In his seminal report on the use of ICT in the Australian Government, Sir Peter Gershon considered a range of improvements that could be made to ICT use. Several of these concerned the relationship with small to medium enterprises. In its acceptance of the report and agreement to the recommendations, the Australian Government undertook a major ICT Reform Program. The program included a task to review the alignment of ICT and SME policies. This review confirmed that the policies were aligned.
Recently, the report of the review was requested under FOI. In keeping with the spirit of the Declaration of Open Government, Finance decided, in consultation with the requester, to release the report on this blog. It is attached below in docx and rtf formats.
SME participation in government ICT remains an important part of our work. AusTender statistics show that, in 2011-12, SMEs directly contracted for 39% of the value of Australian Government ICT contracts ($1.7 billion out of $4.4 billion) and 57% of the contracts by number (8368 out of 14718).
This data has is in the public domain and can be retrieved by searching the AusTender database. To make this easier, Finance has published, yesterday, a .csv file of all contracts on the data.gov.au website. We’ll be updating this file regularly so those interested will be able to download, search, and even mash up the data. Please find the link at http://data.gov.au/dataset/austender-contract-notice-export/.
As always, your comments are welcome.
John Sheridan