Numerous Australian CIOs said they are moving quickly to ensure that their IT staff are doing work that meets business priorities and can generate the highest possible return on investment. For example, Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services CIO, Garry Hulme, said there are so many projects currently under way the agency couldn't get it all done if they simply sequenced one after the other.
"We have some 10,000 employees at more than 350 sites, 40 to 50 different areas of service including mental health, public housing and hospitals," Hulme said. "This year we will be focusing on infrastructure development, improving data communication and information storage to ensure there are enough workstations and access points. Being so diverse we are attempting to get value out of information we hold across our different services."
The department is also looking at ways to protect information and establish individual consent modules which creates considerable overhead. It also involves a lot of integration work to ensure standards are in place to share and move information.
"The biggest challenge in health related areas is [balancing] the demands for new equipment by health professionals against tight budgetary demands," he said.
For Perth-based Murdoch University IT services director Chris Foley, the biggest challenge today is implementing a configuration management system for the organization's 3,100 PCs to remotely manage inventory and configure and deploy software from one central point. "This is something we have manually managed in the past and will take about six months to implement," Foley said.
The next priority is server virtualization
"We have dabbled with it in the past and because it is becoming mainstream we are more confident about moving ahead," he said.
"Another major task is network redesign - this occurs every five to seven years and we will upgrading the network to include new technology such as wireless, VOIP and video over IP and other high speed network applications - we will complete the upgrade over the next two years. This year, we have a chance to build and plan a little more rather than just surviving as we have had to for the last three years."
Demands are great for everyone even high profile CIOs like Randall Mott of Hewlett-Packard. When assessing projects, Mott said he found at least 10 major IT budgets that were separate from one another, plus a variety of "shadow" IT activities that were going on outside those budgets.
Altogether, HP had about 1,200 IT projects in the works, he said .The main focus for online tender notification service TenderLink is developing its in-house JADE application which is used to manage subscribers.
"This is always our biggest priority," according to TenderLink IT manager Stephen Persson ."We always have a large number of development projects under way at any one time, and are continually looking for new and better ways to improve that software, and to successfully get it to market and in use by the electronic tendering fraternity."
South Australian department of trade and economic development corporate IT manager Roger Collini is currently implementing a content management system for Web site management .
"We are consolidating 20 Web sites down to five and hope to have it completed by the end of the year," Collini said. "We plan to update the customer relationship management system (CRM) and replace the records management system, as well as update our network and PCs . There are a lot of consultants who are bringing in their own laptops so we need to monitor access. "
Collini said there are always between two and five projects under way at any given time ."Our biggest challenge is meeting our customers' expectations with limited resources. Our customers are the department and they have high expectations. They want 100 percent results immediately," he said .
A healthy approach to prioritizing projects
Brisbane-based Mater Health Services CIO Mal Thatcher said the top three priorities for 2006 include: the replacement of ageing patient administration software and taking the business transformation opportunity to improve the patient experience; reducing the duplication of information; and exploring opportunities for online pre-admission services by introducing patient tracking technologies such as RFI D.
"We will be undertaking a business transformation project to improve our management of human resources - beyond requisite payroll transaction processing," Thatcher said.
"Mater has some 5,300 staff with complex skills-based rostering requirements. With a chronic shortage of skilled labor in health, having adaptive and responsive HR management information systems is critical. "
Thatcher has a range of business transformation projects under way from deployment of a BI platform to clinical information systems and the introduction of new speech recognition software.
"The biggest challenges I face as a CIO are no doubt the same for other CIOs working in large, complex environments such as health. Apart from the perennial issues of funding and resources, the biggest challenge is project execution, particularly relating to an organization's willingness and ability to adapt to change," Thatcher said.
"True business transformation has to be driven at all levels within an organization. When that happens - truly amazing results can be achieved !"
Avery Cloud, CIO at New Hanover Health Network, said that when he joined the health care provider two years ago, it was working on several resource-intensive projects that promised large returns on investment but "absolutely wore the [IT] organization out".
Cloud said he wanted to prioritize projects better and avoid having too many high-risk initiatives under way at one time. Fifteen months ago, he installed Compuware's Changepoint application portfolio management software, which has helped the provider whittle its portfolio of projects from 150 last year to about 100 now. "We need to have a better, single place of truth for our projects and services," he said.
(With Heather Havenstein)