Centrelink to refresh data warehouse, trim software

17.04.2006
Following its call for tenders for business intelligence and performance management software last month, the South Australia Government's Centrelink scheme will also call soon for submissions to replace core software and data warehousing systems.

Helen Duke, Centrelink's senior IT development manager for the data systems development section, said the organization is undergoing a project to rationalize the number of presentation tools it uses and to replace its current data warehouse platform.

Centrelink's data warehouse environment consists of a "number of presentation products" including Cognos Inc. and Hyperion Solutions Corp., which process reference data and business rules. The data warehouse infrastructure consists of 100GB on NCR Corp.'s Teradata used for fraud detection, 500GB on DB2 on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris, and 189TB on MVS cartridge.

Duke said a new tender is due for release and is waiting final approval.

With 1000 service delivery points, 25,312 staff, 26 call centers, 87 million letters per year, 6.4 million customers, and 440 billion data items, Centrelink's data quality issues are ongoing, but according to Duke, are not dissimilar to other enterprises.

"We're doing a lot of work on data integrity routines," Duke told a data quality conference in Sydney last week.