Crime Commission begins search for CIO

An internal recommendation for the introduction of a chief information officer role at the Australian Crime Commission has been successful, with the government agency now advertising for someone to fill the role.

The ACC’s former national manager Mike Harrison, who previously held partial responsibility for the agency’s IT along with the chief technology officer, signalled the need for a separate CIO last year during a workforce optimisation project.

The recommendation had been under review since then and was subject to the approval of the Public Service Commission. Maria Milosavljevic had been acting in the interim CIO position until a decision was made.

The ACC today put out a job advertisement for the position. The CIO will manage and protect the ACC’s IT and drive an “innovation agenda” which will include investment prioritisation, technology vision and advanced analytics to improve the organisation’s productivity. 

The agency’s new CTO, Narelle Lovett, will report into the CIO. The CTO defines the agency’s technology while the CIO creates the strategy. 

The new CIO will have several immediate tasks to deal with upon being appointed in the role. The new hire will help determine whether to adopt the successor system to the Australian Federal Police’s Police Real-time Online Management Information System (PROMIS), which the ACC currently uses.

The ACC is also planning work to bring together disparate aspects of the ACC”s technology in order to reduce duplication of efforts and gain a better return on technology investment, based on a new technology governance model introduced earlier this year. 

Lovett recently revealed to iTnews the ACC will also study the business case for agency-wide virtualisation. Currently the ACC has 95 percent of its corporate functions virtualised, but the agency’s operations systems have not been as much of a priority to virtualise.