Use of consultants and temporary staff
New skills needed in a longer term UK NAO: Used well, consultants and temporary staff can be an important source of specialist skills and capabilities that are uneconomic for departments to maintain in their permanent staff. Since 2009-10, the government has used spending controls to reduce its use of consultants and temporary staff, and by 2014-15 spending had fallen by £1.5 billion. However, spending has increased by between £400 million and £600 million since 2011-12, suggesting that this was more of a short-term reduction than a sustainable strategy. In the longer term, departments will need to develop workforce, skills and capacity plans to reduce their dependence on external skills. They will need to improve their strategic workforce planning to determine where they can deploy existing staff, where they need to recruit, and where they need to engage temporary resources. Without this, departments cannot demonstrate that they are achieving value for money from the use of consultants and temporary staff.
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Digital transformation in government
Support exemplars, provide consistent guidance... and do not lose focus As the NAO states: Government faces significant challenges in providing public services. While many government services are now available online, public administration is struggling to manage more complicated programmes and to improve the complex systems and processes that support public services.
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Usability of public digital services directed at businesses
G2B - in search of user friendliness Danish Rigsrevisionen finds that the digital services directed at businesses, examined during this audit, are not sufficiently user-friendly from start to finish, and the authorities need to focus more on ensuring that relevant solutions are interlinked in a userfriendly manner.
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Lessons learned from government ICT-projects
This audit has been performed on request of the Dutch parliament. Some newspapers mentioned government losses of four to five billion euro's on a yearly bases. These news items caused the parliament ... to request this audit. The audit has been performed in only 5 months time and consisted of the re-use of earlier performed audits. We have 'recycled' earlier findings about ICT-projects. ... 'Expensive' does not always mean 'High Quality', so... do not feed the spiral ... Excellent analysis of systemic errors commited when designing Government IT projects. The report aims at the essence of problems which are encountered far from information technologies - in: politics ... , business, psychology... Do not be mislead by date of report, it is evergreen for all who really want to know why IT projects fail.
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Audit of the key ICT project federal GEVER programme Federal Chancellery
During the first stage, two new GEVER (electronic records and process management) products were procured in an open WTO tender within the framework of the two-product strategy (federal GEVER WTO ... procurement project). CHF 1.6 million was spent on these. The departments and Federal Chancellery (departments/FCh) had to choose one of the two products within three months of the contract being awarded. ... ... Advanced process management system's cost-effectiveness and deadlines at risk ... Ever since 1990, sequential controls and file management have been part of the Federal Administration's IT landscape (GEVER business administration). Significant obstacles have to be overcome ... in order to ensure the successful creation and introduction of GEVER. Previous efforts did not have any widespread success and led to a diverse GEVER landscape. The federal GEVER project has now laid ... the foundations for simplification and centralisation.
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