The federal government has finally revealed the private contractors working on the redevelopment of the myGov platform, with a panel of providers dominated by multinational technology firms building the new version of the government services portal.
Services Australia established the Systems Integrator Panel late last year for technical support on the myGov rebuild, but has continually refused to reveal which companies are members of it.
Big four consultancy Deloitte was the only company known to be a member of the panel, with the firm having worked on the myGov rebuild since the beginning in early 2020.
In response to questions from InnovationAus, Services Australia has now revealed that the other members of the myGov panel are Irish-based consultancy Accenture, American tech giant IBM and Australian company ARQ Group, along with the UK-based Deloitte.
It comes after the department recently publicly posted a contract with Accenture worth $3.3 million over five months. This was listed only as for “information technology services”, but a Services Australia spokesperson confirmed that this relates to work on myGov, and was awarded through the panel.
“The contract is for professional services to support design and delivery of technology components that will be used in the enhanced myGov platform,” the spokesperson told InnovationAus.
Deloitte was also awarded a contract through the panel earlier this year, worth $4.5 million.
The panel was established following an approach to the market on the Digital Marketplace.
Deloitte has worked on the myGov project since early 2020, when it was awarded a near-$1 million contract to develop a prototype of a new platform. It has since been paid nearly $35 million to continue working on this project.
Accenture is a prolific government contractor and is also working closely on the federal government’s digital identity scheme, while IBM also regularly lands contracts with Home Affairs and the Department of Defence.
ARQ Group, previously known as Melbourne IT, is the only Australian company on the panel, and was recently awarded a $5.3 million contract with the federal Office of Parliamentary Counsel for “federal register of legislation cloud hosting and related services”, along with a number of labour hire contracts with Services Australia.
ARQ Group is also an AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud partner.
The Systems Integrator Panel was established late last year to provide technical resources for the sustaining of the current myGov platform and the development of the enhanced version.
Services Australia took control of the project from the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) earlier this year, and is now handling the contracting and development.
It has since ditched the “horizons” terminology for the project previously used by the DTA, but has said it is still sticking to the planned timeline, with work currently on the second stage of the new myGov, involving a better user experience.
The DTA kicked off the project in early 2020, awarding Deloitte the contract to build a prototype of a new myGov platform. It then handed Deloitte a $9.5 million contract to turn this into a working beta, but this eventually blew out to $28.1 million across 2020.
Services Australia awarded Deloitte a further $1.2 million to continue this work late last year before it won a $4.5 million deal this year.
Accenture’s contract marks the first confirmation of another service provider working on the new myGov platform. It’s unclear whether the other two companies have been awarded any contracts through the myGov panel.
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If working from home can be the new norm then working overseas is not a problem. When you export billions of dollars worth if goods and services you don’t have a problem, you are competing with other international players. Please find out how many IT professional emigrate to Australia every year, from Overseas!
Because it’s too expensive almost double to do this onshore and government cannot waste people’s money like that.
The question is why this work needs to be done of shore? Is there not enough talent in Australia to perform the up grades? Are the people awarding the contracts competent enough to know what is required?