SSC: official moves

Couple of public things at work (State Services Commission or SSC, specifically the Information and Communication Technologies Branch) that may be of interest to a wider audience:

- First, the announcement today of a split in the Branch with the operations of all-of-government services moving over time to the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA). Significantly, this means that the responsibility for operating igovt services like the Government Logon Service will shift to DIA from SSC. Also significant is the creation of a NZ Government CIO post which has been widely welcomed.

- Second, SSC has launched an official blog for a trial period of six months. Outside the US, there aren’t too many government agencies that have official blogs so no doubt it will be watched with great interest. While I haven’t posted anything there yet, I intend to use it for official posts related to the Authentication Programme (subject to the outcome of the structural changes as above) while this blog will continue to reflect my personal views about wider identity and privacy topics.

- Finally, the government portal has been re-launched. Lots of improvements but a major focus is on better search with results from all government and government funded websites, the Public Sector Directory, and MSN live search. People using the new search functionality have been pretty positive about its usefulness.