Defence’s mammoth IT modernisation program is having a positive effect on recruitment as the department continues with efforts to cut reliance on contractors.
Peter Alexander, Defence
CTO Peter Alexander revealed the department had successfully recruited for all 400 roles advertised last year, the “proof in the pudding” that its efforts to attract in-house talent were paying off.
Speaking during a ServiceNow Executive Circle in Canberra, Alexander said Defence is now getting people “knocking at our doors saying, ‘I want to come and work at Defence, you are doing cool things.”
This milestone was reached in part due to Defence “building modern platforms… and recruiting people with skills in those”, Alexander said.
“It’s a general challenge for government, building in-house capability,” he said.
“The pay scale is a challenge. The federal government pays what we pay. People will be remunerated less as public servant than as a contractor, 100 percent.
“The value proposition that we have are learning and development opportunities. We will give them great opportunities to make cool decisions and participate.
“The main [thing] for us that is driving attraction is that we are moving to modern platforms,” he added.
“We are building these modern platforms, and we are recruiting people with skills in those.”
Like a technology museum
However, Alexander said that some of Defence’s legacy IT remains a hindrance both for its technology capability and its hiring.
He likened parts of Defence IT to a “technology museum at the moment”.
“We are old and it’s not through anyone’s fault, but it’s just through the way we’ve built, the way we’ve had investment — the focus being on things that go bang rather than IT investment.
“Getting a workforce that can take you into the future is enabled by getting on those platforms. It’s really hard to hire someone by putting out a job ad saying, ‘We’re looking for a [Windows] Server 2012 operator.”
Alexander’s comments come as Defence attempts to shift its IT workforce balance from 20 percent government employees to 60 percent.
CIO Chris Crozier announced last year that the push would result in 500 new hires in real terms for its Defence Digital Group, a division formed in 2023.
“We are moving to public servants and partnerships with the industry, And that is a different paradigm to where we’re building internal skills and we’re leveraging off what industry do,” Alexander said.
“Contractors aren’t the dead end, but they are interested in their day rate,” he added. “And that’s just life.”
Genie out of the bottle
During the event, Alexander also lifted the lid on some of Defence’s artificial intelligence development.
As Crozier told the iTnews Podcast, Defence was unable to take part in last year’s federal government Copilot trial due to its largely on-premises infrastructure that was “not architected” to support the tool.
The department though, according to Alexander, is currently rolling out Microsoft 365 and is “so keen on Copilot”.
Indeed, Alexander revealed that Defence had “accidentally turned on Copilot for two days”.
“And the genie was out of the bottle because people were using it and getting cool outcomes,” he said. “The demand for generative AI in Defence is ginormous.
“We are so keen on Copilot. We’re rolling out [Microsoft] 365. We will use it, but we just have to have guarantees that it can ingest data in, but nothing goes out.”
At the same time, Alexander estimated that Defence is currently running about 100 AI activities currently.
This, he said, is a mixture of “what would traditionally call RPA [robotic process automation]” through to testing a “bunch of language models” and generative AI.
We have got it in our strategy; we know there are so many use cases where it will add value,” Alexander said.
“Agentic AI [is something] we’re really excited about as well because you can control it; you can give it a set of points.”
However, he added that Defence is “treading carefully” with AI.
“With other technology, mistakes are trivial,” he said.
“You move to the cloud: it costs you more money than you thought, but life goes on. The worry with generative AI is that if you pick a product or technology and you get it wrong, all your data is in your enemy’s hands.
“This compromises you beyond what you might think because they can predict what you’re going to be doing for the next bunch of years if they extract all your data.”
Eleanor Dickinson attended ServiceNow Executive Circle in Canberra as a guest of ServiceNow.