Page 905 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 29 March 2011
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Moving along, at the bottom of page 6 the report says that approximately 10 per cent of the ACT government’s 55,000 active ICT devices are replaced annually. First, I would like to compliment the ACT government that only 10 per cent of active devices are replaced annually, because there are certainly organisations where the figure would be a lot higher. But I would like to ask some questions: why are we replacing all the things we are replacing? As someone who works in the Legislative Assembly, my computer screen and keyboard have just been replaced. All the previous ones were working quite adequately. There may well have been some good reason for replacing the disk and CPU unit, because this has enabled InTACT to move to Windows 2007, which has some advantages, so that was possibly a reasonable move. However, it is beyond me why we replaced perfectly good screens and perfectly good keyboards.
In fact, I and everyone else used to have US keyboards. They have been replaced by European keyboards, which are not a lot different, but they are different. I would like to know how much productivity has been lost by the Legislative Assembly and other government agencies by replacing US keyboards, the standard in Australia for keyboards, with European keyboards, which are common in Europe but not in Australia. I asked for and was able to get an old keyboard back, which is the same as my keyboard at home. I reflect on my previous life as an IT manager—I would have had a lot of flak had I unilaterally decided to give people keyboards different from those they had before.
I cannot understand why IT did this from a user point of view, and I cannot understand why IT replaced the keyboards or the screens from a green, clean point of view. There seems no justification for this, and I would like InTACT to seriously look at why they are replacing things. Have they worn out? Do they need replacing? I would also like them to look at whether the things that are replaced are reused. When they are disposed of, do they seek tenders from people who can best dispose of them? I note that I have a series of questions on notice on these issues, because I have had serious concerns raised with me that our ICT disposal policy is not meeting all the standards it could meet, financially or environmentally.
The next thing the report mentions is that a 10-year data management strategy has been developed. I call on the government to publicly release this. Mr Stanhope kindly said that they would release the sustainability strategy, but the data management is also very important. Please, could you release this.
The report mentions that we will measure the ICT carbon footprint. When will this happen? I am disappointed that information about how it is going to happen will not be released until the end of 2011. Surely it could be a bit quicker than this. As I mentioned earlier, this report has dealt only partly with publishing documentation, because it does not talk about appropriate formats or retaining data while useful to the community.
I thank the government for this response. I look forward very much to seeing the ICT sustainability plan later this year. On the basis of this report, which is largely fluff, I note that the government has quite a distance to go.
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