Development and deployment of a Government Shared Network
The development and deployment of a Government Shared Network (GSN) was approved by Cabinet in mid-2005.
This bold initiative was conceived to realise the opportunity to enable joined-up government services for the benefit of New Zealanders, the owners and users of the public service. It would reduce significant duplication of infrastructure and services across public sector agencies by adopting a shared approach to network capability.
Voco was engaged to help the State Services Commission (SSC) make the concept a reality and over a period of more than 4 years, provided a range of expertise in roles including Programme Manager, Chief Architect and project leaders for the Service Management, Product Management, Deployment, Governance and PMO workstreams.
Initiated in the pre-regulation telecommunications market characterised by a duopoly of two major carriers, the project was undertaken in a hostile environment with many competing interests seeking to maintain the status quo of silo-based arrangements between pubic sector agencies and existing suppliers of telecommunications services. There were many challenges along the way, some forecast and others unexpected. SSC was able to rely on the Voco team to stay the course.
“the team, management, and leadership of the project have been universally praised by all stakeholders in delivering aspects of this difficult project .”
(John Russell-Hodge, Starfish Consulting, GSN Post Implementation Review, March 2008)
Notwithstanding many challenges and hurdles, the core capabilities of the network were delivered and more than a dozen public sector agencies, including the significant Ministry of Education and Department of Labour networks, adopted the GSN services.
“The GSN project has achieved qualified success through the delivery of tangible outcomes into an extremely complex and potentially hostile environment where total failure was more likely than success .”
(John Russell-Hodge, Starfish Consulting, GSN Post Implementation Review, March 2008)
Despite this, the network ultimately failed to attract sufficient uptake to support its cost structure and the government decided to discontinue GSN as a government operated service in favour of sourcing similar arrangements for agencies under a syndicated approach on the open market.
Voco is proud of its involvement in what is arguably the most complex multi-sourcing ICT project yet undertaken in New Zealand.
“I am told that the Commission’s management team rated Voco’s performance highly ”
(Neil Walter, Independent Inquirer’s report to the State Services Commissioner in relation to the Inquiry into procurement and contracting arrangements between the State Services Commission and Voco Limited, March 2009)
The New Zealand public management system has at its core the principles of individual agency decision-making. As such it does not encourage the level of pan-Government thinking that would enable the realisation of benefits from the sensible sharing of services and assets. This is, we believe, a major and on-going challenge for government.
