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Centrelink crisis 'cataclysmic' says PM's former head of digital transformation

• jazoom 10y ago
  >The man handpicked by Malcolm Turnbull to head the government’s digital transformation has said the error rate in Centrelink’s data-matching process is so unfathomably high that it would send a commercial enterprise out of business. I could say this about most government organisations.
• shakna 10y ago
  > ...would include ensuring only technically proficient executives were placed in senior IT leadership roles If only. Instead we have an in-house piece of software pattern matching between SAP (Centrelink), across a shaky VPN built by Telstra in the 90s with only spartan updates since, to a poorly configured REST service(MyGov), and from there to the ATO running some IBM software. It wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't had an 80% staff turnover every year since beginning the mygov project. Instead of unifying departments, so that the data matching project had a chance at working, or being improved, a new layer of fragmentation was added. And everyone but the non-IT IT manager gets fired. > “The way they did it, obviously it’s dangerous, because their algorithms are flawed in the first place,” Shetler said. > “Secondly, you have to be careful with data. Much of the data that’s in the federal government, how good is it really? There is this sort of a blind faith in data.”