Australian Hearing prepares IT overhaul

Australian Hearing business services director Vivian Quinn is preparing to lay out a new strategic IT plan for the government hearing services agency, in which document storage and core systems rationalisation will play a key role.

Quinn took over the position - which combined CFO and CIO duties - in July, after former CIO Peter Gasparovic left the organisation to pursue opportunities at a local government level.

She's now sharpened her focus on finding ways to free up hearing centre staff from bureaucracy and administration.

Quinn told iTnews the objective could be achieved, at least in part, through the digitisation of manual processes and documents.

“It's going to be a program of works. If you think about the paperless office concept, there's going to be multiple projects that ... will deliver [this] vision,” Quinn said.

“At the moment we're developing the list of projects that go underneath the program of works, and then we'll create the overall plan for delivery of that program."

The cornerstone will be a project inherited from Gasparovic, dubbed digital document management - one Quinn says she is "pursuing with passion”.

“We must [legally] keep our client records from the time they first sign up with us for the rest of that client's life. And that does create data storage challenges for us, so we need to become more efficient in that area,” Quinn said.

“One of the projects we are working on is the electronic storage of those records, rather than physical storage. That would make us a lot more efficient."

System rationalisation

The other long-term goal for the agency, to be set out in its strategic roadmap, will be to rationalise the number of core IT systems currently in use.

"We currently have a lot of reporting solutions, and I have created a business intelligence stream ... and will be building the competencies within business intelligence,” Quinn said.

"At the moment, we have a lot of reporting solutions in Oracle CRM, SQL, TM1, SAP, etc., and that needs to be streamlined. 

"We have a similar situation with our transactional systems. We use Oracle, Microsoft and SAP, and what we're going to do is look at some of the complexity to see how we can drive down some of that technical debt."

Quinn expects an added benefit of the consolidation will be in skills - that the agency will find it much easier to recruit staff with the appropriate skills sets.

"It's extremely difficult hiring staff with this number of skills sets,” Quinn said.

"I'm not sure it's ever possible to work with just one [vendor]. We will always have more than one, but it's about reducing the complexity of the applications that we're using from those vendors. So it might be that we predominantly use one of them and less with others.”

The vendor and systems rationalisation project is expected to be delivered over the next three to five years.

Part of Quinn's efforts will be directed at facing the unique challenges that come with being a customer-facing federal government agency.

"We have hearing centres throughout Australia. Those clients are referred to us through a number of channels, and that might be through GPs,” Quinn said.

"We also have kiosks and buses where hearing assessments are performed and those clients come to us. And [others] come to us through a number of different channels, or referrer groups.

“There are hundreds of permanent and visiting sites all across Australia. We are also mobile and do visit the outreach communities as well.”

The agency supports a network of 490 locations, with some operated by the organisation itself and others operated by partners.