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Guiding our Biggest e-government job

Peter Davidson, Information Age

12/10/2004 11:47:09

Murray Harrison is a professional public servant, a 30-year veteran of management roles in the Department of Veterans' Affairs (DVA) and the Department of Social Security (DSS), charged with developing and managing welfare programs.

Like others in government including DIMIA CIO Cheryl Hannah (last issue of Information Age), his appointment in 2002 to an ICT executive role as CIO of the Australian Customs Service is founded on successful management roles in the Senior Executive Service, rather than the traditional trek through information technology.

Joining DVA in 1971, he has climbed a management ladder built of successful projects in benefits, compensation and income support, moving into a CIO role in 1997 when the department moved to increase the business focus of its ICT operations.

He describes it as "a time of quantum change in IT" and a fortuitous point of entry into taking on a CIO role to harness rapidly changing technological dynamics to meet DVA's business imperatives.

His move to Customs two years ago to take up the newly created CIO role included taking control of the technical components of the department's massive, but troubled, Cargo Management Re-engineering Program (CRM) which would test his management acumen.

The program began in 1996 with a review of Customs' IT infrastructure and its ability to handle expanding processing volumes, coincident with the appointment of outsourcer EDS to a wide-ranging contract to support the department's IT operations and systems.

Customs notionally estimated the cost of new software development and an overall architecture to streamline the management of imports, exports and revenue collection at about $30m, with the project to be undertaken by EDS.

"This figure was just a line drawn in the sand against which Customs could benchmark outsourcing bids, not a hard figure as the project had not gone to spec stage, CCF was not included and the more complex import management component had not been studied to any great degree," Harrison says.

It became apparent to both organisations that bundling the task with day-to-day support services "was not the correct thing to do", and at the end of the 90s EDS relinquished the development task, particularly its software component, by mutual agreement and concentrated on its core responsibilities.

EDS' contract has recently been extended to 2007.

Customs went to tender for CMR in 2001, with a successful Computer Associates consortium of Kaz, IOCORE and others bidding $29.7m for the core cargo reporting and management business.

An IBM-led group would develop Customs Connect Facility, a gateway for Web-enabled access to Customs' re-engineered IT infrastructure, and beyond into government agencies interested in who was sending what in and out of Australia: Australian Quarantine, Bureau of Statistics, Foreign Affairs and Trade - about a dozen in all.

"It was a brave decision to change horses in midstream, and the project was restarted pretty well from scratch in late 2001 with little carried over from the EDS effort."

After the decision was made, Harrison was appointed CIO of Customs in 2002 with its 4800 staff across Australia and in offshore posts - and to manage the development and implementation of CMR.

"For all intents and purposes, developing CMR effectively started two years ago, and while there have been some delays in the import end of the development, the project is on time and will start in October.

"There are commentators that insist that we started in 1997 and are fond of talking about a 'seven-year project' but that's simply not the case. This has been an extraordinarily intensive exercise to create a system which is unique in the world."

He also bridles on the question of costs: "We never said what the project would cost at the outset because we didn't know until it was fully defined and specified.

"When the CA group started into the project it rapidly became apparent that the job was about three times bigger than had previously been discussed in the 90s; the notional $30m was meaningless and the software development, when fully scoped, cost around $50m.

"The CCF gateway infrastructure came in at $50m and Customs' costs over five years to get the project fully embedded will be about $100m - all inclusive of GST. So yes, it cost a significant amount, but no more than expected for a project of this size and complexity.

"And given that the system will collect about $7.5 billion a year in Customs duties, it's not a bad investment

"Transition costs are significant, but then so is the job of dealing with the thousands of private sector stakeholders and organisations, and about 30 key agencies."

He also points out that efforts in the US to create a similar management system called Customs ACE has already gone through $US1.2bn and is expected to go to $2.2bn by the time it's finished.

"This is the most important government/industry project in Australia. What we are doing is providing a Web-based interchange between the government and industry for import and export of goods that will enable anyone to access our systems directly to meet their obligations to tell us about their cargo movements, via the Internet.

"If you want to export/import something now you have to go to broker who has a back-end system that does the Customs work and you pay for it. You can still do all that, but under the new system you can register with us, tell us what you have to, we'll give you access to our applications, you fill out the forms, and we'll tell you if you owe us any money.

"We have a sophisticated risk assessment function which will tell us whether we should look at the goods when they come in. It's a simple initial process, but there's an awful lot happening at the back end."