Parliament’s IT systems a complete shambles

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news The department which runs Australia’s Federal Parliament has published a damning report acknowledging it has widespread problems with IT service delivery and infrastructure, stemming from the fact that it has “no parliament-wide IT strategic plan” and no mechanism for making strategic IT decisions, despite a decade of reports warning of the situation.

The report, entitled ‘Review of Information and Communication Technology for the Parliament’ and available in PDF format, was put together by former public servant Michael Roche and delivered in August 2012. It was released last week by the Department of Parliamentary Services, which oversees the operation of the Federal Parliament, including the Senate, the House of Representatives, politicians’ electorate offices and associated bodies such as the Parliamentary Library.

The report details the fact that the Federal Parliament is a substantial consumer of technology, with close to 5,000 users in Canberra’s Parliament House and located in parliamentarians’ electorate offices. The network contains more than 500 file servers, including in electorate offices, and close to 4,400 desktop PCs and laptops (currently being updated to Windows 7). A wide area network provides services to electorate offices, while total annual expenditure on ICT reaches close to $24 million, with about 105 dedicated IT staff meeting the parliament’s technology needs. However, the report acknowledged that management of that IT infrastructure and resources was not ideal.

“The current governance arrangements covering the delivery of ICT to the Parliament are fragmented and do not cover all aspects of the ICT service delivery life cycle,” the report states. “Notwithstanding the fact that there is a single overarching objective for parliamentary ICT — that is to support the work of the Parliament and its members — there is no one governance body charged with the planning for and co-ordination of ICT across the parliamentary departments.”

“There is no parliament-wide IT strategic plan nor is there any formal mechanism for agreeing, prioritising, resourcing and oversighting such a plan. There is no formal mechanism to ensure that critical and/or strategic ICT decisions are dealt with at the appropriate level. And there is no formal process to ensure that decisions by one parliamentary department do not impact the other departments adversely.”

“There is no Chief Information Officer to provide leadership on ICT issues across Parliament.”

The report stated that the department had in place a set of procedures through which it prioritised projects for delivery, including IT projects, but in the absence of a parliament-wide ICT strategic plan, it was “not possible” to be certain that individual IT projects were aligned with the strategic objectives of the Parliament, or that the selected priorities were appropriate.

The report also details the fact that this has been an issue in the Federal Parliament for more than a decade, with the need for strategic parliament-wide ICT governance being recognised in a similar report produced in 2002, again in 2006, and again in 2008.

“All three reports recommended that the Senior Management Co-ordination Group (SMCG) assume greater responsibility for strategic ICT issues,” last week’s report found. “Notwithstanding the inclusion of provision of strategic guidance on parliamentary ICT requirements in SMCG’s terms of reference in February 2012, ten years on from the original recommendation, the need for parliament-wide ICT governance has increased to the point where a dedicated ICT governance body is justified.”

The report added that there did not appear to be a proactive process of considering emerging technology and its likely impact on parliament, not of conducting a dialogue with parliamentarians and their staff about the issue. Neither was it clear that existing IT projects had considered whole of life costs and support responsibilities.

This lack of strategic IT vision and governance was playing out in a substantial way with respect to the parliamentarians, from all sides of politics, that the department’s IT division serves.
For example, the report noted that there was “considerable frustration” at “delays in adopting new technology, and the inflexibility of the rules covering the provision of much of their ICT capability”. In one highly publicised example, parliamentarians were frustrated about the fact that the parliament had not focused on delivering services through Apple’s popular iPad tablet.

Similarly, parliamentarians were frustrated with the slow process of getting access to iPhones instead of the traditional Blackberry devices, and even at the inability to install third-party applications on their mobile devices. And the speed of the broadband connection to electorate offices — a mere 2Mbps, slower than most Australians are able to achieve through consumer-grade ADSL or HFC cable connections — also came in for complaint.

“Virtually every interviewee mentioned the speed of the electorate office connection as an issue,” the report found. “In some offices it was claimed that the speed of the link was little better than dial-up. There was strong support for the provision of capacity consistent with that commonly available in the area in which the electorate office is located.”

Even shared hard disk space in electorate offices came in for complaint, as did the inability of parliamentarians to access to the Adobe InDesign desktop publishing package in Parliament House (it is available to electorate offices). Furthermore, electorate offices didn’t appear to have wireless connectivity, meaning laptop users might not be able to get access to the parliamentary network without an Ethernet connection. Separately, parliamentarians also complained about the ongoing distribution of some parliamentary papers in hard copy — preferring distribution via tablets and Wi-Fi access instead.

Wider IT infrastructure issues also abounded. For example, the report found that the servers in the central computer room in Parliament House did not have off-site business continuity functionality, although data backups were stored offsite. “It is understood that budgetary considerations precluded the establishment of a second site in Parliament House or offsite,” the report found.

In addition, there are even problems with the corporate systems the Parliament runs, with the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Department of Parliamentary Services itself running separate versions of the TRIM records management system, and different finance systems from vendors such as SAP and Technology One.

“Notwithstanding the commonality of the systems, there are three licensed copies of TRIM, two licensed copies of Finance 1, two licensed copies of Chris21 and a single copy of SAP – all on the one network,” the report stated. “These arrangements are in contrast to the trend for smaller organisations to outsource such systems and the trend in government to consolidate corporate systems at the portfolio level.”

The delivery of the report is not the first time that the Federal Parliament has come under fire for its poor performance in the area of IT service delivery. In December 2010, for example, it was revealed that the Parliament was upgrading to the poorly received Windows Vista operating system instead of the much more highly regarded Windows 7 release. Windows Vista was broadly ignored by all but a few large Australian organisations, with most choosing to keep running the long-lived Windows XP platform instead of upgrading to an operating system which had suffered a problematic development cycle. A number of features promised for Vista didn’t make it into the end release, and reviewers pinioned Microsoft for stability and driver problems in the platform.

In addition, the iPad and iPhone issues have been widely documented in the press over the past several years, as has the Parliament’s long-term struggle to deliver Wi-Fi services to parliamentarians.

The Roche report makes a number of recommendations aimed at resolving the problems — including the appointment of a chief information officer. Eija Seittenranta, formerly a general manager with in the IT division at the Department of Human Services and chief information officer of the Department of Health and Ageing, has been appointed to the role.

The news comes as state governments all around Australia currently appear to be experiencing a systemic inability to deliver major IT projects, and in some cases, basic IT services. In November last year, for example Victoria’s Ombudsman handed down one of the most damning assessments of public sector IT project governance in Australia’s history, noting total cost over-runs of $1.44 billion, extensive delays and a general failure to actually deliver on stated aims in 10 major IT projects carried out by the state over the past half-decade.

Like Queensland, Western Australia has broadly walked away from its unsuccessful IT shared services plan, and in New South Wales in mid-August, a landmark report into the management of the NSW Public Sector commissioned by the state’s new Coalition Government described how dozens of overlapping and competing systems and services providers have created “chaos” when it comes to the state’s current IT shared services paradigm.

However, all of the major eastern seaboard states – Queensland, NSW and Victoria – are currently aware of the issue and attempting to address it through the development and implementation of wide-ranging IT strategic plans. Of the three, NSW currently appears most advanced with its plan; and the state is known to have suffered the least catastrophic IT projects of the three.

opinion/analysis
Wow. Looks like almost everything that could go wrong here has gone wrong. Australia’s Federal Parliament doesn’t have sufficient business continuity in place, didn’t have a CIO until recently, doesn’t have an IT strategy plan or even a way of making strategic IT decisions, has a cacophony of wasteful duplicated systems, can’t even deliver Wi-Fi to electorate offices (a matter of installing a new router!) or modern broadband and can’t manage its mobile device fleet sufficiently. And it’s still printing out paper documents and distributing them to parliamentarians. In 2012. 2012!!

Previously I had thought issues of basic IT service delivery were largely restricted to Australia’s state governments. But now I see that things in Federal Parliament are also at a 1990’s level. It’s no wonder that many parliamentarians’ staff simply ignore the existing infrastructure and bring in their MacBooks with a 3G connection, using their personal mobile phones to get things done. This is nothing short of a bad joke.

One hopes that the new CIO, Seittenranta — who looks to be a very high level IT executive, normally too high a level for this kind of basic IT service delivery — has been brought in as a pinch-hitter to resolve these issues. Certainly DHS has been run as an extremely tight ship; one hopes Seittenranta will be able to bring things up to speed in a few years at the Federal Parliament as well.

Image credit: Office of Malcolm Turnbull

19 COMMENTS

  1. As someone who just waited more than a month to get a router installed at my own expense, and preferred to take on ‘i’ devices also at own expense rather than stick with a blackberry with all its apps disabled, i say bravo renai.

    one issue of major importance here – and a reason why this report got written in the first place – is the near completion of a 3 or 4 year campaign to get parle ICT out of the dead hand of the dept of finance and under the direct control of the Parliament itself for the first time.

    That actually gives me real hope that things are changing.

    • *sigh* I hear a lot of these kinds of stories.

      Right now, the facts of the matter are that as a very small business, Delimiter is able to provide me with dramatically better IT resources than you get as a Senator, Scott. And that’s truly a bad joke.

      I’ve been reporting on government IT for the better part of a decade now, but it always surprises me how different it is from the private sector. In the private sector, so much of what is mentioned in this report is taken as a ‘business as usual’ effort, not a special effort to get up to speed. And it’s not that way because the private sector inherently has more money, it’s that way because IT can actually deliver major productivity benefits that will help businesses overall. And people recognise that.

      Our parliamentarians are in high-pressure jobs, taking in an obscene amount of information and making highly important decisions daily which underpin the operation of the rest of Australia. The fact that they aren’t provided with the best technology is just appalling. The amount of members of parliament we have is by necessity limited. The great technology which would rapidly expand their ability to do their job is not. We should be supporting them to the utmost.

      $24 million in annual spend but no centralised plan or CIO to manage it … insanity.

    • Hey Scott,

      Love your work man. A lot of the time you seem to be the only sensible voice on all these committees :o)

    • Next time instead of giving yourselves a pay rise, how about fixing the Parliamentary IT? You guys didn’t seem to have much trouble sorting out the pay rises between yourselves…

      PS yes your IT is crap at APH. Stop outsourcing everything and build up some internal expertise.

  2. Four years ago, Gershon gave top priority in his recommendations to 1) pan-government governance and 2) agency governance. Yet clearly, this agency (department) has no effective governance in place. How can this be? Oh yes – because recommendation 2 cannot be assured on delivery until recommendation 1 is delivered and working – and while the pan-government governance remains a passive elephant stamper rather than an active herd controller, it’s likely that there will continue to be gaps.

    Isn’t it time that all governments in Australia – federal, state and local, got serious about understanding why Gershon used AS 8015 (now AS/NZS/ISO/IEC 38500) as his benchmark for assessing governance of IT, and then actually applied it?

    Appointing a CIO for Parliamentary Services is a good start, but it’s not governance. Good governance in an area where there will be deeply competing priorities and much need for rationalisation requires a strongly engaged top level decision-making forum comprised of the department head and most of its business leaders, with a couple of key stakeholders (MPs), assisted by the CIO and, ideally, with independent expert guidance.

    Will we see it, or will we see another traditional IT in charge scenario?

  3. I wonder if this article partly explains why the Libs think their NBN plan is so good and that the Labor NBN is “World of tomorrow”/overkill stuff?!!

    I expect a lot of pollies (much like many average Australians) don’t really do much of that “IT stuff” at home and a lot of the IT they would be exposed to would be “at work”.

    Food for thought….

  4. Who photoshoped that Toshiba laptop in Turnbull’s picture? We know the original picture had a Commodore64 in it ! Yeah but seriously, sounds terrible :|

  5. Im not surprised! I watched the House of Reps when the vote for the new deputy speaker was taken and its was a complete shambles. Assistants wandering around with wooden boxes collecting bits of paper, and then the poor lady at the main table had to count them all MANUALLY. I was shocked how backward parliament is in terms of IT. I think its time they upgraded. Maybe they could get new wooden boxes!

  6. “A matter of installing a new router” – that easy is it? Just bang a NetGear running WEP or something like that in there ya reckon? I guess Parliament wouldn’t need to worry about security or capacity planning,distribution of policies – nothing like that. I mean, who would possibly want to penetrate Parliament House’s network, all that useless information these overpaid time wasters are harboring.

    Since people started getting iPhone’s, It turns out everyone’s an IT expert these days… Geez why don’t they just put everyone on Google Apps? That fixes everything.

  7. Well if you already know it’s not that easy, why do you “journalists” mislead everyone pretending as though you know what you’re talking about when really you have NFI and make it sound as though it’s so trivial.

    I agree it sounds like things aren’t going as well as they probably could but nothing gets up my spine more when naff freelance iPad hugging journalists sitting in their home office write about enterprise and corporate IT when most of them wouldn’t know the first thing that goes on in the backend of an large tech operation.

    What might work for your little one-man show at home or even small office of 10 or 20 staff is not what works in an organisation supporting hundreds, potentially thousands spread over multiple sites.

    Funny thing is, if they took your advice and “just installed a router” – how would that be aligned with the other issues they’re facing? How does throwing in a wIreless router without much planning fit in with their overall “road map”. Lack of planning and ad-hoc solutions, hmmm isn’t that what got them here in the first place?

    • Mate … I’m not a n00b. I’m a former systems administrator, I’ve been reporting on enterprise IT for a decade now — I understand that it’s not the same as consumer-land. If you doubt this, I encourage you to talk to other Delimiter readers about the issue. Ask them how much I know. I think you may be surprised.

      However, a corporate deployment of, for example, Cisco units which would provide Wi-Fi as well as handle the office DSL connection, is one of the more basic types of technology deployments for an organisation this size. It’s basic infrastructure which virtually every organisation already has.

  8. Mate, I don’t know how to break this to you, but things have changed in 10 years. No offence but in the Enterprise world, a Systems Administrator is really on the same rung as Help Desk.

    Even based on your suggestion of how they might deploy Cisco Wireless (points awarded for use of the Cisco keyword) with a DSL line, the reality is I don’t need to ask other readers, I can already see you don’t know what your talking about and you’ve never been exposed to an enterprise IT environment.

    Yes, an enterprise might use the Cisco gear for their wireless, but what about multi-site deployment and management? Should they also use those fancy controllers? Have you even heard of them?

    Somehow I don’t think an enterprise organisation uses DSL connections. Maybe you might use that at home, but not really suited to support a few hundred people. Doesn’t really cut it.

    About 10 or 15 years ago I too was a Sys Admin and all the time these days I realise how little I knew back then, what a junior I was walking around thinking I was pretty good. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

    These days, as an enterprise consultant, year on year I realise how little I still know. It’s a never ending cycle of learning.

    • Alright that’s it. I’m not discussing this any further, and you, sir, have been placed on a one week ban on commenting on Delimiter. Please see our comments policy here:

      http://delimiter.com.au/comments-policy/

      Note that we ban “Obvious and repetitive trolling to get a reaction” and “Comments which display a lack of rationality or reasonableness.”

      I have demonstrated to you that I do know what I am talking about, and I am not going to debate this issue further. It is not unreasonable for me to suggest that it should not be a huge issue to deploy Wi-Fi access points in electorate offices for politicians who have requested them. This is a standard enterprise IT deployment.

      I will remove your comments ban after a week.

    • Whats with the nerd rage?

      Renai made a perfectly reasonable suggestion, with the only flaw being he didn’t list it as a fully costed roll-out schedule to keep “enterprise consultants” happy :/

      I agree entirely though, that IT is a never ending cycle of learning, that’s why we come to sites like Delimiter…

      • Enterprise consultants always have to over-complicate things, how do you think they get consulting gigs?
        If any old sysadmin could deploy a secure, enterprise wireless solution, who on earth would need a consultant?
        I certainly agree that you need good architects to do enterprise IT planning and architecture, however the dude was pretty rude and I definitely wouldn’t hire him, most of my stakeholders would eat him for breakfast with an attitude like that.
        Anyway, we’re all be made redundant by the cloud so it’s all moot.

  9. Hopefully ben is not working for a government IT team.

    Or, if he is, he has been made aware of the public service code of conduct.

Comments are closed.