Lack of skilled staff forced the Department of Finance and Administration (DOFA) to outsource systems management of its QSP financials.
Alistair Cochrane, DOFA's chief financial officer, said difficulties in finding staff with Unix skills drove the decision to outsource the department's QSP financial management information system.
At the same time, outsourcing the application is expected to save DOFA 30 per cent of the cost of running the application in-house.
Cochrane said savings will total "a few hundred thousand dollars" a year.
The QSP application, which will be delivered to DOFA over a network, went live earlier this year, and will now be relocated to QSP's new data centre in Canberra, he said.
Cochrane said DOFA had had to decide whether to outsource the application to QSP, or DOFA's IT outsourcing partner IBM GSA.
QSP won because "its their product", Cochrane said.
Other federal government departments running QSP include the Veterans' Affairs Department and the Australian Customs Service.