Federal government are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars using 200 different software systems to perform similar functions.
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An outsourcing seminar in Canberra was told on Tuesday that more than $460 million could be saved in the coming years by the public service consolidating its enterprise resource planning systems.
But the tribal nature of the Australian Public Service might prove a stumbling block to progress, the audience of bureaucrats was told, with agreement on a common system unlikely among government agencies and departments.
Enterprise resource planning software is business management systems, usually several integrated applications, that organisations use to collect, store, manage and share data.
Supplying ERP to the federal government is a well-established cash cow for the IT industry with private players pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars each year for software, service agreements, contracts, patches, upgrades and other services.
The duplication of ERP in the public service has emerged as a key target of the Abbott government's "contestability" agenda with the Finance Department ordered to report on the whole-of-government ERP situation.
Finance says the report will not be delivered until mid-2015 but the chief executive of the Employment Department's Shared Services Centre, Delaine Wilson, told Tuesday's seminar that more than 200 systems had been identified across government with many agencies running multiple ERP products.
"There's a lot of commercial rationale around why would take a consolidate, integrated approach to technology," Ms Wilson told the gathering.
"Significant work has already been done on this to reduce the more than 200 Enterprise Resource Planning systems across the public sector to drive adoption of standard better practice process in a more cost effective and sustainable way.
"Based on indicative groupings, it's been identified that the efficiencies saved could be between $233 to $465 million over seven years."
Ms Wilson told the gathering, hosted by the Institute of Public Administration, that her position was backed up by the experiences of the New Zealand and UK governments, with the British finding they could save 40 per cent of its ERP spending through consolidation.
"The stats are certainly impressive and [there is] a strong commonsense rationale involved in that consolidation of technology," she said.
"But I think anybody in the room will know getting agreement to migrate to a common platform, let alone the migration up the system, won't be an easy task."
