Immigration CIO exits

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection's chief information officer Randall Brugeaud is exiting the role, leaving the door open for a successor to tackle one of the biggest transformations in the agency's history.

Brugeaud joined the merged Immigration and Border Protection just prior to his former Customs agency being migrated and abolished in mid-2015.

While first arriving in a transformation position, he quickly rose to the CIO role when his predecessor Matthew Yannopoulos left to become CIO at the Health department.

The executive will end his two-year stint in the job in the midst of a massive program of work to streamline the complex and sprawling IT environment that resulted from Immigration's Customs merger.

A department spokesperson declined to comment on Brugeaud's next moves. 

Update: Brugeaud will take on a deputy statistician role leading transformation at the Bureau of Statistics. Read more here.

Whoever takes on his role will need to be a "strong leader with personal presence who excels in leading people through change", according to the agency.

"You will take the lead in ensuring that front-line immigration, citizenship, travel, cargo and intelligence activities are supported by client-facing systems that are robust and evolve with the needs of the department and the Australian government," Immigration's job ad states.

"You will be strategic and innovative in focus, forward-thinking, and resilient in working in fast-paced environments. You will have experience in managing IT services for a large and complex organisation using a variety of technologies as well as demonstrated knowledge of future global trends for business and IT. "

Submissions close on July 31.

Immigration and Customs had made 'completely opposite' decisions on almost all major aspects of their separate IT environments.

When they came together the agencies had more than 500 business and supporting systems, over 850 systems interfaces and services, around 750 databases, 20,000 desktops, and 3500 mobile devices among thousands of servers and multiple data centres.

Brugeaud and team have made headway in simplifying the merged environments, but still have a long way to go.

His successor will also take on a ten-year technology plan that paints a lofty vision of where Immigration wants its IT environment to be in the 2020s and beyond.

The strategy - released earlier this year - will see Immigration completely rearchitect its IT environment towards self-contained, adaptable systems propped up by common reusable services and cloud-based infrastructure.

The agency's goal is to become a world leader in border technology.

It has already begun work on its multi-billion-dollar overhaul of Australia’s visa processing platform, as well as its 'zero-touch' border processing transformation, which will see it replace its fleet of smartgates in favour of an automated border control solution, and abolish the incoming passenger card and automate the exit marshalling process.

Immigration was handed $95.4 million in this year's federal budget to improve its storage and processing of biometric data and introduce new technologies for processing traveller visas, on top of the $99.2 million it was given last year to build a new visa risk assessment capability.