Immigration CIO maps out 'huge' year ahead

Getting ready of the cloud

Immigration CIO Matt Yannopoulos.

All of these projects started before Yannopoulos’ time.

The coming calendar year will be an opportunity for him to start making his own mark on the organisation, and he is going to start with a comprehensive program of application upgrades covering everything from Windows server and desktop operating systems to immigration’s monitoring and management software.

He will also need to keep a close eye on the floor of parliament, as the packed reform agenda for immigration under the new government will have carry-on implications for the systems he is now responsible for.

He is already preparing for changes he might need to make to Immigration's Siebel central case management system, which logs and tracks the status of detainees and those on bridging visas, should Tony Abbott successfully pass legislation to re-introduce temporary protection visas.

Before 2014 is over, Yannopoulos wants to have commenced the third and final stage in the immigration department’s technology transformation.

“Hopefully starting from before 2015 we can to start to look at opportunities to source services at a lower cost from onshore cloud providers,” he said.

Even beyond that?

“One of the unique challenges of this place is that someone wants to apply for a visa every minute of every day. Planes are seeking to land every minute of every day. And those people need access to our systems,” Yannopoulos said.

The only way to provide this sort of 24/7 service up-time, is to “move to a bank-like system where we have no discernible outages for our clients or staff.”

“At the moment I need to take systems down for a few hours to do upgrades or patching, making them unavailable globally,” he said.

“I want to step up our infrastructure. I don’t know how much that is going to cost me, and that is one of the things we are looking at. But my intent longer term is to lease a second facility with geographic separation from the primary data centre, so we can have that high availability.”

He understands that the road ahead won’t be easy, especially when it comes to trying to get funding from an increasingly tight federal purse, but hopes that the ongoing “balance of priorities” will eventually work in his favour.