Defence

Chief Information Officer

Benefits of transformation

AVM John Monaghan,
Chief Information Officer

Major restructuring of the Defence Organisation in 2004 saw the creation of the Chief Information Officer Group (CIOG). This new group assumed responsibility for the design, development, delivery operations and maintenance of the majority of Defence’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems. The main exceptions remaining outside CIOG’s direct responsibility were the deployable systems built by the Defence Materiel Organisation and regional ICT services under Defence Support Group (DSG).

A Changing Chief Information Officer Group

With the arrival of the new CIO at the end of 2004, a transformation program was introduced to improve the governance, management and performance of ICT capability and end-to-end service delivery. In early 2005, the new CIOG began to take shape, with some divisional responsibilities redefined. The strategic J6 and ICT operational functions were aligned into one command (Information Capability Management Division) while the Information Systems Division (ISD) became a design, delivery and third-level support organisation, no longer responsible for the day-to-day operation of Defence ICT infrastructure. By mid 2006, responsibility for the development and support of the PMKeys and ROMAN Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems had also been transferred from the business areas into ISD. A new branch was formed within ISD to take responsibility for ERP development and support, and for a new Enterprise Application Integration Program.

The CIOG also started a campaign to gather a range of metrics related to the performance of the Defence networks, the delivery of standard ICT services to Defence users, and CIOG delivery of ICT projects and tasks. From around late 2005, CIOG has increasingly been able to examine and analyse a range of Defence ICT performance metrics, all of which can be seen on the CIOG Balanced Scorecard at the CIOG Intranet website.

Apart from a serious downturn in the April–June period, the early 2006 introduction of the KAZ contract covering ICT network operations and standard service delivery has improved service desk capacity and lowered call wait times. Also during this period, ISD commenced the rollout of the new Standard Operating Environment (SOE125), bringing Microsoft XP to all work stations and Microsoft Server 2003 to the back end. This rollout was a significant challenge given the diversity of non-standardised environments across Defence’s regions and sites. Furthermore, many local applications in use at sites across Defence had not been made visible to the SOE team and had not been upgraded by their business owners to be able to operate under XP. As a result, during the rollout, a number of these unknown applications failed and approximately 6 per cent of the workstations had to be rolled back to the old Microsoft NT environment. This, including a range of other unconnected events, led to the significant downturns in performance and service desk call wait times in the April–June period this year. The SOE125 rollout is more than 80 per cent complete now, with the Canberra region and the Defence Secret Network (DSN) the major areas of remaining work to be completed by the end of the year. Users can expect to see further improvements over time.

By moving to SOE125, Defence will have an operating environment that enhances desktop functionality and provides increased stability, supportability and security. Once the SOE125 rollout is complete, the single email project will be able to move forward to completion, standardising email to the Microsoft Exchange/Outlook suite. Email standardisation will enable the introduction of uniform and interoperable collaborative tools and improved military messaging systems.

From around October this year, users will start to see the positive impact of a major upgrade to the bandwidth on the Defence Wide-Area Network. On average, capacity between regional nodes and Defence sites will be doubled, with the flexibility for further capacity to be dynamically managed on demand. Users can expect to see improvements in the performance of remote applications such as the Standard Defence Supply System (SDSS) and ROMAN as well as in common network services such as email and Intranet browsing.

The account creation and configuration process has also been examined for possible improvement. This process currently involves a range of steps crossing a number of Defence groups. By centralising and streamlining this process, it will be possible to drastically improve the time it takes to create or adjust accounts—well down from the six weeks on average it takes at the moment. As CIOG and DSG work together to implement the changes, more information will be provided.

ISD transformation

As metrics were developed on the delivery of CIOG projects and tasks, it has become apparent that the demand for ICT development and deployment is growing beyond ISD delivery capacity. This increase in demand is expected to continue as Defence relies more and more on the Defence Restricted Network, DSN and enterprise applications that operate across those networks.

ISD has been under particular stress in the delivery of projects and tasks related to base and local networks—the work area that has the greatest observable impact on Defence users. This situation has been exacerbated by similar resource constraints in the regional ICT centres run by our delivery partner, DSG. ISD’s current delivery capacity averages 40 tasks a month, and that generally means only Priority 1 and 2 tasks (of five priorities) can be delivered. With over 1000 complex tasks in the queue, and more than 60 projects under construction, ISD has to change its delivery model in order to satisfy the growing demand for ICT systems within the department.

Over the next year ISD will move to a delivery model that will increase engagement with industry for the delivery of projects, tasks and sustainment activities. Nearly 60 per cent of ISD staff are engaged in traditional activities of code cutting and system sustainment. So that ISD can satisfy the increasing demand, our workforce will be transforming, moving towards program and project management, user requirements management, contract management and technical assurance.

A key component of this approach is that the number of staff in ISD will remain the same; no people or FTE will be lost. The employees of ISD will be re-skilled, reorganised and given new experiences to continue their careers within Defence ICT. This change in workplace activity will deliver the increased capacity needed by the department.

This diagram shows the number of PCs that CIO Group has upgraded to Microsoft Windows XP as at 17 July 2006. Visit the CIO Group website at <http://intranet.defence.gov.au/ciogweb/> for the most recent figures.

[ top of page ]