Victorian shared services organisation CenITex will live on as an ICT provider, the government has revealed.
The Labor government announced today that it would not proceed with a move initiated by its predecessor to outsource CenITex.
The previous state government first initiated in 2013 a move to transform CenITex into a broker of services. That move was aborted but in 2014 the government pushed ahead with 'Project Atlas', which sought to outsource all CenITex services to a single vendor.
The Andrews Labor government paused the move to outsource the organisation while a review into the future of shared services in the state was conducted.
The review, made public today, concluded that the organisation "should continue to deliver the services that require specialist understanding of the Victorian Government, or are not readily available in the market, such as secure data processing and storage, data base administration and specialist information security services."
However it added that there are "many services now available through external providers that Victorian Government could choose to use".
"In order for Government to take advantage of the growing number of external providers who offer more ubiquitous services as a commodity, whole of government standards and sourcing strategies need to be put in place," the report stated.
"This review found that the former Liberal Government’s proposal to outsource all of CenITex’s services in one package would have left the government worse off," said Victoria's special minister of state, Gavin Jennings.
The review states that the Department of Premier and Cabinet "should lead the development of standards, high level requirements and the sourcing strategy to market test both the provision of the workplace environment (i.e. desktops, laptops, mobile devices, email and collaboration tools), and network services (i.e. the physical network and management services) for the whole of government."
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"The market testing of some CenITex services and other business support services will provide many opportunities for vendors to compete for government service provision while saving 480 CenITex jobs," Jennings said.