Border Protection's digital transformation is in full swing

Driving a digital transformation through one government agency is hard enough, but when you’re transforming two sizeable agencies — while simultaneously merging them — the challenge goes to another level.

Yet a year after he joined the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) to drive its technology consolidation, CIO Randall Brugeaud believes a measured and collaborative approach has put the merged entity on the right track to long-term success.

The merger of the former Department of Immigration with the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (CBPS), which went into effect in July 2015, fostered “an ambitious agenda” that included a broad range of technical and integration challenges, Brugeaud told GTR in the lead-up to his presentation at the AC Events Technology in Government conference.

Although the two former organisations were officially merged a year ago, for Brugeaud and his colleagues that step was just the beginning. “We’re looking at how we deliver services to government, community and industry in a way that’s quite different to what we do now,” Brugeaud said. “High levels of digitisation, automation, better intelligence and targeting of connected information underpin all of that.”

The transformation is still very much a going concern, with agenda items ranging from consolidation of data networks, telecommunications and processing — “all of the things that take more than just a couple of months to prepare for”, Brugeaud said, noting that the team had achieved “an incredible amount” by the first anniversary of the merger.

Transforming for transformation

Immigration had previously outsourced its mainframe and midrange services to CSC through the massive ongoing Border Critical Infrastructure project. IBM, by contrast, was delivering services to CBPS and won the deal to support the integrated organisation — which has seen the team managing the transition of the CSC services into the consolidated environment.

Although technology integration had proved predictably complex, staff in the two agencies were functionally “much closer together than what we might have first thought”, Brugeaud said, and joint staff education had been a key part of the success of the joint engagement between the two organisations.

Department of Immigration and Border Protection's CIO, Randall Brugeaud.

Ongoing workshops for thousands of staff were held — in conjunction with the Major Capability Division led by Michael Milford, which delivers higher-level solutions around intelligence, biometrics, travel technologies and the like — to drive an internal Agile program of work that is helping staff rework the merged agency’s program-management discipline.

“The big thing that has been a priority for us is to get in front of the staff,” Brugeaud explained, “and to speak with them face to face. This has been a story that developed over time, where we got to operational strategy and organisational design — and that feeds into our new technology strategy as it’s being formed.

“Staff needed to be clear when they turn up to work about what their role is and how they are contributing to the new target state.”

Getting staff on board

By co-creating the target-state operating model and new organisational design with staff, the transformation team has been able to increase buy-in to the transformation — and design a forward strategy that reflects the capabilities and input of the staff.

Among other areas, this work addressed issues such as how staff would be located; how the transition team could foster cultural harmonisation between the two formerly separate departments; and how to build an integrated workforce plan under which staff can be tasked as necessary.

“We've quite openly said to staff that if we had drawn up the target-state operating model at the start of the process, it would have ended up quite differently,” Brugeaud said. “That was a testament to the input of the staff. The key has been making sure we can work within the constraints that everybody in government is dealing with.”

Also contributing to the overhaul was an ongoing program of engagement with the Digital Transformation Office (DTO), with which the evolving DIBP has had an ongoing relationship that included the development of transformation ‘exemplars’ around citizenship appointment bookings and simplification of the processes around managing importation of goods.

Close collaboration with the DTO had helped the DIBP team restructure both its people culture and its technological work plan around the tenets of the DTO’s Digital Service Standard (DSS).

“It’s necessary for us to be quite disruptive in our approach, so the DTO and the DSS they are following has been really useful to demonstrate a more agile way of looking at delivery,” Brugeaud said. “It has increased the prominence of our digital work and we’ve had no choice but to move to new approaches, new processes and new sourcing models.”

Those new models include, for example, efforts to partner with big suppliers for the creation of services, and work that is being done from a whole-of-government perspective. The combined teams are also revisiting procurement and sourcing strategies as well as their long-term plans for data analytics, team organisation and other aspects of the ongoing DIBP strategy.

“We have gone through quite an intensive process to look at how we operate, streamline intensive processes and deduplicate functions such as procurement and program management to come up with a far more stable foundation for how we deliver technology services to the department,” Brugeaud said.

“Our program of work is going to get about three times larger than what it is today. Over the next three years we’re going to need to be operating at a whole other level — and that isn’t going to be possible if we aren’t following this.”

You can catch Randall Brugeaud’s presentation at the Technology in Government conference and expo in Canberra, 2–3 August. He will be speaking on the second day of the event, Wednesday, 3 August, at 4.10 pm.

Image courtesy DIPB.