TALKING
‘‘ business
The Digital Transformation Agency in Australia and The Department of Internal Affairs in New Zealand have created easily accessible systems .
Procurement 2.0
Each government is aiming to take the hassle out of the process and improve the speed of government while remaining transparent to the public .
Furthermore , these agreements aim to save the public purse from budget blowouts as the procurement process is significantly shorter . And vendors often offer a reduced rate for their services to attain the agreement as it lowers their barrier to government entry and reduces the resources required to develop an old-school procurement application .
The Digital Transformation Agency in Australia and The Department of Internal Affairs in New Zealand have created easily accessible systems the envy of many governments across the globe .
Ultimately the goal of Digital Transformations of this kind is to improve flexibility and simplify the process of agencies buying technology and getting more value out of their investments .
In Australia , it ’ s in the form of Whole of Government Agreements that are , effectively , contracts with vendors which can be quickly accessed and easily signed by any agency in Australia . With these specific services offered under a Whole of Government Agreement , there ’ s often no need to go through the process of a full tender anymore , including for such things as maintenance and upport for software systems .
The same holds true of New Zealand which has created the Collaborative Marketplace which features similar agreements for a large and growing number of services that agencies can now access quickly and implement in the time it would normally take to undertake a full tender and the subsequent procurement and assessment process .
Under the old process , a full procurement process would have to be undertaken for each contract , whereas now a contract can be accessed quickly and more affordably , with fewer resources required to do so .
It allows for the simple sourcing of everything from an Enterprise Resource Planning ( ERP ) platform at competitive pricing , to third party support for that very ERP to lower the annual and significant maintenance and support costs and receive dedicated , follow-thesun services – this can help procurement professionals achieve savings targets which can then help fund additional digital initiatives for their agencies .
It may have taken a while , but the speed of government is catching up to the pace of the private sector and saving additional funds from the public purse in the process . p
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