Own the IT function
Another way to score government business is to own its IT services. Systems integrator Ajilon pierced the veil around WA Police by becoming the agency’s preferred IT outsourcer (except for enterprise resource planning).
“It’s easiest to do projects for government if you’re running their IT function,” says Paul Wilkins, Ajilon’s public sector consulting director and strategic lead.
“Doing that outside of an outsourcing arrangement is quite difficult—the projects come along sporadically and the pipeline is difficult to see. We have an advantage being in government and we see the pipeline coming,” he adds.
With Wilkins’ background in WA government including Department of Planning and Infrastructure CIO and Ministry of Justice director of information services, the other lesson for resellers seeking to emulate Ajilon’s success may be to hire from government.
The WA government awarded Ajilon the contract to develop WA’s sex offender register that went live last October, the most comprehensive of its type in the world, Wilkins says.
Unlike most government projects, the register used agile development methods and five “sprints” as it evolved from concept to implementation. Another departure is that the public website is owned by Community Protection WA, a government department, while the data is provided by WA Police.
The website offers real-time details (including photos) of 2900 registered offenders and has three functions:
- Trace missing child sex offenders in the community who stopped reporting to police
- Help citizens find convicted child sex offenders in their neighbourhoods
- Perform background checks, such as of a nanny or childcare worker.
Wilkins says security and trust were critical: information is handed over only once the citizen provides their driver’s licence. The image sent to them is embedded with their details to discourage sharing on social media or online. Background checks are at the discretion of the Assistant Commissioner for State Crime.
“This was the first time the WA Police gave access to internal records (to the public),” Wilkins says. And the success of the service that records 700 queries a month has led police in other states to investigate similar solutions, he says.
The Microsoft .NET back end talks to a standard HTML front end for the website. Wilkins says: “It uses the police enterprise services bus; the only new component is a proprietary Oracle secure gateway that’s part of the ESB suite.”
This integration of legacy technology with new applications doing “tricky things” is a common refrain in government, he says. The ESB in a modular or service-oriented architecture enables this interaction by translating messages between systems, such as a police database and the web, securely. It also enables complex systems to be built out of reusable code blocks, speeding application delivery while cutting costs, which is increasingly influential on government decision makers
In government parlance, agencies must provide efficiency dividends while delivering superior citizen services, otherwise known as ‘doing more with less’.
And this is the crux of any pitch to government. Wilkins says: “All the agencies in WA, with the exception of Education, have an annual efficiency dividend.”
One way to help government clients achieve their mandates is to move from bespoke to off-the-shelf systems. It also means freeing up resources. In the case of WA Police, that means shifting uniformed officers out from behind desks and on to the front lines. This presents opportunities for resellers in areas such as contact centres and online policing.
“If they (police) can create an online reporting tool they can save a high number of full-time equivalent officers in the call centre,” Wilkins says.
There is also potential for big data and analytics to provide more effective and proactive policing through spotting crime trends.
System integrators may also consider the gamut of requirements before recommending mobile apps. Wilkins says Ajilon advised a government client to cautiously implement a property damage mobile app last year until all the integration kinks were ironed out. “While mobile apps allow the reporting they have to do something with the data and that requires back-end smarts.”
Australian police are also likely to follow the lead of their New Zealand counterparts, he says, who partly attribute a 13 percent cut in crime to equipping officers with iPads.
Support the agency
Where the channel can support the public sector in its mission to serve citizens better, it’s likely to get a hearing. This was the case with hosting provider Bulletproof, which simplified the release of the annual Federal Budget papers for Treasury. But first it had to iron out the department’s operations, says Michael Tran, a web and database team leader at Treasury involved with the project.
Treasury has about 50 public websites that had to be taken offline whenever a patch was applied, Tran says: “We tried to minimise outages by doing it out of hours.”
Treasury was also scheduling power outages in its data centres that lasted entire weekends, which wasn’t well received by staff and citizens who needed around-the-clock access to Treasury resources.
The introduction to Bulletproof came through the hoster’s relationship with the broadband community discussion site, Whirlpool. Treasury was swayed by how Bulletproof handled distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the popular site, Tran says.
“We approached Bulletproof and told them we wanted a point of presence leveraging their networks to enable disaster recovery and business continuity for our websites,” he says.
Treasury now routes its public website traffic through Bulletproof’s service using a caching reverse proxy. This ‘web accelerator’ has the advantage of making Treasury websites highly available – even during scheduled outages – while reducing bandwidth costs to Treasury.
Tran estimates only about one percent of traffic now comes to Treasury’s origin servers: “So that’s a lot of money we’re saving.”
But the big performance leap came when it applied this strategy to the release of the Budget. Previously, Treasury coordinated an ad hoc content distribution network by burning the Budget papers to CD-ROM for upload to mirror servers at up to four other agencies about half an hour before the Treasurer’s speech. The process was manual and required intervention when syncing changes to mirrors after the information was live.
“Every year before we started using this technology at Bulletproof, our website would crash because of the sheer interest,” Tran says.
“We just weren’t sized to accommodate all those requests at the same time. It was pretty much a DDoS.”
The release of the 2013 Budget saw a traffic peak of 183Mbps, far greater than Treasury’s 40Mbps communication pipe usually shared with corporate traffic such as emails, BlackBerry and Citrix.
“We didn’t have enough bandwidth to accommodate all that interest. After we put this in (Bulletproof), everything was so snappy,” Tran says.
Cutting travel costs
Treasury, like many Federal government departments, is investing in video conferencing to cut travel costs and distribute work or access skills around Australia. The agency has also just changed over from Blackberry to Apple iPhone for its handsets.
Tran says the Australian Government Information Office (AGIMO) panels “help people like me who don’t have time to do the research”.
“If service providers can get on that list and start talking to AGIMO or Finance that would be a huge benefit for them. The other thing I really value is having access to skilled engineers. Service providers should definitely participate.”
While supplying hardware or software is a defined activity with a set number of items bought by the agency, providers of elastic services must deal with ambiguity as a constant. For instance, the first a cloud service provider may hear of a customer content drop is when requests start pinging against their firewalls, says Bulletproof director of sales and marketing Mark Randall.
“We have to be aware of customer requirements in how they release content; it’s in their control rather than ours,” Randall says. “In cloud, someone signs up and plays with it. It evolves along a very iterative basis and the scope of services evolves over daily or weekly basis.”
Channel partners and their clients must also be aware of the strains fancy new apps will put on the back end, he says.
“Infrastructure is a bit like logistics: the poor, forgotten cousin of the sexy stuff. There’s a tendency to focus on apps and the business-process layer and make an assumption that the infrastructure you had last year is capable of supporting the new things you want to do.”
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