Workforce strategy
The Treasury Workforce Plan 2016-20 sets out our approach to workforce planning across four themes:
- talent sourcing – refresh and renew the workforce for key skills needs, innovation and diversity including greater recruitment from outside the public service;
- development – increase staff capability through career development, talent identification and leadership;
- mobility – promote opportunities for internal and external staff movement to ensure an adaptive, responsive and flexible workforce; and
- inclusivity – build a more inclusive workplace and leadership behaviours consistent with the Integrated Leadership System.
Information and communications technology capability
The efficient acquisition, processing, analysis and publication of information is essential to allow the Treasury to provide sound and timely analysis and advice and to fulfil its statutory responsibilities in relation to program administration. Achieving the desired level of performance and responsiveness would not be possible without reliable access to advanced capabilities in information and communications technology.
A key task for ICT within the Treasury is to identify and evaluate new technologies in order to improve Treasury's business capabilities and responsiveness as well as to reduce operational cost and risk.
The Treasury seeks to ensure that it meets its performance and accountability obligations in relation to ICT by maintaining effective controls over the management of ICT strategy, planning, project delivery, operations and ongoing ICT performance and risk management.
Engagement
The Treasury has a responsibility to engage with the community about its work as the leading economic advisor to the Government. While the role of the Treasury is understood by those who have direct contact with the department, an opportunity exists to build the agency's reputation more broadly both in Australia and internationally.
The Treasury has established in-house communication capability to support engagement with the community. This group will focus on delivering communication strategies for the Department's priority work arising from each of the Treasury's purposes, optimising the use of digital channels. This approach will seek to increase engagement in policy discussion and raise awareness of the context around the policy decisions of the Government.
Shared services
The Treasury has been endorsed by the Secretaries' Board as a shared services provider to small and medium agencies since November 2014 as part of the whole of government Shared and Common Services Program. The Program, being led by the Department of Finance, is first seeking to consolidate common core services such as payroll and finance transactional services with value-added transactional services and strategic services to be addressed later in the program.
The Treasury has provided corporate functions to portfolio agencies for over a decade, including the Inspector-General of Taxation, the Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation, the Takeovers Panel and the Australian Office of Financial Management. Expanding on this experience, the Treasury is delivering these corporate functions to a wider audience through Treasury Shared Services (TSS).
Our aim is to deliver efficient and reliable corporate services to enable agencies to focus on their core business. To achieve both high-quality and cost-efficiency we:
- deliver services in partnership with the private sector; for example, TechnologyOne and Aurion manage our finance and human resource systems and support agency on-boarding;
- offer standardised systems and processes for each of our services, with participating agencies using the same business processes where possible; and
- focus on providing services to "like" agencies for mutual benefit. Like agencies are typically small to medium agencies, who undertake similar business activities and have similar corporate systems and processes.
Corporate Group will be seeking to deliver even stronger client service, strengthen our governance arrangements and make improvements to the way we work by enhancing our systems and processes.