Defence trials ServiceNow to help ADF members relocate

Defence has completed a technology trial using a ServiceNow instance to coordinate all the changes that serving ADF members need to make when they are posted to a new location.

The trial involved 500 personnel and was run over December 2017 and January 2018, the once a year peak period for the allocation of new posts.

Acting associate secretary of Defence, Rebecca Skinner, told a senate estimates hearing that the trial had concluded and had been judged a success.

“We can now have a look at creating a project and how that might be funded,” Skinner said.

Currently, if an ADF member is re-posted to a different Defence location, they are responsible for manually coordinating all the changes required from the various parts of Defence.

“They are often the person that has to integrate all of the pieces of their posting - their removals, ICT arrangements when they move from one location to another, and a whole range of different elements that the various parts of Defence would provide them,” Skinner said.

“The [member] ends up having to integrate all of that by going to a range of places and doing paperwork.

“The pilot project integrated all of those elements so that the person minimises the amount of time they’re integrating their posting [logistics] or providing and re-providing information.

“The whole intent is to de-thatch the organisation, remove layers of duplication, and provide a better service to the [serving member].”

Skinner said that, as an ADF member, it can be “very exhausting to relocate”.

“Having been a child of serving parents I know about moving around as a small child,” she said.

Under the pilot, serving members and their spouses could access a “virtual front door” called Posting Connect, that helped them make the move.

The workflows underpinning Posting Connect were managed in a cloud-based instance of ServiceNow.

Defence CIO Stephen Pearson said that the ability for the spouse to log in was a particularly attractive feature.

“Its ability to be accessed in a wide variety of places allows the spouse of the serving member to be able to use it while their spouse is in active duty,” Pearson said.

“That’s one of the real pushes for this.

“It’s not reliant totally on the ADF member to do all of the work.”

Skinner said that the next steps involved “building an industrial-sized program” to meet the needs of all members that were re-posted to new locations each year.

She said the team also needed to work out where it would get funding for the project from.

“I chair the integrated service delivery committee within Defence,” she said.

“Currently, I am waiting for advice from the lead area there to come forward with how we take those learnings and make it into a program.

“We’re working on that right now. It’s a key focus.”

She was unsure whether the system would be ready for the 2018-19 posting cycle.