The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has seen faster response turnaround times for migration applications due to work built under its digital transformation efforts.
The peak body for association for information and communications technology professionals recently reached a milestone in its digital transformation, which it said will transform the skilled migration industry within Australia.
ACS chief information officer, Rich Wiltshire told Digital Nation that “skilled migration is a critical piece of the puzzle in accelerating growth of a diverse IT sector to support the digital economy”.
“To ensure the right skills in the right areas are coming through to meet the economies demand a transformation of our skilled migration product was identified as in need for a long overdue overhaul.”
Wiltshire said with fraud “being problematic across migration in general” the ACS spotted a need “the need for stronger fraud control measures.”
“Our existing timeframes to asses a skilled migrant application was blowing out to 18 weeks with backlogs in the 1000s. This would seem consistent within the skilled migration industry in general.”
Wiltshire explained poorly defined processes indicated that many applicants needed to revisit the skilled migration process multiple times leading to long delays and high costs for the applicant to get the results needed.
“Internally the product required a resource intensive team to wrangle each application through many complex steps to gain a result,” he said.
He said skilled migration ‘is an incredibly emotional time for an applicant who might be moving their entire family across the world, or they could be moving from a country that they are not currently safe in.”
To help ease the process “a simplified user interface ensuring the applicant can easily complete an application within an otherwise bureaucratic environment.”
From the work the ACS has seen the creation of a simplified user interface ensuring the applicant can easily complete an application within an otherwise bureaucratic environment, Wiltshire said.
“We measure this by ‘application readiness’ that is applications are submitted and ready to be assessed first time around. our prior platform had a readiness metric of 15 percent and are now tracking at over 80 percent.
“Faster response turnaround times for applications – down from peeks of 18 weeks to less than 15 days (most are currently being processed in around 5 days on the new system for which we are now 2 months in).
He added fraud detection and identity checks ensure “the right people are passing through the system.”
It’s “four times more likely to complete a successful skill assessment for experienced applicants through the use of simplified skills assessment questionnaires aligned with ANSCO codes”.
“People, process and technology”
Wiltshire said the Skilled migration platform “is the result of a three-year digital transformation strategy where we are currently shoring up our foundations while concurrently delivering reimagined products.”
“The end-to-end timeline for the skilled migration platform was 18 months, which is a significant journey, but as this was the first product of many to come, we did need to shore up foundational technology at the same time.”
He said the design took three months with a 10-month build, “including building out a new Salesforce tenant” and six months of testing and taking a phased launch.
With the failure rate of such work usually experiencing a failure rate of 70 percent according to Wiltshire, ACS offset this through a “people, process and technology” approach.
“With an organisation fully committed and aligned to transform, and a detailed understanding of who does what and why in the business, the next big challenge was ensuring patience across the organisation via effective ongoing communications and engagement, while we built the new platform,” Wiltshire said.
“We launched two months ago now to the general public and have a highly mature product exceeding all of our business objectives defined at commencement, but like all products, there is a need for further refinement.
“We are also looking at options to white label the platform for other industry bodies that have the same skilled migration challenges we had in the past.
Wiltshire said that in the meantime “transformation continues within ACS and we are currently looking at reimagining the membership industry in a climate where membership across all industries is in decline.”
Redesigning the core
As part of the work the ACS first redesigned its core architecture, shifting from “an organically grown monolithic architecture to a modular product-based design”.
ACS rebuilt its core within Salesforce and reconfigure Mulesoft and Adobe AEM and build an entirely new data platform via Azure Data Lake and data bricks which all then underpinned the Skilled Migration platform.
“With a stable platform in place, we then built the Skilled migration application on top of the core and leveraged ancillary products such as IDVERSE for KYC identity checks and Docusign eSeal for outcome letters ensuring we had a fraud resilient platform in place,” Wiltshire said.
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