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Tracking the traffic at Australia’s door

Peter Davidson, Information Age

24/08/2004 14:22:28

As the queues of would-be migrants and travellers lengthen at Australia’s broad door, the technological challenge of knowing who they are, whether their background will allow them to stay, or if transients, when they should leave, grows exponentially.

It falls to DIMIA, the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, to build and maintain the vast knowledge base required to manage the flow of tourists, students seeking study here – or those who have waded ashore at some remote site hoping for an anonymous new life.

Particularly it’s the task of DIMIA’s CIO Cheryl Hannah to manage the global infrastructure that directs and tracks the swelling traffic flow, and supports the departments responsible to two ministers.

A seasoned and consummate bureaucrat with a background not in information technology but in academic international relations, she manages an IT staff which has grown by 50 per cent since taking on the role in 1999, and will grow by that again to about 700 before a major restructuring program is completed by 2007.

She knows government business, and the department’s business.

Having written speeches on foreign relations for Kim Beazley, Public Service Board chair Peter Willenski and others, and moving through rising levels of government in various agencies and departments, her first real introduction to technology implementation was while she was on secondment to the Department of Health in1998 to assist with their desktop modernisation.

It was there that she learnt that asking more and better questions of IT vendors and consultants was essential to surviving as an IT manager.

And then it was a matter of managing change to a new environment, not twisting wires and stacking router racks.

Cheryl joined DILGEA (as it was back then in 1987) at a senior level, and along the way she managed its Melbourne office, and later did a 30-month tour in charge of its Philippines post.

Her career has been as a manager of people, and her appointment as CIO of DIMIA’s business solutions group was a continuation of the process – the technology was just the tools they used to do a job.

While many CIOs mull the benefits of sending operations offshore, she is responsible for supporting the repatriation of many work processes the business areas of DIMIA have decided to bring home in a drive for new efficiencies, particularly for those staffing DIMIA’s 44 offshore posts.

Charged with processing the thousands of applications from those seeking permanent residence, looking for a student visa or simply wanting a holiday in Australia, since 1989 offshore staff have used the Immigration Records Information System (IRIS) installed locally on mid-range IBM RISC boxes to accumulate and process data before sending it back to the onshore mainframe environment.

Under the proposed new global structure, staff will concentrate on gathering the information required to verify applicants’ bona fides and download data (increasingly in real time) for processing and warehousing here.

“Our offshore people have local knowledge essential to the thorough processing of applications and they need to be allowed to concentrate on the human aspects of their task rather than have also to manage their end of a widely distributed IT infrastructure,” Hannah says.

“Developing our centralised data warehouse is a major task and we have a huge program of application development under way around that project and a multitude of others.

“We have many bespoke applications which have been developed to manage the way we do business, and our strategic goals for service to our clients and government in 2005 and beyond will mean careful integration and new systems.”

She deputes four broad functions to departmental branches: IT business support and governance, applications, client and business systems, and IT infrastructure and resource management.

She also has a global systems environment program office, currently managed at deputy CIO level.

Business support and governance oversees both business and infrastructure architectures, and is her “crystal ball gazer” looking at what’s coming down the track.

“A few years ago we did some work on biometrics because we knew that eventually the business would be asking for it. It’s the same with storage area networking – while we hadn’t signed up for a SAN a few years ago, we knew that by about now we would be asked about it and we needed tested knowledge.

“We look at new offerings all the time in parallel with [outsource partner] CSC which tracks what they call ‘innovations’ just so we’re not caught flat-footed when new technologies arrive, or the business asks for something that might have been percolating out on the fringes and needs fast evaluation.”

“I don’t want to be in a position where by the time they’ve got to us they already have an idea pretty clear in their own mind of what they want to do and we don’t know what they’re talking about.”

The governance end of the branch’s work has also a direct link with financial planning.

“We don’t do things without very clear funding sources. IT projects are notorious for coming in late and over budget so we have a board of management with audit, finance and IT governance committees to decide what we are going to spend our money on.

“That structure has been in place for about 18 months and that’s brought about a revolution in the way we do business because if it isn’t agreed and isn’t properly funded, it doesn’t happen.

“A lot of skunk works that were going on in the department in times gone by have been shaken out because there’s no support for them long term.

“It’s one thing to establish an Access database to track petrol receipts, and another to set up one for some mission-critical part of the business and have the consultant who created it leave with no one knowing how it works or whether it should stay.”

Hannah inherited literally thousands of disparate databases which had proliferated haphazardly. They have been steadily winnowed out and data scrubbed and consolidated as part of a wider data warehousing plan.

The new data management infrastructure will call for some major procurement but she hesitates to get too specific if only to discourage opportunistic vendors. “It’s still very much a work in progress internally and with partners CSC and Optus.”

Federal government procurement learned some hard lessons from misdirected outsourcing practices a few years ago. “We learned such a lot and government has got its act together. The discipline of knowing what it costs to run our business is a by-product of having to negotiate with major global outsourcers, in our case CSC.

“If you don’t have those business-like disciplines you very quickly realise that you’re at an enormous disadvantage in any kind of negotiation or recasting of contractual obligations because they know their costs very well and you don’t know your own.

“Over the last five years we’ve become much tougher and harder on ourselves.

“It also means that as vendors approach us they quickly realise that we’re not taken in by their latest gizmo; they have lifted their game and not sent sales people with offers of discounted licensing deals at the end of their financial year just to make budget.”

But more needs to be done by providers to understand the government’s business she says, and DIMIA has been talking with both the ACS and AIIA to engender a deeper appreciation of government to meet public service needs through consultation rather than a barrage of aimless pitches.

“Vendors need to have a better appreciation of what a government initiative really means to them.”

Behind DIMIA’s operations is a growing pressure to meet a widening range of security concerns, and while not openly discussed, Hannah’s detailed strategic plan for 2005 could also be read as a security prescription.

Charged with managing physical and protective security for DIMIA’s Australian operations as well as its technology (“it brings us closer to the core of our business and makes us part of it”), her strategic plan is a broad matrix of strategies, success measurement and projects against six core values:

• Be accessible for clients • Be transparent • Add value • Be businesslike • Be cost effective, and • Be an employer of choice.

“My whole empire is mapped against these values; it is a checklist against which we measure everything we are doing – if anything doesn’t match up, we shouldn’t be doing it.”

Typically detailed and widely distributed in line with an overarching drive for better communication, the document amounts to a tiny-typed A3 spreadsheet of tasks, targeted outcomes and metrics.

It sways heavily towards client service – and for clients read those seeking or extending various visas, refugees, translation services, citizenship applicants, immigration lawyers, anyone involved with multicultural diversity and indigenous affairs.

And it has to provide the information, advice and support for Immigration and Indigenous Affairs Minister Amanda Vanstone and Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister Gary Hardgrave.

High on the task list is a facility for clients to input and access their own information directly through new telecom and Web-based technologies, seamless connection to third parties like government agencies offering migrant resources, travel agents and integrating internal processes to improve, across the board, client communication (that word again).

DOLLS (DIMIA online lodgement service) will offer portal access to a host of visa application and renewal functions, and via other initiatives inbound passengers will be processed in advance, and employers and government agencies will get early information on non-citizens’ immigration status.

Electronic visa lodgement, enterprise-wide data sharing, increased use of biometric entrant screening, global processing centres in Adelaide, Perth, Hobart as well as Canberra, remote access for staff and enhanced SAP-based integration with HR and financial functions – the list goes on.

“We have a universal border protection system that is the envy of the world. Our visa controls are long established and continue to evolve.”

Given the increasing pressure at the gate, they must.

[sidebar]

Being a better client

Cheryl Hannah took charge of an IT group five years ago with a high proportion of contractors among its hundreds of members.

It quickly became apparent that there was an “us and them” mindset afoot, interfering with the cohesion of a team facing some testing times as the department grew to meet new business challenges.

Along the way Hannah also opened a dialogue with her outsourcing partners to make IT in DIMIA a “better” client to do business with by DIMIA striving to better understand the business drivers of the outsource partners and adapting to their processes. By focusing on improvement internally and externally with a common goal of better service IT in DIMIA “has really lifted its game”.

“It’s easy for the IT function to become a back-room activity. Its practitioners tend to be introspective and prone to individualism, so it’s important for IT to integrate with the core business, to remember why it’s there by understanding the importance of their involvement,” Hannah says.

In a series of initiatives designed to weld the team, attitudes changed – some contractors joined the permanent staff, others who’d moved on as contractors returned to do the same.

One particularly successful device has been the instigation of an internal “CIO Awards for Excellence” scheme whereby those who most closely meet the department’s tenets of service and excellence are recognised.

Nominated by their peers, recipients have been drawn from within the department, from its outsource partners and from other agencies.

“It’s no gala event – we just have an afternoon tea function and recognise the people who best demonstrate the qualities that we want to characterise the way DIMIA works,” she says. “It’s simple, valued and effective.”