So The Gateway To The PCEHR Needs Some Serious Work. What A Surprise!

This turned up last week:

Troubled myGov website to be taken from Human Services and given to Digital Transformation Office for streamlining

Date January 28, 2016 - 10:30PM

Noel Towell

Reporter for The Canberra Times

The federal government's troubled myGov website is set to be taken over by the Prime Minister's pet public service project the Digital Transformation Office.

Fairfax understands that moves are already under way for the DTO to take over the management of the web portal from Commonwealth service delivery workhorse the giant Department of Human Services.

Neither agency would confirm that a takeover was under way but one government IT expert said the move would be a chance to make a real difference for the digital change project which has so far produced little more than "wishy-washy" statements.

The myGov site was launched in 2013 and is used by several million Australians as a portal to access their Centrelink, Medicare, Child Support, Department of Veteran Affairs, e-health, and DisabilityCare accounts.

But serious problems have emerged with the security and operability of the site, with users complaining of being locked out of their accounts, outages and other glitches.

A storm of criticism was aimed in mid-2015 at the myTax portal, linked to the myGov system, for its performance at the end of the 2014-2015 financial year as millions of taxpayers tried to finish their tax returns.

In July, the DTO's high-profile boss Paul Shetler warned the Australian government was failing in its online service delivery effort and that it was "not good enough in the age of Uber and Airbnb".

Now Mr Shetler, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, looks set to get the chance to see if his agency can better do better than the much maligned DHS.

A DTO spokeswoman would not answer questions about the looming takeover but replied with a statement.

"The Digital Transformation Office is responsible for digital service delivery across government," she said.

But government IT expert Matthew Sorell of the University of Adelaide who believes myGov is "not appalling", says that running myGov would be a chance for the DTO to prove itself.

More here:

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/it-pro/government-it/troubled-mygov-website-to-be-taken-from-human-services-and-given-to-digital-transformation-office-for-streamlining-20160127-gmfoe3.html

Other links that are on the same topic:

• My myGov nightmare
• They're in denial: myGov users vent fury
• He beat Centrelink's system and says you can too.

All we can think is that it is a good idea for some experts to see if they can fix things up a bit. Right now the whole thing is pretty clunky. Of course they could save themselves a whole lot of pain by just giving up on the PCEHR etc.

David.