Kosta Galanis heads up Public Sector, Emergency Services and Healthcare at Totalmobile Australia and New Zealand, which means he spends most of his time in conversations with the organisations carrying some of the heaviest operational loads in the country including state government agencies, public and private health networks, emergency services, and local councils. The common thread across all of them, he says, is the same: the ambition is there, but the operational foundation underneath it isn’t keeping up.
In this blog, Kosta explores where that gap is widest, why it’s showing up as both a cost and compliance risk, and what will separate the public sector organisations that close it from those that fall further behind.
The gap between ambition and resourcing
The dominant theme across almost every conversation is the gap between what organisations are expected to deliver and the resources they have to do it. Workforce pressure is front and centre, and it’s not just about shortages – it’s the complexity of managing the workforces they already have.
Award and enterprise agreement obligations have become really difficult to administer at scale, particularly in health and emergency services where fatigue rules, overtime, and penalty rates create genuine legal and safety exposure. And sitting alongside that is a growing recognition that legacy systems and manual processes, many built or procured a decade ago, are creating an operational drag that shows up in rostering errors, manual workarounds, and an inability to respond dynamically when demand shifts. The organisations doing this well have worked out that it’s not just a technology problem. It’s an operating model problem.
Where the pressure is most acute right now
There are significant challenges across all these areas, but the sectors most likely to act in the next 12 to 24 months are public and private health, along with state government agencies including emergency services.
Health is being squeezed from multiple directions at once. In the public system, legislative nurse-to-patient ratios are under scrutiny and enterprise agreement bargaining is ongoing across states. In aged care and private health, workforce shortages and sector reform are compounding that pressure further.
Emergency services run a close second. Police and ambulance services deal with demand patterns that are inherently unpredictable, and their rostering and fatigue management obligations are among the most complex in the country.
How cost and compliance risk show up day-to-day
The most visible sign is unplanned overtime. When you can’t fill a shift through proactive rostering, someone gets called in. In health and emergency services, that call-in carries a penalty rate, which is often a significant cost premium over the baseline rate. I’ve spoken to organisations where the gap between their funded headcount and their actual deployed headcount is substantial, and the difference is being bridged through overtime and agency spend that was never in the budget.
But underneath the cost issue there’s a compliance risk that doesn’t always get the same attention. When rostering is manual or semi-manual, award interpretation errors accumulate quietly. That exposure only becomes visible when there’s an audit or a grievance is lodged. In the meantime, frontline managers are spending most of their time solving roster puzzles rather than actually leading their teams, which has a real downstream effect on retention and morale. And that compounds the workforce problem even further.
How procurement and delivery are changing
There’s a clear shift toward smaller, more targeted procurement decisions and a tendency to phase larger initiatives rather than seek full-scope approval upfront. The broad digital transformation pitch that worked a few years ago doesn’t land the same way now. Finance and procurement teams want a specific link between the investment and a measurable operational outcome.
The value case for getting rostering or workforce optimisation right is quantifiable, and the projects we see succeed are built around a specific operational problem with a clear cost attached, not a platform modernisation argument.
Where the public sector is keeping up, and where it isn’t
The public-facing digital transformation, such as online services, citizen portals, digital identity, moves reasonably well. But the back office and operational layer, particularly anything to do with workforce management, scheduling and field operations, is lagging significantly. That’s consistent across every state government department we talk to. There are health networks across Australia still rostering thousands of staff using systems with no understanding of the awards those staff are employed under. Local councils are managing field workforces with paper-based job cards and a wide technology stack that doesn’t always sync. The gap between the ambition of digital strategy and the operational reality underneath it is real, and closing that gap is where we spend most of our time.
Public vs private: the real difference
The clearest difference is procurement cycles and accountability structures. A private organisation facing a serious overtime problem can make a purchasing decision in weeks and have a solution live within a few quarters. The same problem in the public sector can require a business case, a budget submission cycle, and a procurement process – easily a 12 to 18 month journey before anything is deployed. By the time the solution is live, the problem has often evolved.
Change management is the other big difference. Public sector workforces often have strong union representation and enterprise agreements that make workforce change genuinely complex. The organisations that handle it well treat unions and workforce representatives as stakeholders in the solution, not obstacles to it.
What will separate those who get ahead
The ones that come out ahead treat their operational infrastructure as a strategic asset rather than a back-office cost to be managed. Workforce management, scheduling, field service operations – these are the mechanisms through which public services actually get delivered. Getting them right doesn’t just reduce cost, it creates the operational agility to respond to demand shifts, regulatory changes and workforce pressures without each one becoming a ministerial crisis.
The second differentiator is leadership that understands both the operational problem and the data story underneath it. The best conversations happen with executives who know their overtime spend and their award compliance exposure, and who are approaching technology as a way to solve a specific operational problem, not just to run a transformation project for its own sake.
