Gympie council IT woes continue despite $19m spend

Frustrated Gympie councillors are banking on their latest attempt to fix their internal IT systems after being told a multi-million-dollar investment over the past five years had failed to save staff and the public from having to deal with a “rubbish” system.

“Frustrated” Gympie councillors are taking another crack at fixing its ongoing IT problems which remain an issue despite moe than $19 million invested in the past five years.

“Frustrated” Gympie councillors are banking on their latest attempt to fix their internal IT systems after being told a multi-million-dollar investment in the past five years had still left staff and the public dealing with a “rubbish” system.

Councillors voted unanimously to ask for proposals to upgrade its electronic records and management software after an independent report by consultants McGrath Nicol found a slew of problems with the existing ones.

One such problem was that inconsistencies continued to pop up in financial reporting.

This had forced staff to intervene weekly for corrections as the ledgers continued to go out of balance.

Another problem was timesheets and staff management were still being done manually (leaving the door open to under payment), while the servers hosting the system rapidly approach the end of their lives and will need a costly upgrade.

An independent review of the council’s systems identified a number of significant problems, including ongoing problems with financial accuracy.

The existing system was also throwing up roadblocks to the public when trying to deal with the council.

The need for this upgrade was flagged two months ago at the February meeting where a number of re-elected councillors expressed frustration the issue had made its way back to the table seemingly unchanged.

“I’m pretty sure at May 2016, at our first standard meeting we heard our ICT system was rubbish,” councillor Dan Stewart said at that meeting.

“Here we are almost five years later and things have been promised over time … I’m wondering what’s going to be different?”

The report says the council’s troubled item systems is creating roadblocks for its ability to engage with the public it serves.

How much has been spent in that time was itself an issue flagged by Mcgrath Nicol’s report; it found costings and budgets for the existing systems “are not well known and just contained within the overall IT budget”.

And that budget has been big.

Figures from Gympie Regional Council reveal since 2016, more $19 million was spend upgrading information and technology systems, including new software licensing, hardware purchases like laptops and tablets, and back-up solutions, including firewalls and networks.

CEO Shane Gray said in February the council has about 160 different software program, and almost two-thirds of them do not talk to each other.

These include investments of $4.5 million in 2018-19 and $4.34 million in 2019-20.

Mayor Glen Hartwig was on the same page as Mr Stewart.

“As a council we adopted motions to spend millions to upgrade our ICT, supposedly into the 2020s”, he said in February.

“To find after an independent audit that we probably need to spend more money feeding pigeons with our current system, because that’s how outdated it is, is rather frustrating and we need to ascertain where that money has gone.”

CEO Shane Grey said in February the problems appeared on the radar early, especially in regards to cyber security risks.

McGrath Nicol “flagged very quickly … the risk is high”,” he said.

“We currently have about 160-odd pieces of software, of which 60 talk to each other.

“We’ve got a lot of gaps, we’ve got a lot of obsolescence.”

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