Services Australia is currently undertaking eight major transformation programs, focusing on reusing capability that the agency’s CEO of transformation projects Charles McHardie has touted will provide consistency, ease of use for staff, and cost savings.
The first and most costly program is the Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation (WPIT), which is now in its seventh year of operation at a cost of around AU$1.6 billion.
Another is the Health Delivery Modernisation program, which is heavily focused on the Medicare space and providing “stability” in the scheme’s core services, but also aimed at improving the experience for medical providers and Australians using the Medicare system.
The Residential Aged Care Funding Reform will see Services Australia deliver a brand new end-to-end system by September 2022; there’s also Veteran Centric Reform, which hopes to transform the way veterans interact with government; the agency is also undertaking a telco services program, which will result in a change to the way call centre operations are offered; and it now has the GovERP program under its care.
Rounding out the remaining two projects is the enhanced myGov program, which McHardie said will see the portal be “completely changed over the next two years” and the myGovID work it is doing alongside the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) and the Australian Tax Office (ATO).
More on myGovID: Researchers want Australia’s digital ID system thrown out and redesigned from scratch
The plan for these projects will be to make as much of the tech reusable where possible.
“Building out capability that can be reused in other transformation programs across federal government, the DTA has a large focus on making sure that that is the case,” McHardie said, who spoke before the Finance and Public Administration References Committee on Tuesday as part of its probe of the current capability of the Australian Public Service (APS).
“We are working very closely across federal government to make sure whatever we are building from a digital capability perspective, it is to the benefit of as many public service organisations as possible.”
He said Services Australia staff were “engaging very strongly” with the capability being rolled out, pointing to the final tranche of WPIT as an example.
“It has a very heavy focus on a single staff interface. At the moment, as it has been for several years, staff work across three separate systems when they’re processing Centrelink claims — this is placing all of that claims processing on one single SAP-based staff interface this financial year,” he explained.
“Staff have rallied behind that. It is allowing us to process claims more quickly, more effectively, making it easier for staff to actually work in the one system for the first time in many, many years.”
Services Australia staff member Emma White, who appeared before the committee in her capacity as Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) section secretary, discussed some of the issues plaguing the agency where IT was concerned, painting a picture that differed from McHardie’s.
“There is a serious problem with legacy systems and the technology that we’re using,” White said.
It was revealed in early 2018 that the Department of Human Services, now Services Australia, blew AU$135 million on a bad and functionally incomplete child support system, known as Pluto, which was the product of the department’s Child Support System Replacement Programme to replace the mainframe-based legacy platform, called Cuba, used by roughly 3,000 staff who oversee the collection and distribution of AU$1.5 billion in child support payments each year.
The now-morphed department went to tender for the Pluto project back in 2013, but decided in 2016 to pause its delivery, deciding to implement some work that was previously developed as part of WPIT.
Read more here: Human Services finally reveals details of bungled child support IT project
“There is a concern that given that Cuba hasn’t been replaced, and that it still does act as the brain, or such, a calculator, that if it falls over the new system Pluto is able to stand alone — and how much longer can we rely on a system that was already deemed end of life?” White said.
White said across the agency there were still a number of legacy systems in use.
“It means that, like many of our areas, that we work within two different systems, that information is not always necessarily mirrored, that what you find on one system is not necessarily on the other — and you have different cohorts of staff that may work on one system, or may need to move between the two,” she explained.
In one example, White said staff did not have a secure mechanism to deliver all customers — employers in this example — with information via email, so for many it needs to be done via post.
“More recently, our customers have been able to upload documents through myGov but we can’t reverse document upload to them … whilst there has been significant development in the capabilities of myGov, what we haven’t really seen is that keeping up with our needs,” she said.
50% of Services Australia’s IT workforce are contractors
According to Alistair Waters, CPSU national president, of the almost 1,600 labour-hire workers at Services Australia at the end of April, around 800 worked in the payments and integrity group raising debts.
“This labour-hire workforce was introduced when robo-debt was being implemented,” he told the committee. “Permanent staff who then worked in the robo-debt area objected to the awfulness of the robo-debt program and were moved to other duties. An insecure workforce of about 800 labour hire employees were then brought in by Services Australia to implement robo-debt.”
The data-matching program of work, colloquially known as robo-debt, kicked off in 2016. It saw the automatic issuing of debt notices to those in receipt of welfare payments through Centrelink.
Read more here: Federal Court approves AU$112m compensation in settlement for robo-debt failure
“In addition to its over-reliance on insecure workers, it is widely acknowledged that Services Australia’s ICT capabilities and systems are not as good as they could or should be,” Waters added.
The CPSU estimated that up to around 50% of the IT workforce at Services Australia are contractors.
Services Australia has the largest in-house IT capability within the federal government. McHardie said the agency has the aim to get to a 70/30 blend of APS and contracted staff, and it also wants to upskill the APS staff it has.
But there’s an “attracting and retaining talent” problem and McHardie said staff needed to feel like they were being invested in. He said the agency has a number of cadetships, traineeships, apprenticeships, and a grad program, which last time saw the agency, through its “STEM program” approach university graduates from 230 different degree types directly to recruit them into its technology group. He said Services Australia is doing the same again this year.
He also pointed to the new Pegasystems platform the agency was implementing around entitlements calculations, which covers a number of its programs, including Centrelink, residential aged care, Veteran Centric Reform, and Medicare. McHardie said there’s a “resource shortfall” with APS staff having appropriate knowledge of the new system.
“That’s a new technology for us. Traditionally, the legacy entitlement calculation engines that we have, have been around for several decades … we have a fairly large APS workforce that looks after that entitlement calculation engine day in, day out,” he explained.
“But the new system we’re bringing on board, we are training that workforce up now … we’re running a Pega Academy to get them up to speed in that capability, but in the interim, we’re relying heavily on a contracted workforce, a systems integrator, that being Infosys, to come into the agency help us.
“You do have challenges as you roll out new systems to bring in the skillsets that you need.”
Another good example, he said, was with SAP. In 2017, a decision was made by the agency to have SAP CRM and ERP systems in its tech stack moving into the future.
“And we made a conscious decision then to invest heavily in our APS workforce, and indeed, Services Australia now has the largest SAP workforce in the southern hemisphere,” McHardie said.
He cited that as one of the reasons Services Australia took the GovERP work from the Department of Finance on July 1.
Currently there are 75 APS staff and 125 contractors working on GovERP but McHardie expects that blend will change, with recruitment underway and also staff transitioning over from the completed SAP WPIT work.
