Speaking at a Defence Watch event in Canberra this week, Chief Information Officer Group senior leadership addressed over 200 ICT professionals about the Group's work.
Chief Information Officer Steve Pearson, now a year into this role, gave an update on how the Group is progressing in its reform efforts as it seeks to deliver capabilities ‘from the strong strategic centre out to the tactical edge’ for the ADF.
“I’ve been talking with the IIP team about the nature of ICT programs: we cannot deliver a massive program every 10 years that just brings us up to date,” Pearson said. “We cannot keep operating this way given the rate of technology change, and this is being listened to outside of CIOG.”
First Assistant Secretary ICT Delivery Paul Cazaz pointed out some of the wins that CIOG has had in the past 12 months, with the Investment Committee first pass approval for health knowledge management program under JP 2060 and first pass approval for vetting transformation. He also made the observation that Defence has the biggest ERP, health knowledge management and cyber programs on the books.
The signature programs that CIOG is delivering under EIM (Enterprise Information Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) are progressing with EIM going through the National Security Committee of Cabinet this week for first pass approval.
Industry and CIOG are currently undergoing an ODIA activity for ERP with the next major milestone to be hit in Q3 this year. Pearson was reluctant to go into details about this process for probity reasons, refusing to be drawn on a detailed timeline or scope. Given that both Accenture and IBM have been going through this prolonged process for almost two years, a third quarter goal for the resolution of ODIA this year is very welcome.
The 2020 ERP delivery date is still in place despite the programmatic delays and confirmation that elements of the program are struggling. This includes the fact that MILIS, the logistics backbone, will no longer be supported past 2020 by its OEM and its SAP based replacement is not due for delivery till 2023.
As to the replacement of Air Vice Marshal Peter Yates as program lead for ERP who finished up late 2018, Pearson commented that he is in the midst of a global search for a replacement, with industry sources noting that a uniformed person will most likely take a deputy role in the program.
Rear Admiral Michael Rothwell, head of ICT Operations in CIOG, outlined the full scope of Defence’s current network operations at MilCIS 2018.
“Across 400 locations, we have: 120,000 work stations; 230,000 network connections; 110,000 desktop phones; 10,000 servers; 30,000 mobiles; 14 data centres; 50 floating data centres; and one million annual service requests.”