The Australian Department of Tourism, Industry and Resources (DITR) brought IT support back in-house in 2004 following the break up of the whole-of-government cluster five contract.
It was an outsourcing experience that left DITR with little or no staff and a lack of IT management skills within the organization, according to Steve Sterling, the department's general manager of the ICT infrastructure branch.
As a result, he said there had to be a serious investment in staff and the department immediately began to actively recruit.
Under the previous cluster five arrangements, Telstra Enterprise Services was responsible for the department's IT infrastructure services.
"What we did was bought everything back in-house and then made strategic decisions about what to source in the market. We signed a deal with Macquarie Telecom for gateway and Web hosting as we had no infrastructure to do this ourselves," Sterling said
"In terms of what else was outsourced we got Getronics to look after servers, the desktop network as well as some services. Everything else we do in-house and in terms of the service desk, all level two calls are done by Getronics.
"Everything else we do in-house, such as people providing executive support, change and release management, IT governance and policy as well as ICT communications and infrastructure projects to co-ordinate a whole range of service delivery projects and for our new remote access platform or, say introducing Blackberrys we coordinate this work with Macquarie Telecom and Getronics."
Sterling said the agency is in the middle of moving to new premises in Canberra, consolidating 1450 people into one building.
He said this involves building a new network for the data centre.