Federal finalists fly in iTnews Benchmark Awards 2019

We’re almost there now: iTnews has announced finalists in our annual Benchmark Awards in the categories for Finance, Industrial, Emerging Technologies, State Government, Local Government, Education, Health and Consumer categories.

Today, we reveal the finalists in the Federal Government category.

These three agencies are now in the running to take home our Australian Technology Leader of The Year prize for 2019, which will be announced at our gala awards dinner on March 7^th.

So without further ado, here are the finalists!

Fair Work Ombudsman Anonymous report service

Australia’s Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) aims to create a culture of compliance with workplace laws, to support inclusive and productive workplaces.

But the agency felt that some groups in the community – especially migrant workers – might not feel comfortable approaching it. FWO identified limited English language skills, youth and lack of familiarity with workplace laws as barriers to such workers seeking its services.

Which is why extended its Anonymous Report tool into 16 languages other than English.

Doing so generated 1,600 reports the agency feels it would not otherwise have received.

The agency uses free cloud-based translation services from Microsoft and Google for some processing of the reports received through the tool. 75 reports submitted with the multi-lingual tool have resulted in investigations, while all have helped to develop a better understanding of issues facing migrant workers.

FWO’s experiences with this project have also given it confidence to conduct further online experiments aimed at reaching and better-serving at-risk workers.

Read more about this project here

National Blood Authority BloodNet5

The National Blood Authority’s (NBA) core business is to deliver a blood supply system that is responsive to patient needs, because when you need some blood you really need some blood!

And that’s why the agency is proud as punch of BloodNet5, an upgrade to the application it uses to offer near-real-time visibility of the nation’s blood supply. Previous versions of BloodNet lacked that real-time visibility, making the upgrade a notable milestone.

ROI from the project is already impressive: less blood goes un-used and wastage is down. Savings by reducing over the life of the project are expected to hit $14.6m, againt development costs of $3.2m.

The agency also feels the project has set it up for future improvements: NBA was the small first federal agency to score the Digital Transformation Agency’s Digital Service Standard, signifying it has successfully adopted Agile methodologies. It now continuously manages and improves BloodNet using those skills.

Read more about this project here!

Airservices Australia cloud migration

Airservices Australia is Australia’s air navigation service provider and also offers aviation rescue fire fighting services.

In 2018 the organisation migrated its core infrastructure to a third party data centre and an infrastructure-as-a-service operating model.

800 servers, 130 applications and almost a petabyte of data made the journey.

While a primary motive for the move was a mandated consolidation of office buildings, the agency used that as an opportunity to change its IT operating model. The result was a 20 percent reduction in its IT infrastructure, substantially lower facility and operating costs, improved security an an expected $1m-a-year saving compared to running IT in-house.

Read iTnews’ coverage of the project here.