Section 3: Strategic partnerships
The review recommended expanding the use of SSAs as a contracting framework, with a key focus on fostering strategic partnerships.
In addition to the commercial relationship elements of CCAs (see section 2 of this discussion paper above), assessing a strategic partnership may also need to understand the market’s position in relation to:
- Broader economic benefits (including growing the Australian technology sector)
- Upskilling the workforce
- Innovation.
Broader economic benefits (including growing the Australian technology sector)
The Australian Government’s spend on ICT goods and services is significant. This buying power is an important lever that can help build the sector’s capability and increase growth. Delivering a government contract can be transformative for businesses, giving them the opportunity to innovate, scale up, and demonstrate their capability. This can create significant, and wide-ranging, economic benefits for Australia. Assessment of broader economic benefits of ICT procurement, consistent with the CPRs, supports government aims to make sure that public spending benefits the Australian economy and community.
Upskilling the workforce
The Australian Government — through the Australian Public Service (APS) Professions and/or APS Academy — provides opportunities to upskill the workforce at scale through communities of interest, events, or training platforms. The Australian Government has also released the APS Data, Digital and Cyber Workforce Plan, which included commissioning the Digital Workforce Insights report.
To achieve greater value through contracts and ensure the public sector workforce can be upskilled across an evolving technology ecosystem, CCAs may include requirements for sellers to support training. While necessary for some specific users, the least transferable skills are generally those related to seller-specific products or services. In contrast, training on common technologies or capabilities focuses on broader skills, which are not specific to the seller. Training formats could also vary — from capped to uncapped, from unaccredited to accredited, from micro modules to comprehensive programs, and from free to discounted courses.
The DTA may encourage sellers to be creative in how they could provide an additional value-for-money proposition — such as aggregating buyers to achieve government objectives as active adopters, rather than passive consumers, of digital and ICT. However, the intent would not be for these innovation pitches to detract, replace, or substitute other elements of the suitability assessment framework.
Broader input
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