Defence is now expecting its OneDefence Data platform to be operating as a “minimum viable capability” in late March or early April, having previously aimed for the end of last year.
Chief information officer Chris Crozier told a senate estimates hearing that the technology platform is “in production” for both protected and secret information.
The platform had been expected to achieve “minimum viable capability” – a relatively new concept in Defence designed to get new tools into the hands of personnel sooner – status by December last year.
That would have come months after KPMG wound up its work on the project.
But Crozier said the system is currently only ingesting synthetic data and remains under test.
“We’re still continuing to shake the systems out, so at this point in time we have not actually hit minimum viable capability (MVC),” he said.
“MVC is scheduled for the end of March [or] early April and we’re going through the process of ingesting and shaking out the datasets associated with it.”
Health knowledge management is the first part of Defence that will make use of the new data environment.
“At the moment we don’t want to be ingesting live patient data until we confirm the support of that system, which is why we’re currently ingesting synthetic [data] and proving the technology,” Crozier said.
After KPMG handed over what it, and its consortium partners, had built, there was a hypercare period where “deficiencies that were identified, and KPMG then corrected those.”
“The platform was delivered per the contract,” Crozier said.
“Now, we’re in the process of ingesting the necessary datasets to be able to then complete and have the analytical engines available.”
A major change for the program is that the work is primarily being performed by Defence staff, rather than by contractors, although Crozier noted the odd contractor is still engaged.
“At this point in time, it’s the Commonwealth that is now firmly in charge of the OneDefence Data platform, making the decisions associated with that from an architecture perspective and so on, and managing the completion of requirements to hit MVC,” he said.
Crozier said that in addition to ingestion and processing, some of the additional work being performed on the platform related to “additional requirements” added to the program, as well as a desire to utilise “additional technology capabilities of the stack that we’ve actually installed.”
The program has previously faced delays after due diligence work by Defence uncovered problems that needed to be corrected.