Transport considers outsourcing all IT to Revera

The Ministry is also seeking a new electronic document management system

The Ministry of Transport is considering two final steps towards the full outsourcing of all its IT.

In April, the Ministry placed the bulk of its IT processing work with service company Revera, giving it ICT expertise it did not possess internally, as well as disaster back-up, through Revera’s two data-centres.

“This is simply not our area of expertise,” says spokeswoman Claire Johnstone. “We want to use [ICT]. We don’t want to manage it.”

The basic tasks of document generation and desktop maintenance have already been turned over to Revera. But two sets of applications, a Jade suite and I-lign project management, are still being run by their respective vendors. The Ministry is considering transferring these to Revera, too, so it can rationalise by using just the one provider.

At the same time, the Ministry is seeking a new electronic document management system, for physical and electronic documents, to replace the rather basic Lotus Notes system it is presently using.

A new system is likely to be based on Microsoft Exchange, so as to blend smoothly with the Microsoft orientation of most of the Ministry’s applications.

Johnstone says she does not want to be “drawn into a conversation on the drawbacks of Lotus Notes”.

She will say only that its record of upgrades has been rather disappointing over the last few years.

Before this year, the Ministry’s IT work was done with the help of Internal Affairs, but an office move means this is no longer practical, says Johnstone.