Published on the 14/04/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
The Federal Government has given the thumbs up for a seven year overhaul of Centrelink’s core computing platform, predicting the first benefits will emerge as soon as next year…
The 30-year-old Income Security Integrated System (ISIS) handles 50 million transactions a day and delivers A$100 billion worth of social security payments to 7.3 million people a year.
Kevin Noonan, lead Government analyst for Ovum, was a programmer 30 years ago and worked on that system. Now he sees the overhaul as an important first test of the Federal Government’s Digital Transformation Office, which has been charged with developing innovative digital services for Australian citizens, while Government department IT teams are charged with the execution of those ideas.
Noonan said the Department of Human Services’ Centrelink overhaul would be a “showcase project” for the DTO and warned that the new computing platform could not be too narrowly focused if it was to be able to handle changing customer expectations and needs.
He said that it would not make sense for the Government to attempt to write the code for the new system itself, rather that a collection of business process outsourcing and cloud computing might be a more sensible approach to reform.
While the project has been costed at $1-$1.5 billion, the specifics of the funding package won’t be revealed until the Budget is released later this month.
Although the overhaul is not scheduled to be complete before 2022, ministers have already indicated they expect to go to market early in 2016 with consumers seeing the first benefits of the reform by the end of next year.
The Centrelink reformation has been a long time coming – the Department received $16.2 million from the 2013/14 budget to develop the business case for ISIS’ overhaul. It then consulted with the UK Government, Rio Tinto and Commonwealth Bank about how best to proceed.
Given that line up it seems likely that cloud solutions and Agile development will feature heavily in Centrelink’s plans. According to the Department: “The project will be carried out via multiple work packages. Each stage will deliver tangible benefits for welfare recipients, while also building the new components to support the next phase.
Planning will begin on 1 July 2015 with the first stage to be completed by the end of 2016.”
According to a statement from the minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison, and the minister for Human Services, Marise Payne: “Investing in a new system will boost efficiencies and help advance many welfare reforms – you can’t fix the system if you can’t change the engine which drives the system and makes it work. The efficiencies it creates will also mean the new system will pay for itself over time.”
Exactly what period of time that may be remains undefined.
