Services Australia is set to kick off an end-to-end architecture review this year that will help it to determine a future path for several key but ageing applications.
Charles McHardie.
Chief information and digital officer Charles McHardie told a senate estimates hearing yesterday that the agency had invested “significant” resources in recent years into its core infrastructure, but not into the applications or database software hosted on it.
“We’ve had significant investment over the last few years in our infrastructure, so the servers, whether they’re mainframe, mid-range or x86, [or] our gateways, all of that capability is pretty much best-in-class,” McHardie said.
“Where we do suffer is in some of the applications that have been around for a while, maintaining the workforce that is required to look after those applications, and also making sure that they are patchable, secure and you have vendor support moving forward into the future.”
McHardie said that the architecture review would address these concerns, and map out and cost an upgrade path for these applications.
“This year we’re undertaking an end-to-end architecture review, primarily focused on each of our major systems,” he said.
“We have some brand new systems and we have some systems that have been around for some time, and the results of that architecture will drive some of that future investment.
“We intend to go back to the government and show them what our plans would be.”
In a recent written question, Services Australia highlighted four systems it runs that it characterises as “legacy” – the child support system, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, income security integrated system, and the Medicare and pharmaceutical benefits system.
Based on McHardie’s comments, all of these could emerge from the architecture exercise with documented upgrade paths that form the basis of a business case for funding.
Replacements have been attempted before.
The child support system runs on a backend from 2002 called Cuba that is built on Cool:Gen (now CA Gen).
A replacement program for the child support system was kicked off in 2013 but burned through its budget and produced only a new frontend.
As iTnews reported at the time, Cuba remained in the backend, and decisions around replacing it were deferred.
McHardie said yesterday that despite challenges, Services Australia continued to make enhancements to Cuba.
“There are still people globally that are building in CA Gen. There’s still a strong CA Gen community, the platform is still patchable and has a current operating system,” he said.
“If I look at what we’ve been up to as far as increasing functionality in the platform, we’ve been able to bake in improved customer visibility of payment details, the ability for customers to securely provide documents via the document lodgement service, and the ability for customers to update details via their authorised rep[resentative].”