savings. We manage our mobile fleet extremely efficiently; we ensure the best and the right plans are in place and this saves us money too. We are also providing our tenants with B-pay facilities to pay their rent online rather than over the counter. These are just some examples of what we do.

What IT strategy or initiative do you believe will transform the ICT landscape?

Vladas Leonas: We strongly believe in the shared services approach, and this is the driving force behind our cost savings initiatives, ensuring that the ICT landscape is created and managed appropriately. We provide exactly what the business requires. Just to give you a couple of examples, we are looking at a number of new service initiatives, like streamlining the procure to pay process and video conferencing.

What are the opportunities offered by cloud computing initiatives?

Vladas Leonas: This is a very interesting question. There are a lot of questions about how cloud computing can ensure that we fully comply with legislation. Possibly, private clouds will be able to deliver on this promise. The challenge for state government is that we have very strong privacy legislation that we have to comply with, and when it is in a cloud and you do not know where, who and how handles the data, you cannot guarantee that privacy legislation is being complied with. So there are some challenges with it. It is a great concept and this is why I am talking about private clouds, because they have potential capability to deliver on this.

What IT developments should we expect in the next five years?

Vladas Leonas: I think further commoditisation, virtualisation will become mainstream, TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) will go further down. There will also be new technologies, no doubt about it.

As a government CIO, what are your long-term goals?

Vladas Leonas: I want to ensure sustainability of ICT service delivery, and provision of flexible and efficient ITC support and technology enablement that meets business requirements.

What are your thoughts on developing IT around the citizen?

Vladas Leonas: Without disclosing a lot of details about our plans I must say we are already working on some blueprints in this area, as a part of the NSW government that is looking at Gov 2.0 implementation.