The organisation uses IT principally as a tool to assist with experiments in its nuclear reactor and not as a revenue-generator, although it is also used in finance, accounting and communication operations.
ANSTO delivers specialised advice, scientific services and products to government, industry, and research organizations. It also houses Australia's only nuclear rector and the third of its kind in the world, OPAL, which is used for research and nuclear medicine production.
ANSTO information services manager Mike Beckett heads-up a team of 55 IT staff who work separate to the organisation's 10 support crew who assist scientific operations. Its networks are similarly divided between 'corporate' operations and the reactor, which has its own IT instruments and requirements, spread over an 11 hectare campus with two main sites and a separate Sydney office at the at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
Beckett said the "pain" phase of the ITIL roll out, including service desk, and management of incidents, capacity, availability and change, was completed in June last year.
"The thrust of the exercise is to turn the IT group around so we focus on the user needs and the business requirements," Beckett said.
"We started on the strategic issues common to IT and now we are moving to the deep-seated difficult areas like configuration and release management.
"We can, to an extent, use templates from the UK government (which ) and we have had really good results [because] the problems like broken processes and a lack of knowledge are common to IT shops."
Performance levels and expectations are defined in service level agreements and compared to external benchmarks. Beckett said external benchmarks, crucial to maintain a high service delivery, were obtained from various industry sources including the Australian Government Information Management Office which assisted with its telecommunications and Microsoft licence agreements.
Beckett, who has previous ITIL experience in government IT shops, recruited an ITIL expert to assist with deployment timelines in what he describes as "the best money we have spent".
The ITIL version 2 deployment is a phased roll out, which began with a focus on end users including service, problem and incident management, and followed with capacity and availability management.
Release and configuration management will be rolled out this year as the organisation moves to ITIL version 3, during which time Beckett and his team will centralise all software within the IT department and deploy its monitoring platform to establish the licence profiles of each of the 1200 PCs, Macs and Linux-based devices.
Software licences covering about 150 applications have been extracted from business units and centralised within a database held by the IT service desk. Expired and unused licences, many which have been converted for multi-user and enterprise usage, can now be tracked within the database.
"Much of this work is low-hanging fruit, but you need to get on to them," Beckett said, adding it has recently reviewed its SAP contract for maintenance and support.
More upgrades in the pipeline
Beckett, a long-term advocate of IT and project management frameworks and policies such as ITIL and , plans to put his staff through additional ITIL training during the version 3 transition this year. Staff training for version 2 began in January 2007 and was completed in September last year which he said filled knowledge gaps and ensured consistent service delivery.
"If people are trained in ITIL or [an equivalent] framework, they can move within the industry to process-orientated environments... it is extremely valuable to everyone in IT," Beckett said.
The organisation has rationalised support contracts and slashed data centre costs with extensive virtualisation, including its IBM SAP servers, and by cutting its 200 servers down to 100 and moving them into a single warehouse.
The number of devices, including those used by scientists, was reduced from 3000 to 1200 which helped Beckett patch the entire fleet of Microsoft machines for a critical Windows exploit in less than three weeks.
ANSTO will move its large platforms to a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) model during the next few years, which will see a phased roll over into single common-layering and a low-level integration and restructure of its five environmental monitoring applications -- three which are designs on different technologies -- to increase efficiency. All 512 applications, of which 90 are commercial and administrative and the remainder scientific, are targeted for SOA integration.
Maintenance costs have been reduced through upgrades to the "entire network fabric", Beckett said, including core SAP and Oracle databases.
"IT managers are a great help for saving money. I have no problem allowing them to both invest capital for upgrades and for reducing ongoing costs where possible. Every dollar we spend is a dollar less in research," he said
ANSTO is now operating on the multi-gigabit research network between Sydney and Wollongong, as part of the upgrades, which also introduced gigabit links to staff computers and shifted network infrastructure from the organisation's two campus sites to street grey boxes (kerbside nodes), which resembles the architecture of a commercial telecommunications provider. A new wireless network dubbed ScienceNet will come online this year which will require new access controls to allow scientists and visitors to use the same AARNET WAN, while Beckett will continue work on a knowledge and content management strategy. ANSTO's IT staff are a mix of industry veterans, TAFE students and post-graduates from Wollongong University. Beckett recruited 11 staff, many university and TAFE students, within nine months during a previous shortage.