From the Source: Greg Farr, Chief Information Officer, Department of Defence | ADM Nov 08

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Having been in the job a year now, Greg Farr has transitioned from the ATO into Defence’s top ICT position with little hassle. With numerous reviews on the go in 2008, Farr has plans of his own to make ICT in Defence an easier beast to deal with. He spoke with ADM’s Editor Katherine Ziesing in Canberra in the wake of the Mortimer Review release.

Katherine Ziesing

ADM:
The preface to the executive summary for the 2007-08 Defence Information Infrastructure Plan refers to a pressing need to better engage with Defence stakeholders and customers; assist and draw upon the development of the Defence business model; develop cross-Defence DII governance arrangements; better define service delivery standards and agreements; and develop a Defence ICT strategy.

What is being done, and with what success, in dealing with these issues?

Farr: Where do we start?

Engaging with stakeholders: at one level what I’ve been going around and talking to a whole range of people at senior levels of the organisation and saying what are the issues that you’re having and how is it that we can actually work together to achieve what it is you want to achieve?

We’ve also set up a number of which goes both to stakeholder and governance.

The first one is essentially the highest level ICT Committee comprising of the Secretary and the CDF and that Committee is advised by myself, by the CEO of DMO, by the CFO, by CCDG and DEPSEC Strategic Governance and SCG.

That’s where the highest level decisions, the strategy, the direction of ICT, the overall investment portfolio is made. We’re actually aligning the ICT effort to whole of Defence priorities.

We’ve also had one meeting of a two star group which I chair, which hopefully will be able to look at the whole portfolio of ICT work across Defence and advise the Secretary and CDF to make sure that all the groups’ views are represented and that we accurately portray what everybody’s interests are.

We’ve also started talking to group heads and service chiefs and the vice chief about how we might better align our organisational structures so that their priorities drive our work program.

Discussions have begun and we’ve also produced a full portfolio of all the work the CIO group has done at the moment, and that reflects the priorities that are fed in from the various groups when they are presenting it back and say did we get this right, do you want us to change it?

So still early days but we’ve made progress and we’ve started to put into place the processes for further progress and improvement.

ADM: Given that Defence ICT is scattered across so many different agencies, how are you consolidating strategies and spending? What barriers to change have you come across there?

Farr: I think the barriers for change is that it’s wide and scattered and dispersed, but probably understandable in some ways, that groups were not getting the support they thought they needed and so they’ve gone out and done things themselves.

I don’t want to bring everything into CIO group; I don’t want to get all the money, put it one bucket and dish it out.

The business priorities must be set by the business, whether it’s military or corporate business.

We need to have proper frameworks in place where people know that they have to deliver.

We need an enterprise architecture. We need to have enterprise-wide governance.

We need to have a whole portfolio of ICT work so that we can align that.

Within the frameworks, people need to be able to realise their business priorities because they’re the ones that know them best.

So we’re in fact looking at it in two ways: allowing business to drive their work through the portfolio of their work, but at the same time we’re trying to put in place some frameworks that people know they have to live within.

It can still be devolved, it can’t be semi-autonomous. It has to be all part of ICT for Defence.

ADM: When can the Defence community expect the ICT strategy?

Farr: We’re about 60 per cent of the way through the strategy at the moment.

We’ve got another six weeks to go and we’ll be 80 per cent through.

We’re actually starting to expose that to stakeholders in defence except we’re not calling it a strategy; we’re calling it ‘Here are some concepts, what do you think of them?

This is what we’re thinking might happen, what do you think of that?’

Because as soon as you have a strategy people think of a strategy document.

What we want to do is start engaging people in discussion and allow that to shape the final document rather than present them with a document.

So our thinking is pretty well advanced, although as we go out and have further discussions with people of course it changes, but we would expect to have 80 per cent of the strategy in place within six weeks.

ADM: And the final document will appear when?

Farr: By Christmas or shortly after.

ADM: What successes and what difficulties have you experienced in carrying out the recommendations of the Defence Management Review?

Farr: One of the big difficulties I think has been people have not seen that we are able to deliver to them basic services and when we can’t deliver basic services to them it’s very hard to engage with people at a strategic level.

So we just have to get our basic service delivery right and that will allow us to have better engagement with people to allow us to help them at a high level, solve their business problems.

I think that’s been a major issue for us.

I think lack of understanding of what the role of an ICT architecture means, and how it can actually help as opposed to how it can be a blocker; how if we have a much more standardised architecture we can actually respond more quickly to whatever business imperative it is; we don’t have to go back to a blank sheet of paper every time we want to actually develop some ICT.

That understanding needs to come through as well and it’s a big place. We could actually write lots of things and say this is how it is, but unless you actually take the time to engage with people, it’s actually not going to mean anything.

ADM: Does CIOG have sufficient staff, funding, and expertise?

Are you happy with the speed of decision-making on communications issues both externally and within CIOG?

Farr: If you ask any group head or service chief they’ll say they don’t have enough staff, resources or expertise and they’d like more.

Do I think I’ve got my fair share?

I’ve probably got my fair share in Defence terms.

I’m quite happy with most of the capability that I have.

There are some areas where I’d like to see greater capability.

ADM: Such as?

Farr: Across the architecture space.

There is a number of people doing architecture; I don’t think anywhere near enough and I think we need to have more people at the higher level.

I have a new Chief Technology Officer starting work next month which will help on that front.

I’d like much more ability to do solutions design work.

This is when people can come to the group and say ‘I have this problem’ as opposed to ‘Go and buy me this technology’; and they can say ‘Well, what is your problem? What is it that you want to achieve here?’ and then work on what’s the best technology solutions jointly with them.

We can hopefully leverage off the technology we already have as opposed to going out and buying some more, which is very slow and not very efficient because of more sustainment costs.

That’s quite a specialist skill. We have some people that do that but, once again, we don’t have enough.

And we have to get away from the fact that ICT is a free resource.

It’s not. It costs a lot of money, it’s limited, and I don’t have a magic pudding. You make your choices but no ICT group is every going to deliver everything that people want.

ADM: When can we expect the decision on the replacement for Link 11?

Farr: That’s a really complex question.

Link 11 I think is being supported by the US through to 2011.

We’ve already got some platforms that we’ll be using Link 16 and that’ll be coming through JP 2089 and others.

We’ve has a preliminary look at Link 22.

We’re looking at some beyond line of sight capability for Link 16.

So it’ll be an evolutionary process and of course what we’ve got to do is come along with the allies and the other people using them.

So certainly we’re moving to Link 16; we will probably go on and develop further from that but that’ll be between now and 2011; we’ve just got to make sure that there’s no capability gap while we’re actually doing that.

ADM: Is the wait for the forthcoming Defence White Paper holding up any CIOG decisions or projects?

Farr: No, we’re running very much on track.

In terms of reform, we’re running them very much together.

The strategy is informing the ICT Companion Review; the Companion Review is informing the strategy.

It will be one strategy and way forward which will be signed off both by Defence and of course Government.

So, no, it’s not delaying us at the moment; hopefully it won’t and we are running them very much in parallel, to about the same timelines.

ADM: A constant bugbear for industry is locating the relevant individual within Defence.

Is any consideration being given to bridging this communications gap, for example by an unclassified, cutdown version of the Defence Corporate Directory?

Farr: I haven’t contemplated a cut down version of the Corporate Directory but this is a very common complaint, not only by industry I might add but by people within Defence of how they engage with the CIO group, and there’s certainly some work that would have been done to do that, which streamlined the way we take on work because work was coming in – work requests were coming in all over the place and we couldn’t keep track of them; some just disappeared down black holes and we couldn’t actually keep track of it.

We’ve streamlined that process; it now all comes into one place into the Portfolio Management Office and it’s distributed from there and when it’s distributed from the Portfolio Management Office it’s distributed with funds and then people can keep track of where their work is.

That process is already established but it will go onto our website where people can track how their jobs are going.

In terms of industry I think the main point of contact for industry will be through the CTO’s office but what we don’t want is lots of different people engaging with industry via lots of different solutions.

We’re spending all our time and effort procuring them, implementing them and sustaining them, and that’s taking our efforts away from new capability that we could be building.

What we want to do is reuse the capability, I want to be able to get to is that the CTO will decide what the portfolio of applications and the portfolio of technology we have in place and then everyone will reuse those.

At the moment we have over 4,000 applications in our application portfolio.

We have a lot of applications that do the same job as other applications; so we’re sustaining multiple applications.

We have multiple instances of the one application, once again, which is really killing us with sustainment and taking our effort away from new capability. We need to rationalise that.

ADM: What influence has the Mortimer Review had on CIOG operations, if any?

Farr: Honestly, I don’t know.

I only really read it for the first time last night (the evening the report was released).

I don’t know whether it will have an impact or not yet; we’ll just have to wait and see because it’s too new at the moment.

ADM: Have you brought any strategies from the ATO into Defence?

Is there a role for a Defence Change Program?

Farr: There’ll be certainly room for a program of deep reform within the ICT and that’s what we’re building up to.

I guess one of the things that I did bring from Tax, which I’m very keen to push, is something that we called User Based Design, so that you actually design ICT solutions from a user’s perspective as opposed to a technology perspective.

I know when I talk to people internal to the group and external to the group, when we talk about technology, I often use the term ‘What does it look like? How will you know when you’ve won?’ So from a user’s perspective what will they see?

And so you design it in a sense from the outside in as opposed to inside out.

It was the basic design methodology that was implemented within Tax as part of the Change Program.

We have to get those design skills and we have to get a group of people who can actually put themselves in the user’s shoes.

We may need to invest in some other technology to actually allow us to have that, whether it’s usability laboratories or simulations, we need to get better at prototyping.

Not prototyping like we tend to do here in Defence, which is quite complex, but prototyping could be just a mock-up web page or a mock-up computer screen that’s got nothing behind it to say how would you use it?

And people who have the skill-set to actually take those designs and turn them into user requirements.

ADM: Given the security clearances involved with the work done by Defence, what role do you see outsourcing, consultants and private contractors play in the long-term?

Farr: Industry capability is something that we rely heavily on and we’re going to continue to rely heavily on.

Because of all those things you mentioned, plus in the specialist domain knowledge that you need to work in Defence, we need to build up longer-term relationships.

At the moment we have lots and lots and lots of vendors, professional service providers, contractors coming and going.

A lot of the contracts we have with even major vendors are quite small.

We need to bundle them up; we need to get longer-term relationships; we need to have people from industry who can bring industry expertise in but they have that security clearance, but also the knowledge to give us that continuity.

So part of the sourcing strategy that will be agreed as part of the ICT Strategy will look at how we better engage with industry, how we get longer-term relationships; how we actually get the best out of the industry people while at the same time cutting down our internal overheads.

ADM: So is your corporate depth out in industry?

Farr: There are some things that I don’t believe ever should leave the confines of an organisation. You should never let go of your strategy and architecture.

If you do that you’ve lost complete control of, your IT environment, because ICT by its nature is integrated and if you compartmentalise it and you don’t have an integrated environment all elements suffer.

So we need to keep that in-house, but in terms of delivery, yes, the depth is within the industry.

But we need really good ICT project managers, people that have good project management skills but also have good ICT skills.

But we also need the ability to engage with industry on a very informed basis, so we need high levels of expertise that can actually deal with the high levels of.

We can leverage off the numbers out there but we actually have to have the expertise to engage as an informed customer.

We need both of those things but the depth is in industry, but we need very deep ICT and project management skills within the group as well.

ADM: The ICT sector trend is towards commercially available technologies with a relatively short product lifecycle compared to your long-term defence product lifecycles.

So Defence must therefore decide which major commercial trends to adopt and how to shape mutually beneficial strategic industry relationships.

Is the ‘ISD Transformation’ process of industry partnership coping?

Farr: I think that we need to go further in that and I think we need to do that not just within CIO group but we need to go across Defence in doing that.

So we need to engage with industry but we need product development that is much quicker than it currently is.

Publicly I’ve said to people in the group for most projects I expect 90 day drops in functionality.

Not years, and if you take four or five years to deliver an ICT project you are going to deliver obsolete technology because the technology cycle has actually beaten you.

We need to get technology in place at a basic level, get people using it, because it’s not until people get their hands on it that they actually understand what they want.

I have never been able to go to in many years of ICT, I have never been able to go to a business user and say ‘What do you want?’ and get the correct answer, because quite frankly they don’t know.

But what they do know is what they want to achieve and what their business priorities are.

So if we start from there, get some basic technology in place instead of taking two years to design it, take a short time to get it in place and say ‘Okay, how’s that?’.

Generally speaking what they would say is ‘Oh yeah, that’s good but really I wanted to do…’ Okay, next drop cycle.

And as they get more experienced they say ‘Oh yeah, but if it only could do…’ and just keep evolving it that way rather than this big bang ICT project with a fuller risk, that generally don’t deliver the scope, generally take forever, and generally cost more than you anticipated for doing small chunks.

This way you can build on it along the way as the users get experience in understanding how they want to use the system; and that’s a different methodology than we use in some projects.

ADM: How has the high operational tempo of the ADF affected how you do business?

Farr: I think that’s been one of the real issues for us because things – we have to react to it, we don’t have a lot of time to sit back and look at the whole overall architecture; we’ve just got to do it, get it in, and support it.

And so what’s that, I think, resulted in is a significant number of what I call point solutions that are good but don’t really integrate.

When I had the opportunity to go with CDF to the Middle East and spoke to the CIS guys there, one of the questions I got across the board: ‘Why is the deployed environment different to the fixed environment? Why are we working with a different product or different configuration or a different architecture than we actually are used to in the race, train and sustain environment?’

Now the reality is it just had to be done really quickly but now is, I think, the opportunity for us to actually have that common architecture, common platform, common systems, common hardware across – to the extent that it can be – across the fixed and the deployed environments, so that as people go through the race/train/sustain, they go race/train/sustain/deploy and they’re used to using the equipment.

They don’t have to learn again once they get into theatre, and that was absolutely across the board.

The CIS people just didn’t like it.

I think the key point is that we needed to get more standardisation.

I think just maybe the urgency of being able to support operations, of what it was like out there and how they needed, not as a nice to have but as absolutely essential, they needed 24/7 support.

I took that away from the trip.

I came away enormously impressed with the people that were there and some of things they did literally making work what should never have worked.

But they actually made it work, and I came away thinking we just have to support these people better; it’s not fair that we’re actually putting them through that if we can avoid it.

So it did actually quite significantly change the way I thought and really made me much more determined to be able to support the warfighter.
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