Datacom has secured a three-year extension to its IT outsourcing contract with the Department of Health, which will deliver millions of dollars in savings and help accelerate the Department’s digital transformation.
The Department of Health’s contract extension with Datacom will bring the tenure of the partnership to ten years. The agreement continues existing IT infrastructure and support, and adds a number of new capabilities aimed at enhancing services and driving cost savings.
Datacom’s AIOps will use AI-driven insights to enhance the operational delivery of IT services, while up to 80% of the Department’s cloud workloads will be automatically provisioned. A CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) approach will automate aspects of application development and monitoring.
“Datacom has made some significant investments in our own capabilities that allow us to have a profound impact on our clients' service delivery capability and on their bottom line,” says Matthew Gooden, Datacom’s Chief Innovation and Technology Officer.
“Our increasing use of AI and automation will speed up the migration of over 1,000 production workloads to the Public Cloud, streamline the release of new applications and deliver improved functionality for Department employees,” he adds.
Significant cost savings will be delivered through the migration to public cloud, while further efficiencies will be achieved by automating the configuration of workloads on cloud platforms.
Teams consisting of Datacom and Department of Health personnel will employ the Agile methodology and SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) across their operating model and the use of new digital channels to improve the employee experience at the Department of Health will also help save on IT Service Desk costs. Cybersecurity will continue to be a major pillar of Datacom’s work with the Department of Health.
The contract extension caps off an intensive period of work that saw Datacom assist the Department of Health in reconfiguring its IT infrastructure to deal with the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It saw Datacom design and implement a remote working solution for around 7,500 employees, procuring, provisioning and deploying thousands of laptop computers in the process. Busy health workers can now seamlessly move between working environments while having secure access to all the devices and applications they need.
Datacom also worked with other vendors to stand up vaccine management systems, redeployed staff to address the Department’s Covid-related priorities and ramped up its contact centre operations.
Support calls to Datacom’s IT helpdesk are expected to decline as forms and chat tools are increasingly used to lodge faults and other queries.
“We had a lot of dialogue with the Department of Health about how we could drive service improvements while lowering costs over the next contract period,” says Datacom Associate Director - Customer, Nick Brennan.
“Datacom understands agile ways of working and how to build scalable systems that allow the Department of Health to expand its digital services to meet emerging needs, whether it is managing a national vaccine roll out or offering more contact centre support,” says Brennan.
“We are proud of our expertise in delivering health IT infrastructure and services and excited at the prospect of continuing our long-running collaboration with the Department of Health.”