Policies and standards

OCIO policies and standards are high-level statements of position or intent relating to ICT decisions or operations. Policies are broad and descriptive while standards are specific and prescriptive.

Policies, standards and guidelines

• Applications and Internet
• Data and information
• Governance
• Security
• Sourcing
• Technology
• Terminology / taxonomy
• Interoperability
• View complete list of policies, standards and guidelines (PDF 58KB)

About policies, standards and guidelines

ICT policies and standards support the strategic directions of the South Australian Government. They direct the consolidation and rationalisation of ICT processes and technologies with the aims of increasing flexibility, decreasing costs and enhancing management of ICT assets.

The policies and standards published by the Office of the CIO:

• underpin the across-government enterprise architecture and its associated business process, application, data/information and technology components.
• facilitate consistency in the procurement of service provision arrangements across government.

The Office of the CIO’s policies and standards apply to all SA Government agencies and instrumentalities, although exemptions may be granted under certain circumstances. 

A review date for each policy and standard is to be included in the metadata of all relevant document.

Who is involved?

Policies and standards must be endorsed by an appropriate governance authority prior to publication. The authority will depend on the nature of the document but may be the Chief Information Officer, the ICT Board, the Strategy and Standards Steering Committee, the Major Projects and Infrastructure Cabinet Committee (MPICC) or Cabinet.

The Strategy and Innovation Directorate within the Office of the CIO oversees the preparation, management and publication of policies, standards and guidelines.

The Secretariat does not engage in the development of policies and standards itself.  This is undertaken by discipline experts in the Office of the CIO or in other Government agencies.

The Directorate initiates reviews of documents as their expiry dates approach. Responsibility for implementing policies and standards within agencies is identified in the policy documents produced by the Directorate.

Agencies may develop their own ICT policies and standards to address local requirements. Such documents should be aligned with those of the Office of the CIO.

Policy and standards links

Many organisations provide advice on developing policies and standards. Their documents are good examples of best practice in publishing policies and standards. The links below are to external websites:

• Australian Government Information Management Office
• International Organization for Standardization
• W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
• Australian Standards
• South Australian Policy Online
• Open Standards

Further information

Andrew Jones
Manager Strategy and Innovation
Telephone:  61 8 8226 5573
jones.andrew@saugov.sa.gov.au

Documents are in Adobe PDF format.  You may need to download the Adobe Acrobat reader to read them.