Within five years, government could be running mostly on nimble microservices-based architectures, the head of an influential Commonwealth agency recently told a public gathering of his peers.
“We’re moving from a monolithic tech stack to a series of microservices,” Australian Digital Health Agency chief digital officer Peter O’Halloran told last month’s Tech in Gov conference in Canberra, referring to the trend for software systems to be composed of focused, bite-sized code chunks.
The trend is also being reflected in procurement as well. Facing a perfect storm of falling budgets, ballooning expectations and cyber security threats, Australian governments are hunting simpler, ‘bite-sized’ technologies from nimble businesses.
“The days of the multi-billion-dollar IT projects are dead,” O’Halloran said.
“We’re never going to see those days again – and that’s probably not a bad thing.”
O’Halloran said government had to modernise its systems even as disruptors such as artificial intelligence (AI) and rising citizen expectations pressured agencies in an era of collapsing IT budgets.
“Government was one of the first to digitise a whole lot of processes … and so we have a huge amount of tech debt,” he said during a panel to launch iTnews’ Public Sector Tech Report.
His comments reflected the iTnews report’s findings that, although Australia ranked an enviable fifth in the OECD’s 2023 Digital Government Index, 20 years of legacies now hamstrung its future transformation.
To hurdle the impasse, the public sector, including ADHA, would “chunk down” its IT systems, chipping away at legacy, monolithic implementations while reusing the same microservices across agencies, he said.
“You keep reusing that function for the same thing so, over time, you have a single tool that’s doing authentication or user management or whatever the case might be. And keep building on those so that, every time you get an investment for a new system, you can plug into existing pieces you’ve modernised.
“You get five years down the path and go, ‘Gee, our monolithic tech stack is halved’.”
He said ADHA’s “next four or five procurements” were critical: “And we’ll keep doing that year on year until we get rid of the old tech debt that we have”.
Emerging IT philosophy draws SMBs seat at public table
A consequence of the emerging IT enlightenment was smaller, nimble firms previously barred from whole-of-government, ‘Big Bang’ IT contracts could now successfully bid for work.
IT industry analyst, Gartner, said Australian governments could invest up to $27 billion into IT this year — about 60 per cent at the federal level — and rising by about 10 per cent a year making it collectively Australia’s single biggest buyer.
O’Halloran said agencies were now receptive to smaller, innovative suppliers with deep knowledge of specific technologies.
“We’re trying to broaden the supply base – we can look for small companies that have innovation as well as big companies that have experience with other products,” he said. “We’re trying to bring the sector together, so we get that innovation from everyone.”
Natalie Legg, CEO of Canberra systems integrator A23 and a former Treasury senior project manager, echoed O’Halloran’s view suggesting more opportunities for smaller Australian businesses were a silver lining to tightening government budgets.
“Along with the huge projects comes … a shortlist of the five companies that can ever do it. And we’ve seen — we know — what that has resulted in.”
Legg said government agency buyers should ask for receipts from their suppliers: “Who can do that ‘thing’ and has done it”.
“We never seem to ask: ‘Did they deliver the ‘thing’ that they were hired to deliver?
“Is it the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’; do people not see the nude project in the room?”
She said the answer was for agencies to, “invest in small, agile companies that that do these sorts of things really well and that’s what they focus on”.
Top tech for government in 2024 – predictions beyond AI
According to Gartner, those new things in ascendancy with government buyers were adaptive security, digital identity, digital platform agility, programmatic data management — and AI.
The latter was especially pertinent for government decision-makers because — although AI promised to deliver better services through applications such as chat bots, apps and enhanced cybersecurity — agencies required people with new and enhanced skills to implement it successfully.
O’Halloran said ADHA was reskilling people with frontline healthcare experience for digital roles.
“They’re probably not going to become hardcore programmers [but] as business analysts, change managers, designing a service and product they’re brilliant; they understand our world,” O’Halloran said.
“And so, I’m trying to not keep poaching from every other organisation but grow the workforce … through people who are doing a mid-career change.”
Marcus D’Castro also lauded the public sector’s jump on their private sector peers as it prepares for an AI-powered future.
“One area that stands out is data management — the consolidation, rationalisation, access, security, governance of data,” said D’Castro, a general manager at Nomura Research Institute (NRI).
“The old saying of, ‘garbage in, garbage out’ has never been truer — if you feed GenAI rubbish data, you’re going to get rubbish results.”
He said the public sector’s approach to archives management especially held it “in good stead” to leverage future opportunities.
“The technical part is quite simple; getting your data ready and … accessible is the harder part.”
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