Australian Navy reveals five-year system modernisation

The Australian Navy is readying itself for a five-year modernisation drive that will see it “rapidly mature” its core suite of information management tools.

The navy information management system (NIMS) is the collection of legacy, bespoke applications Australia’s sailors rely on to manage classified business and military intelligence.

The NIMS suite includes tools for planning exercises and training, hosting secret personnel data, assurance and auditing, and expenditure tracking.

Most of the NIMS systems were internally developed in Delphi. The navy wants to transition the platforms to a more widely supported langauge.

It has asked the market for help, currently calling for bids for an IT partner to deliver helpdesk and programming support through the process, starting from July 2017.

The successful provider will offer a ready workforce of security-cleared IT professionals that can develop and support the new codebase, while running error correction, code optimisation, and the deletion of obsolete capabilities.

Contractors will need clearance to work on applications hosted on the Defence restricted network or the Defence secret network.

The modernisation project will be rolled out in three concurrent streams: basic software maintenance, the design of a service management framework, and the development of a more forward-looking plan to achieve information standardisation.

The NIMS project slots into the Department of Defence’s wider strategy to radically slim the huge number of applications and IT tools that have proliferated across the armed and civilian forces, getting in the way of a single accurate source of truth about Defence operations, expenditure, and risk.

The Navy said the NIMS modernisation would move it closer to its big data ambitions by delivering “ready access” to “trusted information from multiple sources”.