Defence Business: ICT management oversight attacked by audit | ADM February 2012
John Hilvert | Canberra
This is the bottom line of recent audit into Defence’s oversight and management of its portfolio of ICT investments and projects. As a result, Defence has agreed to review and "clarify" the role of its Chief Information Officer (CIO) group after a federal audit found the division lacked supervision over some $300 million or 25 per cent of the department's ICT activities in 2011.
Released in late 2012, the report found successive surveys into Defence’s ICT environment had failed to provide senior decision?makers in the organisation with a reliable, consolidated view of Defence’s ICT including expenditure, servers, hardware and software applications.
“CIOG’s current knowledge of the Defence?wide ICT systems and expenditure, while the best available consolidation to date, is incomplete,” the report stated.
The “good” news is that CIOG had direct visibility of some 75 percent of Defence’s $1.2 billion annual expenditure on ICT. This was an improvement on May 2009, when CIOG had visibility of less than half of Defence’s ICT expenditure.
For Defence watchers, this continuing lack of visibility over the remaining expenditure meant its estimates of likely savings from its massive re-equipment programs were hard to “verify or validate”.
“Defence therefore has a less than complete view of the information needed to effectively manage its ICT, plan future systems, and fully deliver the savings necessary to support the White Paper targets,” the audit concluded.
The report is worth reading for its dry and familiar narrative of internecine and stealth moves by various committees to undermine a central approach to IT purchasing. It noted that Defence had established a high level governance committee—the Defence Information and Communication Technology Committee (DICTC)—to provide strategic direction for the planning, coordination and execution of ICT initiatives across Defence.
But DICTC was not well?integrated into the governance of the SRP. Decisions affecting its scope, timing, relative priority, and overall savings to be achieved by major ICT projects could also be made by other high level Defence committees without the direct knowledge of, or coordination with, DICTC or CIOG, according to the report. These committees include the SRP Stream Governance Committees, the Defence Workforce and Financial Management Committee, and the Defence Capability and Investment Committee.
“Coordination and information?sharing between these committees currently relies heavily on common membership, mainly of very high?level officials who are time?poor,” the audit found.
“By early 2011, it was evident that the relationships between the Defence committees responsible for the governance of ICT reform, for the governance of the SRP ICT reform stream, and for the oversight of ICT initiatives supporting other SRP streams were not clear,” it stated.
Defence internal surveys of ICT stakeholders reported that ICT demand management and prioritisation were “not functioning well” and that there was “no effective decision?making for trade?offs between competing initiatives".
“CIOG was not always included in stream governance arrangements and did not always have visibility of these ICT initiatives."
Defence silos
While the impetus of ICT reform “started to erode” Defence’s silos, management of its ICT, the absence of fully effective governance arrangements means that Defence ICT initiatives continue to be developed in the absence of processes to clearly identify and resolve competing priorities, properly identify interdependent initiatives, or provide a clear view of resources.
The report recommended the department clarify CIOG’s role as ICT service provider and coordinating capability manager of Defence ICT and that program managers adopt a “full partnership” model with CIOG to deliver relevant portfolio initiatives.
It also recommended an improved portfolio?level view of Defence’s enterprise needs and managing Defence as a single entity and avoid fragmented approaches to risks, benefits and financial monitoring of ICT investments. Defence accepted both recommendations. However this may be too little, too late.
The report suggested failure to re-align CIOG's activities with the rest of the department would have an adverse effect on the organisation's programs elsewhere. It points out that eight major SRP streams undertaken by the department relied on ICT projects or elements of ICT projects to succeed.
Scheduled slippages on some of the reform program streams were already evident at the time of the report, which the federal Auditor-General warned could have a domino effect on other SRP activities and threaten anticipated savings from the initiatives. The report also warned Defence was under-staffed by approximately 350, impacting on its ability to calculate and mitigate against risk.
At the time of this audit, Defence was yet to resolve the current over?commitment of CIOG resources, placing significant pressures on both the achievement of ICT priorities and the operational day?to?day running of Defence’s ICT.
In the event, Audit found that CIOG overspent its budget in 2010?11. It did so by investing in the replacement of end-of-life Data Centre infrastructure, accelerating other projects in the Integrated Plan of Work (IPW) to satisfy customer demands and bringing forward annual software licensing renewals to take advantage of early payments and relieve financial pressure accelerating other projects in the IPW to satisfy customer demands and bringing forward annual software licensing renewals to take advantage of year.
Audit reports that the most recent available data shows little recovery of the current schedule slippage of ICT initiatives supporting the SRP streams, and continuing increases in slippage in the project schedules for the IPW. In the present state, the majority of timeframes suggested for implementing ICT reforms remain as originally estimated and have yet to adjust to the feedback from program and project managers, showing delays in start?up and ongoing resource shortfalls.