Why has the NSW GCIO not been ‘MOGed’?

The Machinery of Government (MoG) changes that created NSW’s 13 Super Departments provided a golden opportunity for the NSW Government Chief Information Office to move to the central agency that is responsible for not only controlling the NSW budget but is taking the magnifying lens to ICT expenditure across NSW government.

But to the puzzlement of many, it didn’t happen.

In Canberra, the equivalent office, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) sits in the key policy agency of Finance and Deregulation and was moved there after its predecessor (NOIE) spent some years in the wilderness as part of a less influential Department.  As a result of that move, and a Minister, (Lindsay Tanner) who really ‘gets ICT’, it now has real clout.

The failure to be ‘MOGed’ into Treasury is even more curious in the light of rumours suggesting that the Budget-announced NSW Government ICT Review will be run from Treasury.  Speculation is that this review will have similar objectives to the review conducted by Sir Peter Gershon for the Australian Government (coordinated by AGIMO).

Seems that GCIO has been mugged, not ‘MOG’ed in this instance!  Was the new Department in which the GCIO sits given the name of Services, Technology and Administration as a salve for the GCIO staying on the periphery, rather than in the centre?

And what does it mean, to have ‘Technology’ in the title, anyway?