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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (7 September) . . Page.. 3013 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

business easily with government. We want to harness the opportunities provided by new technology that make it possible to integrate services and change the way customers can access those services.

Customers are already demanding broader access to government services out of core business hours and via the Internet. Canberra Connect will also provide a mechanism to change the way we do business from the paper-based conventions of old to new technology and electronic management.

One of the greatest strengths of this initiative is its capacity to deliver greater coordination of our services to our customers. Improving customer service has been an ongoing focus of this government. Over recent years we have put in place a number of initiatives to improve the way people can access information and do transactions. For example, we have four whole-of-government shopfronts across Canberra that offer a range of information and transaction services.

Our Austouch multimedia kiosks at 18 locations offer a range of government information and transactions both during business hours and after hours. People can also access a wide range of information about government services on the ACT government home page and through specialised web sites such as Business Gateway, and we already offer more than a dozen government transactions over the Internet.

Canberra Connect will build on these initiatives to deliver an integrated system capable of offering much wider services, streamlining processes and providing user-friendly systems. Importantly, Canberra Connect will offer a seamless approach to service delivery. Irrespective of whether customers use a shopfront, phone, kiosk or the Internet, they will experience the same look and feel and only need to contact one point.

This is possible in the ACT for two important reasons. The first is that our community has a high level of IT skills and good access to IT infrastructure which allows the government to deliver services in an IT environment. In 1999, 68 per cent of Canberra households had computer access, which was the highest for any state in Australia. Not only that, Canberra's home Internet access increased from 28 per cent to 35 per cent between 1998 and 1999, which was again the highest among the states and territories. Secondly, the modernisation of the ACT's information technology infrastructure is provided primarily through one platform.

Implementation of Canberra Connect has already begun. The first step towards instituting this change was my announcement on 14 July about establishing Canberra Connect, which will be operational on 1 March 2001. A project team from across ACT government departments has been drawn together to develop and implement Canberra Connect. This team is located within the policy group in my department.

Over the next six months this project team will work with each department to begin auditing and migrating services into Canberra Connect. These services will be integrated into a single service delivery system. Once the services have been audited, a phased approach will be adopted to migrate these services to ensure Canberra Connect begins business in March 2001.

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