Canberra’s $15 billion tech panel is being routinely exploited by officials, who use it as a veneer of competition when handing hundreds of millions of dollars to their preferred suppliers, a horror audit shows. Exploits of the Digital Marketplace Panel are littered throughout the auditor general’s latest report, which exposes years of broken procurement rules…
An overhaul of the federal government’s Digital Marketplace has been pushed back to 2025 to evaluate a flood of new applicants and allow agencies to update their procurement processes, frustrating budding new suppliers. The latest delay to Digital Marketplace 2.0 puts it a year behind schedule and continues the freeze on adding new suppliers to…
Consulting giant EY will be paid almost $1 million a month to build the regulatory technology underpinning Australia’s expanding digital identity system, after the big four landed its biggest federal contract in years. Only select suppliers were invited to bid for the work for the ID scheme’s regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC),…
A new cohort of tech firms are being called up to join the federal government’s new and improved Digital Marketplace, which is poised to open in the second half of the year after a lengthy overhaul. Applications for the Digital Marketplace Panel 2 arrangement opened on Friday afternoon, ending a redesign process that locked new…
Startups and SMEs will soon be able to negotiate with federal government agencies on who owns the intellectual property developed under contracts won through the Digital Marketplace. The change, to be inserted within the next iteration of the Digital Marketplace later this year, introduces greater flexibility around IP ownership into the arrangement to address the…
Startups and smaller tech firms wanting to break into the federal government market will have to wait another six months to do so after the Digital Transformation Agency pushed back plans for its replacement Digital Marketplace. The marketplace, which was established break down barriers to entry for small and medium-sized enterprises, is currently undergoing the…
A relatively small group of suppliers have dominated the Digital Marketplace set up by the federal government to encourage competition, new data shows. Just 12 per cent of its listed suppliers have won 80 per cent of the $8.6 billion in Digital Marketplace contracts over the past seven years, according to the national auditor’s latest…
The Victorian government has resurrected plans to create a digital marketplace, promising it will give small to medium-sized entities greater visibility when selling tech to the public sector. Government services minister Danny Pearson on Tuesday announced the government had begun looking for a vendor to assume responsibility for the Digital Victoria marketplace from later this…
In relation to purchases of information technology, the federal government is currently not able to properly understand with any real clarity what it is buying, from whom it is buying, and what price it is paying. And the first step in improving its procurement woes is all about data, according to former Digital Marketplace lead…
The federal government’s Digital Marketplace will be rolled into the BuyICT website in May, marking the end of the standalone procurement platform for digital SMEs and startups after six years and more than $7 billion of contracts facilitated. Established in 2016, the Digital Marketplace was designed to better connect smaller suppliers with government buyers and…
Plans for a Digital Victoria marketplace have been placed indefinitely on hold by the state government due to “unforeseen circumstances”. Earlier this year the Victorian Department of Premier & Cabinet issued an advance tender notice for the establishment of a Digital Victoria marketplace. Digital Victoria is a new state agency established in 2020 to drive…
The government has declined to name the companies that were selected for a panel last year to work on the myGov redevelopment project, while responsibility for contracting for the project has shifted between agencies.
The government is working on developing a new version of myGov to initially run alongside the existing platform, before eventually replacing it. The new platform aims to replace the user experience of private sector offerings, with the bulk of the work so far contracted out to consulting giant Deloitte.
While the initial work and contracts was handled by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), its parent department Services Australia is now issuing the contracts for work, and handling requests about its progression.
Clear as mud: Transparency issues cloud the already opaque MyGov redevelopment
These contracts are now being posted publicly under broad and general titles after previously being labelled with GovDXP, making them more difficult to identity.
The government has also ditched the use of ‘horizons’ to designate the different phases of work on the revamped myGov, but a department spokesperson said the previous timeline is still in use.
Late last year Services Australia established a Systems Integrator Panel, filled by a number of companies that will be offered work on the myGov project. Deloitte was awarded a $4.5 million contract through this panel in last month.
But the government has continually refused to reveal which other companies are members of this panel and would be working on the project, even to other companies looking to tender for work on it.
“The Systems Integrator Panel was established through open request for tender via the Digital Marketplace panel. Information about companies selected to join the Systems Integrator Panel will be published once all aspects of the procurement process are completed,” a Services Australia spokesperson told InnovationAus.
In February, Services Australia went to the market for contractors to “provide suitable software capabilities to enable any of the prescribed bundles of the core customer experience capabilities”, related to the myGov project.
These capabilities include content management, experience delivery and experience analytics.
A number of applicants for this tender requested to know the other members of the Systems Integrator Panel, the companies they would be working with on the project, but the department opted to keep them secret.
It is important to mark milestones and to celebrate successes. This is how most of us maintain forward momentum in important work. But when the ‘success’ is so lame and the supporting evidence so disingenuous, the milestone itself becomes pointless. It is completely without meaning.
It is in this spirit that I ask Australia to please stand and join me in a slow hand clap for the federal government’s Digital Marketplace. Well done, and ho hum.
Government Services Minister Stuart Robert and newly appointed Digital Economy Minister Jane Hume issued a media release on Friday to mark the $3 billion milestone. That is, the marketplace has delivered $3 billion worth of contracts since it was established five years ago.
Stuart Robert: The Minister for Government Services is celebrating the wrong milestones
It’s a double milestone, the minister’s say, because more than $2 billion of those contracts were awarded to small and medium-sized businesses.
These are shallow claims and certainly no cause for celebration. An inch-deep dive into the tech procurement numbers quickly reveals the depth of the misinformation that underscores the Digital Marketplace milestones.
Over the six years it has taken the Digital Marketplace to reach its $3 billion milestone, the federal government has spent a total of between $48 billion and $56 billion on ICT products and services. That’s six years of $8 billion to $9 billion spent on federal ICT. So, there’s some perspective.
I raise these numbers merely to state the obvious: The main game in terms of tech procurement – including for digital consulting and delivery services – happens outside of the Digital Marketplace. The hundreds of millions of dollars the Commonwealth spends with the Big Four management consultants (and others) is a digital-focused testament to that.
The Digital Marketplace does not operate as a online marketplace. It is rather simply a panel contract that is used primarily by recruitment companies, by tech industry body shops.
According to the Digital Transformation Agency’s numbers, ten out of the top ten sellers on the Digital Marketplace in the past financial year were recruitment companies. That’s ten out of ten.
Six of those body shops in the top ten sellers were SMEs. It is laughable that recruiters supplying individuals into the bureaucracy is being chalked up by this government as a win for local digital SMEs. What a jolly jape.
If the aim of the Digital Marketplace was to make it easier for digital SMEs to get access to government work and to build digital capability and capacity for the nation, then it’s not working. It’s a farce.
When ten out of ten of the top sellers are providing nothing more than warm bodies into the bureaucracy – albeit warm bodies with specialist skills – what chance is there that these small players can develop IP, build growing and commercially successful businesses?
Just 28 per cent of the opportunities listed on the Digital Marketplace since 2016 have been open to all sellers. The proportion of these open opportunities on the Digital Marketplace has been trending down.
The fashion these days, it seems, is for government buyers to restrict opportunities to invited sellers only. Sometimes this involves an invitation to a single supplier, which does make you wonder why it’s called a marketplace.
This practice makes the procurement process more opaque, not less. And these single supplier arrangements involve huge amounts of money.
All of this reminds me of the InnovationAus Selling to Government survey, published just four months ago (even if it feels like forever ago)
Nearly three-quarters of the individuals participating in that survey reported that the process for selling into the federal government was neither simple, nor transparent.
And 90 per cent of the respondents believe that the federal government favours larger multinational providers over Australian providers of technology.
The results of the InnovationAus survey do not easily square with Digital Marketplace milestone celebrations of Stuart Robert and Jane Hume. It’s like we are accessing the experiences of completely different sets of suppliers.
Because the damning assessment of the SME technology providers who responded to the InnovationAus survey simply don’t believe that the government process for buying tech is either fair or transparent.
