The NSW Department of Commerce's Government Chief Information Office (GCIO) has embarked on a review of the Government Selected Application Systems (GSAS) program.

GSAS is a series of panel contracts for the provision of enterprise software systems to NSW government departments across finance, HR and payroll, records and information management, and "integrated management solutions".

According to a Department of Commerce document, the review aligns with the back office consolidation (BOAC) program which involves the development of a new operating framework to ensure the NSW government achieves "an acceptable return on investment" for corporate applications.

The review also follows the sudden resignation of CIO Paul Edgecumbe in May and a scathing audit report on the progress of Commerce's own internal SAP implementation.

The joint BOAC and GSAS review will strive to develop a framework for better management of corporate applications, to add value to each stage of the application management lifecycle (ALM), and to better utilize the state's purchasing power.

It is anticipated "substantial savings" will be generated for agencies and the state government as a whole through "a combination of direct, indirect, process and offset savings".

This type of sourcing strategy is in line with the government's Premier's State Plan, Treasury's e-recruitment, and the more recent PeopleFirst directive.

The "guiding principles" of the projects include the state government, or "Crown", as the central custodian of software licences, a central program office to coordinate activities around enterprise applications, and a standard NSW government configuration for "core functionality" to reduce implementation, upgrade, and support costs.

Also in the pipeline is the formation of a shared services program, including a reduction in the number of processing centres and the formation of "clusters" for government agencies, consolidation of software applications, the potential to "on board" a number of agencies onto "the successful vendor's" applications, the establishment of a new panel contract for service providers, and building "long-term partnerships" with successful vendors.

The Department of Commerce has released an expression of interest as the first step in establishing a separate panel contract for service providers to support approved GSAS corporate applications. The panel contract will be a five-year term.

The contract will have three categories - functional specialists for finance, HR and supply chain; technical specialists for NetWeaver, JDeveloper and Java; and managed service providers.

The department anticipates the work will be split into components of an ALM process and once a work requirement is identified a request for quotation will be sent to the vendors in the panel.