The Victorian Government is planning a $16 million, five-year project to improve security and data integrity, and rationalise directories across 10 departments.

A request for tender (RFT) has been issued by the Department of Infrastructure's MultiMedia Victoria for the project dubbed "Rosetta", which has already seen "a lot" of interest from vendors.

Director of Rosetta, David Hart, said the project will see the establishment of infrastructure for an integrated and automated directory service to allow "secure provision of accurate information on people, resources, assets and services across the whole of the Victorian Government".

The rollout of stage one is planned for early next year, with implementation across the 10 government departments to take 15 to 18 months, Hart said.

According to the RFT, the 10 Victorian government departments involved in the initial rollout include justice, human services, education and training, innovation, industry and regional development.

Hart said the infrastructure will be available to about 60,000 users after stage one but this will increase to more than 250,000 users within three years.

The mammoth project, which was initiated late last year, has been broken into three streams, Hart said, covering directory infrastructure, identity management frameworks, and extending functionality.

"The project’s goal is to implement Stream 1 - the infrastructure - however, in order to deliver this, the project needs to have an understanding of Streams 2 and 3 to ensure that the infrastructure can support and deliver those activities," Hart said.

He said infrastructure will not be replaced as a result of the project "but rather new infrastructure will be provided that will form a backbone for robust and reliable e-government services".

According to the RFT [part B Overview] a "proliferation in the number and range of connected devices, people and applications" including devices such as PDAs, laptop and desktop PCs, has caused a growth in network use, compromising the security and usability of networks and applications.

While Hart said "this is not a concerning issue in the short to medium term", the RFT went on to say; "security is compromised by the absolute number of permission and access control entries that exist for each person, application and device. The logistics of managing this has become an increasing burden for business managers and IT departments resulting in a growing number of errors and omissions".

It became a burden, he said, because of a lack of systems in place to support unified changes.

Hart confirmed that the Victorian government's newly appointed CIO will have input into project Rosetta.

ICT Minister Marsha Thomson said the project is part of an e-government strategy and key plank of the state's "Connecting Victoria" policy.

The closing date for tenders is October 23, 2003. For more information; www.tenders.vic.gov.au