Gershon Review brings mixed fortunes

Article appeared in: The Canberra Times
Author: James Massola
Date: 20th July 2009

The Gershon Review, undertaken by senior British public servant Sir Peter Gershon in April 2008, is remaking information and communications technology in government and therefore in Canberra.

The review was undertaken at the urging of Finance and Deregulation Minister Lindsay Tanner, driving force of the Rudd Government’s razor gang. It promised savings across the board in ICT. But the results, to date, have not all been positive.

Australia’s economy has slowed significantly since Gershon handed his report to Tanner in August 2008, and moreso since Tanner responded in November 2008. In July 2008, as the report noted, unemployment in Australia stood at 4.3 per cent; in the ACT, unemployment was 2.7 per cent. The unemployment rate has now reached 5.8 per cent, and while it is still lower in the ACT, unemployment is climbing in ”recession-proof” Canberra.

The Gershon Review cited a study by the Australian Computer Society and the Australian Information Industry Association that predicted an Australian ICT shortfall of 14,000 jobs by 2010, growing to 25,000 within another 10 years. Rae Buerckner was one of thousands of people employed, indirectly, by the public service in the ICT sector. She lost her job with Indigo Pacific, an Adobe partner, in the new year.

Despite 12 years’ experience that commanded a six- figure salary or perhaps because of it she has struggled to find work since. ”I applied for an EL2 position with a government department on the 19th of January,” Buerckner says. ”I found out the other day that the applications haven’t even been looked at yet.

I’ve applied for loads of contracts there was one recently where the recruitment agency rang me the other day to find out my availabilities, two months after they rang me to ask my availabilities.” The reason for the delays, according to Buerckner, is that projects are not being adequately funded post- Gershon. ”There are a lot of agencies out there struggling to get things done internally and what happens is that an agency ends up having to pay a big company to fix up the mess,” she says. ”Post-Gershon, it’s almost been like a second change of government in the ICT sector.” The Gershon Review encouraged government agencies to find workers outside the ACT because of the skills shortage. It also called for agencies to reduce their reliance on private contractors, calling for a 50 per cent cut over two years, green measures such as those employed in Defence to save both power and money, centralisation of data centres, more teleconferencing and centralised purchasing.

If only it was all that simple. According to one senior ICT manager in the public service, the fallout from Gershon has been significant, with jobs lost, increased uncertainty and agencies putting off projects and focusing on BAUs, or business-as- usual projects, almost to the exclusion of innovation.

”There has been a general perception, since Gershon, and because of a tightening in the market place, that contractors are in a position where they have to accept lower rates,” he says. ”Departments are using expiring contracts as a chance to put things out to tender and push prices down.” According to the manager, projects that had been in the pipeline have been stalled or cancelled. ”Gershon recommended replacing contractors with permanent staff,” he says. ”But what is actually happening is that departments are just not taking on new IT contracts. There are significant reviews in process within the public sector of new projects and many of these are not being approved.

”The push to outsource was significant under the previous government, but with this push for centralisation under AGIMO [the Australian Government Information Management Office], well, just look at the employment pages.

”Larger agencies have achieved some efficiencies, but smaller ones haven’t benefited much. Nearly 80 per cent of work being done is business as usual, and they want to move that to 70 per cent, but they aren’t hiring new staff.”

But not everyone agrees with the gloomy post-Gershon Review conclusions. Peter Acheson, the chief operating officer of Peoplebank, which sells itself as the largest provider of ICT staff to government in the country, thinks the worst of Gershon is over and the benefits are starting to flow. ”We’ve gone through the process launched late last year when Gershon was ratified by Cabinet, we’ve seen DIAC [Department of Immigration and Citizenship] and Defence, for example, respond early in the year,” he says.

”There was a period of uncertainty in February-March when there ICT workers in Canberra were concerned, but I think that is largely passed.” And while Acheson concedes that some contractors have lost out, he says the future is bright. He says, ”What we have seen now is that the sector has settled down. We aren’t in the boom times of 2006 and 2007, but the market has returned to a degree of normalcy.”

That’s not a view shared by Buerckner. She says, ”There needs to be a set of guidelines written on how agencies can implement each area of Gershon and it should probably come out of AGIMO and the Government 2.0 taskforce. ”The way this was handled, it cost me my job, but that’s not even the point. They need to do things in a sustainable way.”