Jew World Order

The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry is currently laying the foundations for, what it hopes will be, a major IT program to reform Australia’s biosecurity systems.

In 2008, a report (PDF) into Australia’s biosecurity operations said that an investment in the order of $225 million would be needed to upgrade the information technology and business systems. The report said that systems needed to; be more user-friendly, support risk research by providing data in useful formats, be connected to other departments and countries, and to enable the reduction of paperwork by replacing it via electronic interfaces, online approval systems and electronic certification.

According to department secretary Rona Mellor speaking at Senate Estimates last week, in order for the report’s recommendations to be implemented, some base work needed to be done on the department’s IT systems, which were old and didn’t interact with each other very well.

“In order to make a proper investment over time, we actually need the system stable and robust [to be able] to build on now. The system is quite old. In fact, I would not call it a system; I would call it a variety of systems that need to speak to each other. Their interoperability is low and their pace is [s]low,” she said.

In the Federal Budget, the government provided $19.8 million, over three years, to do the necessary remediation of its IT systems.

The department was now looking at virtualising its systems, Mellor said, to create better storage, access, speed and security.

“I like to think that it is like a foundation piece. It is like the slab that you build under a new house. Rather than building onto some old pillars and pylons and seeing whether it will be stable, we are actually building the slab at the moment,” she said.

Also, playing into the creation of a consistent foundation, was the decision to centralise the IT function, doing away with dispersed IT teams.

“Across a number of the divisions, there were staff trying to manage systems. So, one of the key decisions that we took in the corporate realignment was to create a division that was focused on IT, and that would enable us to look at the whole organisation’s IT as one piece of enterprise architecture, rather than a number of sets,” Mellor said.

This enabled efficiencies, in the form of job cuts, to be made, and meant that the department could focus on creating a consistent service.

Once the foundation is right, the department will come back with a business case for reforming the biosecurity IT systems. The department already has a conceptual design for what it wants, which would enable it to electronically deal with the various parties involved in biosecurity, such as exporters and importers, but, that would have to be fleshed out in the business case, which Mellor expected would be put to the government in 2015.

To make sure that parties involved in biosecurity don’t pull their hair out in frustration until then, Mellor said that the IT team had introduced some electronic tools and were planning more, to enable the efficient exchange of data.

“Where we can, we are making enhancements; and, we are doing that in a co-design mode with [the] industry. But getting the balance right, between the integrity of documents and the client experience, will remain a key focus for us,” she said.