The Queensland Health pay bungle is an important lesson for IT governance in shared services arrangements, according to an IT industry analyst firm
Research company Ovum warns government departments to apply appropriate measures to contemporary IT issues in order to prevent another governance disaster reminiscent of Queensland Health's payroll disaster.
Kevin Noonan from Ovum said the pay mishap provides an example of just how complex IT governance can be.
“Queensland Health is a diverse and complex government agency. It provides both metropolitan and remote health services to Australian citizens, across a land mass three quarters of the size of Western Europe.”
“It has thirteen different industrial awards and multiple industrial agreements, providing over 200 different allowances to its employees. It is the combined effect of this that really creates the problems. The current award structure leads to more than 24,000 different pay combinations to be calculated,” Noonan said.
A statement from Ovum said issues like scope creep can be dangerous for project management and “this was certainly the case for Queensland Health’s payroll system”.
The news comes as employees of Queensland Health were last month told they would need to “crunch the numbers themselves” in order to see if their annual group certificates are accurate.
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