Geoscience Australia will launch a second round of voluntary redundancies targeting its IT divisions after initial offers failed to sufficiently slim its tech functions.
A spokesman for GA confirmed to iTnews the agency had accepted voluntary redudancy applications for 73 staff across the organisation, accounting for about 10 percent of the workforce.
A spokesperson declined to break out how many IT staff were included in that figure.
But he did confirm a further 10 positions would be cut from IT in what the agency is hoping will be voluntary redundancies.
If all 10 positions could not be reduced through voluntary redudancies, the agency had “a number of options” to meet the outstanding workforce reductions, including forced redundancies and redeployment elsewhere in the public service, the spokesperson said.
He refused to provide a breakdown of how many IT roles would be cut in total, but according to a report in the The Canberra Times, around 23 of the 73 cuts already approved come out of corporate and IT divisions.
Geoscience Australia declined to release figures about the total number of IT staff it employees.
Geoscience Australia is charged with providing geoscientific advice to the Australian Government to inform policies, resource development, environmental priorities and business objectives.
It acts as the custodian of about 5 petabytes worth of records detailing the nation's geological resources and composition, including the national petroleum data repository and 30 years of satellite images inside the Earth Observation Data Store (EODS). It estimates the volume is growing at a rate of about 40 percent year-on-year.
