From $5,000 taps to $8,000 baths and $9,000 tiles, bathrooms in The Block get more extravagant every season. Up to 1/3 of the entire reno budget is being spent on this one room alone, in pursuit of the illusive wow factor. But the biggest costs in bathrooms doesn’t come from the solid marble counters and gold fittings, it comes from the much less glamorous plumbing. The real costs of bathrooms only come to light when the concrete is poured and the tiles are laid, only for the foremen to gleefully tell the contestants that their waste pipe is 2cm too close to the wall for code and the whole lot will have to be ripped up. The tears flow freely as tens of thousands of dollars are spent making it right, with nothing to show the judges.
NSW Gov’s new digital strategy is reminiscent of these scenes. For years they have focused on fancy fixtures and fittings (read apps and portals), while labouring away with ‘monolithic, legacy systems’, in the background. Core systems of record like DRIVES, COPS and GLS have underpinned (and constrained) the digital experience for years, but have been too big and difficult for any one project to put right.
This is where it looks like the new $100m ‘digital restart fund’ comes in. Ministers won’t get any shiny new apps to wave around in front of the press, but it will sort out the essential plumbing that underpins our increasingly digital government. This will let us citizens do many more transactions online, eliminate processing times and save money through shared systems. Not flash, but it works…
https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/beyond-digital/ministers-foreword