Friday the 13th of June was indeed something of a black Friday for The State Services Commission's E-government Unit, with the announcement that the GoProcure offering would be cut back to focus on a "core transaction hub".

Only two agencies (New Zealand Police and University of Auckland) were fully involved in the GoProcure initiative at that stage, and E-Government Unit director Brendan Boyle says that's the way things will stay. "As this first phase of GoProcure is now concentrating solely on the transaction hub," he says, "the two agencies and their suppliers involved in the evaluation have already been engaged. The transaction hub concept will be evaluated in the remainder of this phase (between now and the end of November), before a decision is made to extend this to other government agencies."

Boyle says suppliers other than those already contacted by either the Police or University of Auckland should therefore wait for this evaluation process to finish, and for further contact from either the E-Government Unit  or other agencies before they prepare their  catalogues for hub connection.

GoProcure phase one commenced in December 2002 and is scheduled to run until November 2003. The first phase involved two options (both of which incorporated the transaction hub) for agencies that had not yet implemented internal requisitioning systems. These were;

Evaluation of the first phase quickly revealed that the Full Suite option was more difficult to implement and operate than initially scoped. Systems testing revealed that the degree to which agencies could customise their requisitioning to meet their needs was limited,  hence, says Boyle, the decision to focus instead on establishing the core transaction hub.

June 2003

Brendan Boyle