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CIO: Four into one does go

Peter Davidson, Information Age

17/06/2004 08:16:37

Few challenges tax the acumen of a CIO like integrating one enterprise’s legacy platform with another. It is an exacting project to manage when private companies merge, but when government agencies must be melded into a new entity, a host of extra considerations arise.

Unlike private enterprises, legacy organisational structures cannot always be summarily swept away as new owners move in, and initially at least, old hierarchies remain. Responsibilities are redefined rather than made redundant and citizens still need to be able to find the agencies they want.

Late last year, NSW Government Minister Bob Debus decreed that four agencies would aggregate to form the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC), by bringing together the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), Resources NSW, Royal Botanical Gardens and the Environment Protection Authority (EPA).

Four complete management structures, four different social charters, four governance philosophies, four cultures – and four fully operational ICT architectures, all to be somehow jig sawn into a single department.

From them will be distilled a single streamlined amalgam as individuals are assigned divisional responsibilities, an over-arching governance policy is devised and an ICT structure engineered to support an evolving charter.

As director of information management and technology for the EPA, it fell to Richard Baecher to take a significant role on the steering committee which would guide the merging of all ICT functions into a cohesive whole to gain critical mass which would bring better public services, new efficiencies and economies of scale.

The exercise has to meet its integration costs out of future internal savings to make it self-funded, establish immediate inter-connectivity across a disparate array of hardware, networking and business applications while launching a five-year transition to a completely new architecture – and keep each agency running effectively in the meantime.

At the start of the year, the committee appointed an independent consultant to recommend which legacy systems should be retained, and options for a new common platform architecture which would be implemented over time.

The overall process had been going only a few months before the NSW Treasurer brought down a mini-budget in April to close a $300m budget gap through a new range of taxes and planned public sector spending cuts of $365m, sharpening the new department’s focus on its fiscal strategies and operational efficiencies.

“Our strategy is to establish a new platform, and over the next three to five years dispose of legacy stuff at the end of its efficient life to see a new architecture fully in service, certainly by 2009, but hopefully earlier. We expect to consider the new platform recommendation any time now.”

It is likely however, that the distributed server platform which has supported the NPWS’s operations across the state will become a model for the department, along with the EPA’s Microsoft product set, enhanced by the addition of .Net.

From his EPA perspective in the meantime, it meant his purview of 750 staff ballooning to 3100, remote sites from 70 to 181, 82 servers becoming 281, 600 PCs becoming nearly 3400, a printer population of nearly 1100 and adding a further 100 business applications to the 70 already in EPA as the agencies were jockeyed into departmental formation.

The EPA also has a highly centralised Citrix platform supporting about 400 thin client workstations.

And having steered their own ICT course for years, the four agencies’ accumulation of gear represents pretty well every vendor ever to stick a logo on a box or disc.

“Some people are using Oracle, SQL or Access for example to manage data, and no two content management systems are the same. We have four separate Internet and extranet systems to manage, and so it goes on.”

While trying to get connectivity didn’t faze him – “it’s easy with the sophisticated products available” – the overall question of communication, electronic and human, was a concern.

“We were primarily dealing with Outlook and Lotus Notes internally, and getting them together was straightforward. But the integration strategy would not work if people weren’t motivated to communicate,” Baecher says.”

In the new order Baecher anticipates that MS Exchange, based on its scalability and functionality, will be adopted to meet the department’s future needs.

The human element of the exercise was important from the outset and HR issues have been considered alongside overall ICT requirements, particularly in assessing the scope, level and methodologies required for training.

“I hold to the old school of face-to-face training, and the sheer logistics of getting trainers to 180 sites, some really remote, spread all over NSW, quite apart from deciding what they need to deliver, is a major task.”

Open source While open source may not necessarily find a place in DEC’s new order, it will be tested in a pilot scheme during the transition process.

“While there is appeal for open source, issues like down-the-line support, IP ownership and total cost of ownership are far from clear at this stage – but we will explore its possibilities in a practical way, probably as a desktop alternative initially,” Baecher says.

Adopting open source should not meet too much resistance at NSW Cabinet level: Speaking at an ALP Conference fringe event in February, NSW Minister for Commerce John Della Bosca bluntly told an assembly of 30 IT bosses that the NSW government was in the process of breaking down proprietary vendor lock-ins.

"We have been dumb buyers of IT for a long time. We want to become better buyers, users and sellers of information and IT. We are moving away from proprietary software…a controversial decision onto open source. It's a suck-it-and-see exercise," Della Bosca said.

Re-engineering the agencies into a single entity will also offer opportunities to renegotiate software licensing agreements in the drive for cost efficiencies.

“It all comes down to our being able to offer new technologies and the communication opportunities they bring to NSW taxpayers at zero additional cost. It requires careful planning but economies are available through overhauling architectures to meet continually evolving business goals.”

The DEC development is one of a series of aggregations the NSW Government has made, or is planning, to bring a plethora of agencies and instrumentalities into a new departmental structure. Lessons learned in each project can be applied to the next as architectures are created and tested while maintaining the daily business of government.

For Baecher, keeping systems going is an established aspect of his professional stock in trade: during nearly a decade with Digital Equipment Corp in Australia, he headed its South Pacific business recovery operations.

At a time when Digital was second only to IBM as an IT enterprise in this region, its multi-vendor customer services operations were the envy of the industry, offering 24/7 international support for 14,000 offerings from 1400 vendors.

(It was this capability which first prompted Compaq to direct its takeover ambitions toward the by then ailing pioneer company, and later, those of HP.) As leader of Digital’s DecProtect operation, he earned a number of significant belt notches for getting enterprises up and running quickly and quietly after disaster, such as when the Australian Stock Exchange’s polyglot systems were inundated with run-off water as firemen struggled to save the heritage-listed George Patterson building nearby in Sydney’s CBD.

While re-engineering systems for the new DEC is happening in calmer circumstances, he on the other hand is back working for an organisation of the same populist name. Not that any self-respecting Digit ever called it anything but Digital…

Footnote: Richard Baecher is a Fellow of the ACS, a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management and also a Vice Chairman of the ACS NSW Branch Executive Committee. His major life goal is to serve four consecutive aces in a game of tennis…