QLD Government Dept. of Agriculture & Fisheries Delivers Clarity to Partner Agencies

The Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF) is responsible for the growth, sustainable development and protection of the Queensland State’s agriculture, fisheries and forestry industries. The core business areas of DAF are Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, Biosecurity Queensland and Corporate Services.

Lacking a single view of IT costs across 6 government agencies made decision-making difficult.

Operating within the department, Information Technology Partners (ITP) is a charge-back ICT provider servicing multiple state government agencies outside of the department. ITP’s services are delivered across more than 9,000 users and 300 sites throughout Queensland. DAF were an advanced user of service costing and billing practices, with 6 separate government agencies as clients of their IT Services.

Complex spreadsheets supported that need, but key person dependency concerns, lack of analytics and poor auditability were considered significant risks. This, combined with the need to explain to their partner agencies what they were getting for their chargeback, required a purpose built ITFM solution. DAF surveyed the market for suitable software systems to replace the spreadsheets and settled on ClearCost to conduct a Proof of Concept (POC).

To provide ITP with a robust ITFM solution to enable transparency to their partner agencies on service costs.

Only one company provided a single source of truth, exactly as desired.

DAF surveyed the market for suitable software systems to replace the spreadsheets and settled on ClearCost. After a successful Proof of Concept, the solution was implemented across all of ITP and has led to year on year improvements for the
department.

ClearCost software and professional services have led to:

•   Transparency across all IT spend, showing what services and business outcomes were driving their spend

•   Transparent and defensible Bill of IT for DAF’s partner agencies

•   An analytics platform to enable cost optimisation and investment to meet the departments business objectives

•   A flexible data model that facilitated government contestability and statewide benchmarking initiatives for better analytics

•   Robust EOM business processes, ensuring cost of service and its drivers were defensible and current

•   Capability for scenario modelling allowing management to understand the impact of budgetary & organisation structure changes on their service offerings

•   Team skilled up to further their ICT service costing capabilities and supporting their business cases for new service capabilities

•   Provided a financial management framework for each cost centre manager to manage their resources and provide sustainable forecasting and budgeting capabilities.

Gained a robust IT Financial Management solution to enable transparency to their partner agencies on service costs.

Because of ClearCost, ITP now have one source of truth in a single pane of glass. All six partner agencies see the same numbers and can be on the same page. ITP can now make better-informed decisions by seeing all their IT spend, including any unexpected or unauthorised costs.

ITP used ClearCost’s solution to optimise costs across all six partner agencies, enabling a single source of truth. They now always have an accurate, and reliable understanding of their financial forecast and how their individual services are performing.