Image: Christiaan Colen
The Western Australian government has awarded contracts to supply information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure as a service to the whole-of-government for the next five years.
Under a new procurement arrangement, the state government has ruled that all agencies will purchase through one contract where three vendors will continuously compete to sell their ICT infrastructure services.
The government said that this will reduce procurement costs and delays for both government and suppliers.
The new contracts with IT suppliers Atos, Datacom and NEC are the biggest example of this new process that the government wants to promote, as it claims that it will save an estimated $65 to $80 million annually in ICT infrastructure expenditure as agencies are being told to only pay for what they use.
Western Australian Minister for Innovation Bill Marmion said the government expects innovation to thrive under this arrangement through the stimulation of local industry, which in turn will ensure diversity of supply.
“The GovNext-ICT contract enables agencies to have access to the latest and greatest technological offerings to assist with improving their online service delivery presence,” Mr Marmion said.
He said suppliers will be delivering services locally using local and, in some cases, national providers.
According to the state government, other ICT services, such as application support and project management services, will continue to be delivered under the existing common use arrangements the government has in place with local suppliers.
Mr Marmion said the more robust ICT procurement regime would enable a cost-effective roll-out of Digital WA, a strategy that aimed for 70 per cent of transactions with government to be done online by 2020.
“Digital WA will transform the way services are delivered by the public sector, improving service delivery to all West Australians,” he said.
