Ahead of Government Technology Review’s 2011 Cloud Computing Forum, we conducted a round table to assess cloud and how it adds value to government users. Here's a partial transcript of the round table

Craig Ward

Craig Ward was taken completely off guard when he was approached and offered the role of CIO at the Western Australia Police; as someone with little technical knowledge, managing a $200 million organisational ICT spend and a team of around 300 technical people was hardly the next step he would have expected to take in his self-described “zen career path.”

A year on, however, the 29-year police veteran – who joined the force as a fresh-faced 17 year old and worked his way through positions including detective, Police Academy trainer, undercover operative, and internal affairs – has embraced and relished the role. And that role came with “quite a learning curve” as he worked to get up to speed with the technology supporting what is, with over 5,000 police managing 157 police stations across 2.5 million square kilometres, the world’s largest police jurisdiction.

Dr Catriona Wallace

Government Technology Review: How big is the government call centre sector? How many people does it employ?

Dr Wallace: According to our most recent study, the 2010 Australia and New Zealand Industry Benchmarking Reports, government contact centres make up 22 per cent of total seats [a ‘seat’ in a contact centre can be occupied by more than one worker, and is used as a metric that indicates a centre’s capacity] based on our sample. We found that the industry as a whole has 198,200 seats, which means there are around 43,600 seats in Australian government contact centres. The mean seat size is 134 and 30 is the median. The mean number of full-time equivalent staff is 95 with a median of 20.

In 1975 Business Week Magazine published an article famously titled “The Office of the Future”. In it, George Pake, the Head of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre, introduced the now well-worn phrase “paperless office.”

Since then there has been a general consensus that it is a good thing to eliminate paper from a business. The arguments for this have included: paper slows down process paper gets lost paper is less secure than digital information paper impacts the environment paper can cause process errors.

Baw Baw Shire Council walked away from a tender for new customer management software, then decided to adapt sales-centric customer relationship management software to serve its citizens, but found the costs beyond its means. So why is its approach set to be adopted by dozens of other local government areas? Simon Sharwood explains.