GovDC puts government on the open market

New South Wales’ GovDC Marketplace is setting an example for similar efforts in other states.

The creation of a service-based marketplace to support the New South Wales Government’s GovDC strategy reflects the maturation of its customer-centric vision and sets an example for similar efforts in other states. That’s the view of one technology executive in the wake of a significant contract that will enable state agencies to commission cloud services faster and more easily than ever before.

Approved vendors are already marketing services through the GovDC Marketplace, a self-described ‘ICT supermarket’ that was launched in July on the back of a key supply contract awarded to ServiceNow and UXC Keystone by the NSW Department of Finance, Services, and Innovation (DFSI).

The portal both standardises and streamlines the sourcing of approved services by state agencies as they progressively embrace cloud services — a key structural transformation that is driving similar state efforts at transformation that has already delivered considerable benefits for proactive early adopters.

A user-centric design — also reflected in Service NSW’s recent adoption of Google’s Android Pay digital-payments system — was critical to bringing the marketplace vision to fruition with a broad enough range of services to support myriad NSW state agencies, ServiceNow ANZ Managing Director David Oakley told GTR.

“The whole system of user engagement and experience has been quite key to getting adoption going,” he explained.

“The nature of the project is as a brokering environment, but the emphasis on the project has been around a design experience. It's allowing different agencies to come together in a marketplace, and through government and partner support we have made the system of engagement and user experience very compelling.”

ServiceNow's David Oakley.

That compelling experience would drive the evolution of the GovDC initiative into a “digital community where we have on-premises environments connected to clouds globally for the government,” said Derek Paterson, director of the NSW GovDC and Marketplace Services within DFSI.

Agencies, he said, “will be able to utilise services from anywhere, any time. The Marketplace project gives government the opportunity to buy on-premises and off-premises cloud services that encourage better efficiencies and better use of government spending.”

Current GovDC Marketplace providers include ac3, Fujitsu, IBM, Unisys, Deloitte, UXC Red Rock and others.

The creation of a marketplace-driven environment was not originally in DFSI’s plan, executive director of government technology platforms Pedro Harris recently told GTR, but increasing demand highlighted the opportunity and drove architectural changes that would allow private providers to co-exist within the GovDC environment.

“Traditionally we would do all our development internally,” Harris said, “and this signalled a big push toward platform development. We’re creating this ecosystem of different marketplaces that allows our users to find the best workloads. Rather than having 160 agencies doing it themselves, we do this and give them the ability to consume.

“We’ve started partnering with agencies so they can do what they’re best at doing — supporting citizens with services — and we can do what we’re best at, which is abstracting the complexity and giving them a platform to operate from.”

The NSW model has set the pace for government-scale delivery of cloud services, said Oakley, who has been involved in a number of agency-wide deployments and called the state-wide GovDC effort “probably the most innovative group [in government transformation], certainly at a state level. They are doing some really great things.”

Such “great things” will be key to helping government bodies realise the potential of digital transformation — as well as meeting a NSW Government edict that they be live within GovDC by August 2017. If the results of a recent Gartner survey are any indication, there’s still a way to go — 59% of respondents believe their IT organisation is not ready for the digital business of the next two years.

Cloud technologies were nominated as the area that would have the most significant impact on respondents’ careers, reflecting the growing importance of initiatives like GovDC to transformation-minded governments.

As well as realising a focus on user experience and user-centric design, the Marketplace portal — which took three months to implement and went “extremely smoothly”, Oakley said — is also designed to help agencies monitor and audit their usage of GovDC services, and track their costs as they accumulate.

“The ability to have tenancy in the GovDC Platform, and to stand up preproduction environments within a couple of hours of receiving a purchase order, is critical in getting that time to value and getting the project off on the right footing,” he explained.

“The government have had clarity of thought in terms of what they’re trying to achieve and gave very clear direction to the project team about the outcomes they wanted.”

Image courtesy David Kryzaniak under CC BY 2.0