Tech firms behind $100m NSW child protection overhaul

EYC3 Business Solutions, Salesforce and Squiz are among a large group of tech companies selected by the NSW Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) for the $100 million replacement of child protection system ChildStory.

With the first release of the upgraded tool planned to be deployed to caseworkers at the beginning of 2017, ChildStory will be an integrated system that holds details of a child's history with FACS and builds a network of family, carers, caseworkers and service providers, enabling them to work collaboratively to keep the child safe.

Salesforce was appointed as the lead technology collaborator for the project and worked with FACS on the selection of partners during the initial 18 months of requirements gathering, design, prototyping and procurement.

Salesforce partners selected were global service provider Accenture Cloud Solutions, CloudSense, reporting application developer Conga, API technology provider MuleSoft and systems integrator Tigerspike.

Salesforce's new platform is worth $19 million with licensing and support services worth $4.8 million.

The contract for licensing and support services provided by MuleSoft ($7m), CloudSense ($2.5m) and Conga ($769,000) add up to $10.3 million. Accenture's support service is worth $5.4 million.

"To deliver ChildStory we have chosen technology partners who have demonstrated that they understood the challenge and had the right technology to support child protection in NSW," ChildStory program director Lisa Alonso Love said.

"ChildStory is a great opportunity to provide children, families, caseworkers and our partners with tools that help us to work together and to gather the stories of children who are vulnerable and need child protection services." 

Australian technology consultancy Squiz will provide its search engine, licensing and supporting services up to a total value of $9.2 million.

Squiz will deliver its enterprise search solution Funnelback to the platform to enable searches from multiple sources allowing users to tailor how the content is displayed. Funnelback will help to understand and identify the high volume of unstructured data of the child protection services, according to Squiz.

EYC3 Business Solutions' data migration and synchronisation work is valued at $8.1 million.

All the vendors and partners, along with the ChildStory team, will be working from a workspace planned to drive collaboration, teamwork, and agile methods of project management and implementation.

Listed as other tender respondents were the likes of Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, IBM, NEC, RXP Services, SAP, SMS Consulting Group, Telstra and Unisys.

Salesforce partner roles

• Tigerspike will design the web and mobile community platforms and provide user research and testing, through to solution design and development.
• Accenture is providing solution architects, delivery consultants, developers and quality assurance to help deliver the platform. Once the system is live Accenture will provide ongoing support, according to a spokesperson.
• Mulesoft's Anypoint platform was chosen to connect applications, data and services in the cloud and on-premises. The platform will make it easier to connect multiple government systems to provide real-time information to mobile caseworkers, as well as to police, education and health departments to resolve cases quickly, according to MuleSoft.
• ChildStory will leverage Conga Composer, Conga’s document generation solution, to streamline and automate the way that caseworkers generate documentation. Composer will reduce the hours of work and ensure documentation accuracy by eliminating manual entry and merging of multiple data sources, according to Conga Asia-Pacific operations manager Jarrod Hunt.
• The CloudSense Commerce platform will be used to create a catalogue of services provided by different suppliers. The caseworkers can use the CloudSense software to create the right care services for a particular child and capture all the information needed. The platform then books the care service, sends out a work order, creates purchase requisitions and integrates into the financial systems to create the invoices to help caseworkers to work faster, according to the company.