Grahame Coles makes start on Vic whole-of-government role

Grahame Coles, formerly CIO at Victoria’s Department of Human Services for almost five years, has begun his new executive director role for digital government at the Department of State Development and Business Innovation.

Coles began the new role on 11 March after leaving the Department of Human Services in February.

Speaking to CIO Australia, Coles said he is now responsible for working on whole of government ICT strategy and running projects across Victorian government departments.

He said he is currently working on an update of the Victorian government’s ICT strategy which will be released in April. It will be an update of the strategy released in February 2013.

Coles said “he is still pulling the projects together” that are part of the state government strategy.

In January, the Victorian government released a draft of the updated strategy for public consultation.

The stated priorities of the updated ICT strategy are:

The Victorian government said cloud services could offer “opportunities to re-use and share services and strengthen capabilities”.

CIO of Victorian Department of Business and Innovation, Chris Gilmore, previously told lt;igt;CIO Australialt;/igt; that there are challenges when sharing cloud services across government agencies such as interoperability, data sharing and security, and the level of complexity in different cloud offerings.

The updated Victorian ICT strategy will look at developing a whole-of-government approach to standards, principles, policies and transition planning when provisioning cloud services in future.

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