Department at war with IBM. The Department of Health and Ageing has had a few IT issues of late. “Catastrophic”, in fact. The secretary reassures staff:

Colleagues,

As you are no doubt painfully aware, changes made by IBM to the department’s IT storage environment over the weekend has resulted in a catastrophic failure in our IT systems that has significantly affected everyone.

I acknowledge our communication to staff yesterday on this issue was inadequate and have asked that our communication processes are reviewed to ensure staff are more appropriately advised of any future IT problems and attempts to fix them in future (hoping and planning of course that we do not have another issue like this again).

Our own departmental IT staff worked very hard with IBM on resolving the issue yesterday, overnight and continue today to attempt to fix the problem and restore the system as soon as possible.

I spoke to the Managing Director of IBM yesterday and this morning and am writing to him today to express my extreme dissatisfaction with this completely unacceptable event on top of the delay to the implementation of our new desktop hard and software systems. This letter follows recent meetings that I, Paul Madden the Chief Information and Knowledge Officer and Deputy Secretary Andrew Stuart have had with senior IBM executives on the desktop delay.

Once the system is restored a joint review will be undertaken to ensure a similar failure does not recur for staff and any potential financial penalties are applied.

I want to thank our IT people for their efforts and energy, and acknowledge the unfortunate disruption to all staff which we are working as hard as possible to resolve.

Jane Halton
Secretary

Vic government tunnels under greenies. A Victorian political spy reckons the Baillieu government is about to resurrect the East-West road tunnel underneath Royal Park at the expense of the Labor government’s planned Melbourne Metro scheme. It’s “a big up-yours to all the inner-city greenies that gave the old government such a run-around,” they say.

Pre-press operators shifted from Geelong. News Limited’s quiet redundancy drive has apparently come to The Geelong Advertiser, with pre-press operators transferred to the offices of News’ community papers in Melbourne. Our spy reports: “The general manager says there will be some positions available at Blackburn and it’s all very necessary because of ‘News Limited’s move to a shared services model’. Wouldn’t be so bad if the drive along the Geelong-Melbourne road wasn’t so excruciatingly boring.” We’ll ask for more information …

Your Maj, please sack the government. They welcomed the Queen with open arms in Melbourne today, the anti-carbon tax protesters. And politely asked for a small favour …

‘Murdoch’ subscribes to The Oz. You don’t need to use your real name to subscribe to The Australian online, one reader confirmed …

Big investment but still bad coffee. One Melbourne council spent $3000 on a Nespresso coffee machine to fuel its executives and senior councillors, we told you yesterday. They shouldn’t have bothered, says one coffee snob: “As an ex-barista and self-identified coffee snob, I would advise them that whilst George Clooney is very dashing, in no way is Nespresso coffee ever good coffee and they’d be much better served buying an actual espresso machine and some decent beans from one of the many good roasters in Melbourne. Last I checked, you could get a good basic machine for between $100-200.” Noted.