DXC migrates the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority to Azure

DXC has been chosen to migrate the IT systems of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) to Azure.

The agency assesses the potential impact of pesticides and veterinary medicines on humans, animals and plants before approving them for distribution and use in Australia.

The migration is part of the APVMA’s Enabling Technology program, which aims to turn the agency into a digitally-enabled regulator by 2022. It also came following the agency’s relocation from Canberra to Armidale, NSW in 2018.

DXC was tapped to migrate the IT environment out of third-party managed data centres into Azure for platform as a service, backup as a service and security as a service. A third party company is also digitising the APVMA’s analogue records and providing ongoing managed IT services.

APVMA executive director of service improvement and integration Bob Smith said the digitisation of records is key to the agency’s plans to be a digital regulator. “We are moving from what was largely a paper-based organisation to digitising 167,000 files,” he said.

The digitisation process is set to complete in September 2021 with all information loaded into the APVMA’s new electronic document management system.

The ongoing migration has also helped the APVMA’s 190 staff transition to working from home at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We moved away from rigid desktops in the first place, migrated everybody onto the laptops
as stage one and bringing on Skype for Business and getting people to utilise the digitised
files that we already have into the system,” Smith said.

Smith added the impact of COVID-19 had been minimal as APVMA management decided to have staff work from home in mid-March. He said performance was maintained and even improved as a result, as some staff are still based in Canberra and virtual meetings now reduced the need for staff travel.

“That is in itself going to introduce an interesting challenge for the future because whatever the new normal might be, it may not involve a permanent location in an office.”

DXC is also working on implementing Dynamics 365 as the APVMA’s new CRM and to manage workflow, which is set to complete later this year.