Airservices Australia launches major service management system upgrade project

Airservices Australia is embarking on a rebuild that will retire the systems now underpinning its technical operations centres (TOCs), creating a single, integrated and virtualised service management environment.

In a tender published late last week, the organisation said that its Brisbane and Melbourne TOCs monitoring equipment “is either at or nearing end of supportable life”.

The centres monitor and control both the National Airways System and Airservices’ enterprise systems, and “function in a highly manual and reactive environment that does not provide an efficient end-to-end view of enterprise service availability”.

“This modernisation must move Airservices to a more contemporary way of working, provide improved end-to-end service performance visibility, and shift from a reactive to a proactive technology services approach, creating an integrated service operations centre (ISOC),” the tender stated.

“The intent of the ISOC is a capability that owns all technology monitoring and situational awareness across Airservices enterprise IT and facilitates successful outcomes as service integrator to coordinate incident and change processes across multiple stakeholders."

The ISOC will have to handle a complex array of operational systems, including a modernised network being implemented by L3 Harris; the Civil Military Air Traffic Management system being delivered by Thales; the nascent Future Support Model which will rely on the ISOC; and “back office enabling services transformation”, a program in its early stages to replace some back office functions so they can be managed as-a-service, which will demand major changes in environments such as SAP.

The service management and ISOC project is broken into three streams.

Stream A covers seeks a partner for strategic advisory overseeing project delivery and design; the Stream B partner will be delivery-focused, while the Stream C partner will be responsible for the ISOC, command centre, and situational awareness environments.

The project will begin in 2023, with completion expected by June 2024.