Identity and knowing who governments are dealing with has emerged as the top priority over the next 12 months for South Australia's CIO, Andrew Mills.
Speaking to Computerworld, Mills said the challenge will be knowing who is accessing what at a business and citizen level, as the respective state governments and federal agencies look to share resources, information and services.
“It is a key issue we are going to have to work through. I don't think there is a golden bullet but, rather, it's a hard slog to work those issues through,” he said. “Particularly sharing that between different levels of government and across agencies is going to be a key issue.”
Mills also pointed to South Australia's continued focus on reducing its business as usual costs with ICT — as exemplified by last week's announcement of a renewed deal with Dimension Data — and green IT as the other top priorities.
“It's not just about getting ICT greener but how we contribute to the broader sustainability agenda,” Mills said. “Included in that is the red-tape reduction for business and all those sorts of things. Certainly, again, we have made a lot of promises but we have to work our way through the incremental delivery of how we improve that.”
Mills did not highlight the Federal Government's National Broadband Network (NBN) as fitting into his top three priorities but said he was ready to speak to the company leading the rollout, NBNco. The conversation has yet to take place, however, and he was still evaluating which assets the state would look to contribute.
“We have a good handle on what we have and what we don't have but at this stage it is unclear what it all means,” Mills said. “We'll wait and see what NBNco wish to do and then have those conversations.
“From a South Australian point of view, the key issue with the NBN will be the 10 per cent, not the 90 per cent,” he said in reference to the plan to have 90 per cent of homes connected via a fibre-to-the-premises network and the remainder via wireless and satellite technologies.
“We have a lot of the 10 per cent and we are concentrating on what is happening with them.”
To contact the journalist on this story email Computerworld or follow @computerworldau on Twitter and let us know.