The Victoria state government in Australia has chosen to stick with the managed IT services they know, with the state"s Department of Premier of Cabinet and the Department of Treasury and Finance awarding a A$12 million (US$9.4 million) infrastructure contract to incumbent vendor Unisys.
To be played out over three years, the deal covers the provision of "deskside" support, IMACs (installs, moves, adds, changes), Lotus Notes administration, network management and server management to 1300 users across five Melbourne CBD locations.
Unisys also claims it has picked up disaster recovery, process improvement and consulting, although the individual worth of these additional services has not been specified.
According Ian Thomas, the shared director of information and technology services of the two departments, the tendering opportunity provided the opportunity to improve the level of service extracted from vendors.
"In line with government procurement policy, we went back to the market for these services and, having assessed our needs, we set the bar much higher," Thomas said.
Thomas added the tender involved significant process change to align current operation within an ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) framework to boost delivery and cut costs.
"ITIL is now the world"s most widely accepted approach to IT service management, providing a cohesive service catalogue and responsibility matrix that reduces expensive contract changes by ensuring both client and supplier approval."
Expensive IT contract changes is a theme painfully familiar to Victorians.
The state played host to a long-running landmark case in 2001 that saw Unisys successfully sued by its then-client the Royal Auto Club of Victoria over an imaging-based document and workflow management system to replace RACV"s paper-based claims system.
The win by the RACV under misleading and deceptive conduct provisions within the Trade Practices Act effectively changed the way IT vendors are able to construct contracts both in the state and throughout Australia.