2020 CIO50 DHHS nomination details

DHHS was ranked #5 in the 2020 CIO50 - the fourth year in a row that the department's ICT teams have ranked in the top10 of this listing of Australia's most innovative CIOs and their technology functions.

As in previous years, the achievements are a team effort … more so in the context of the department’s massive response to COVID-19 pandemic … so it seems discourteous to single out the executive leader for individual recognition.

This nomination should be read as recognising the CIO and the Business Technology and Information Management (BTIM) branch and the broader DHHS ICT teams.

The teams have delivered incredible results in an extremely complex and dynamic organisational context at very large scale and under demanding operational requirements of public accountability, cyber security, information privacy, operational resilience and public emergency response.

The BTM leadership team comprises (in alphabetic order of first name):

• David Stephens, Chief Data Officer and Director of the data and information management team.
• Fiona Sparks, Director of the strategy, planning, architecture, PMO and cyber security teams.
• John Henderson, Assistant Director of the business engagement and Office365 Connected Working support teams
• Liz Hughes, manager of the audit and risk and branch support team.
• Jodie Quilliam PSM, Assistant Director of the operational support teams (as part of the Customer Support branch).
• Ray Baird PSM, Director of the project delivery teams.
• Of note is also the fantastic work of Abhendra Singh, Cyber Security Manager.
• Mike Todd has recently joined as Chief Information Security Officer.

The DHHS 2020 CIO50 Nomination

For the record, DHHS was ranked #7 in 2017, #2 in 2018, #9 in 2019 and #5 in 2020 :-)

This is the sixth year of my leadership of digital transformation in DHHS. This means that the business innovations that have occurred over the past year are the product of sustainable ways of working that have become embedded through iterative refinement over half a decade.

The primary business innovation, therefore, is our capacity for digital transformation – more so than any individual project or system. I have talked about the Platform+Agile approach in my previous nominations, and (at length!) on LinkedIn and at conferences.

Platform+Agile is suited to organisations that grapple with complex and dynamic challenges. The goal is to develop the digital fitness and digital innovation skill necessary to confidently deliver a large portfolio of projects each year to a high cadence – using well proven and repeatable platforms and methods.

The key elements of the Platform+Agile approach are summarised in the figure below. These elements, when they are functioning well together, create what I call digital fitness.

ICT Achievements over the past year

The achievements over the past year fall into two distinct categories - each with different stories. First those that were planned under the 2020/21 ICT Project Portfolio and secondly those that 'happened' as a result of responding to the year's public emergencies.

(1) 2019/20 ICT PROJECT PORTFOLIO

Over 20 significant digitally enabled business innovations were deployed under this year’s planned ICT Project Portfolio using the Platform+Agile approach. Noteworthy examples include:

1. Family Safety Victoria systems – an integrated suite of case management and multi-agency information sharing systems was deployed and iteratively refined using Microsoft Dynamics365 to support family violence response programs.
2. SafeScript - Victoria’s multi-award-winning real time prescription monitoring system concluded its state-wide deployment in June and has been adopted by the Commonwealth and most states as the basis of an integrated national system.
3. The Victorian Health Incident Management System (VHIMS) – this project has demonstrated a new approach to cloud services and API enabled deployment of systems across the devolved health sector. VHIMS is currently deployed to 40 health services and is being rolled out progressively via a panel of delivery partners.
4. Common Data Layer – implementation of a highly successful new department-wide data governance, storage and secure-sharing platform based on Microsoft Azure. This has been a ground-breaking achievement led by the Chief Data Officer in strengthening data governance and the ability to securely share and reuse data across the department and with other agencies.

Other major systems delivered included SAP Success Factors (for HR), ServiceNow (for payroll service management) and many front-office and back-office digital innovations in public housing, Child Protection and other policy and service delivery areas of the department.

(2) PUBLIC EMERGENCY RESPONSE

The past year has been dominated by unplanned projects arising from the need to develop digital solutions urgently to support public emergency responses. Over 50 ICT initiatives and projects were implemented at-speed to support front and back office emergency response teams. Noteworthy examples include:

(1) Personal Hardship Assistance Program System – this system was rapidly deployed during the Victorian bushfires to allow staff to administer payments from any computer or mobile device using debit cards. The system, developed by the in-house team in our .NET framework on Microsoft Azure, was launched quickly and then iteratively refined to enable more than 14,000 payments to be efficiently and securely processed using payment cards during the bushfire crisis.

(2) DHHS transition to remote working – Microsoft Office365 was implemented across all 11,000 DHHS staff in 2019. This was timely preparation for the rapid transition of all staff to remote working at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift to working from home was relatively painless, with all staff securely connected using internet access and multi-factor authentication, quickly productive using Teams and supported by rapidly implemented SharePoint sites and PowerApp/PowerBI applications for administrative support and communications. Use of advanced security controls in O365 E5 and the Azure Sentinel service has enabled us to manage remote working cyber security risks.

(3) Compliance and Welfare Management System – this system enabled authorised officers, nurses and welfare officers to manage and provide services to over 15,000 returned travelers under hotel quarantine. Microsoft Dynamics365 was used to enable CRM and case management activities. The system MVP was implemented in days after the announcement that inbound travellers would be quarantined in hotels. It was then iteratively refined as the quarantine operating model, processes and user requirements evolved during the rapid influx of returned travelers into hotel quarantine. The system was transferred to the Department of Justice and Community Safety with the hotel quarantine program.

(4) Digital Test Trace Isolate System – a suite of digital solutions was implemented to streamline and automate COVID-19 testing and contact tracing operations - under a Digital Cell of the Public Health Response division (led by Matthew McCrone). This included upgrading and replatforming the existing Conduent Maven Public Health Event Surveillance System (PHESS) and the delivery of new systems to support:

• Test Tracker - COVID-19 testing data collection and test results tracking (Stop Press! as profiled in the National Contact Tracing Review pg.70)
• HL7 eRequesting of tests between testing sites and labs
• electronic lab reporting from 19 Pathology labs to DHHS
• Case and Contact Management Portal (CCMP) - to support positive case management and close contact tracing interviews (including COVIDSafe integration) - launched in early August to fully digitise PHESS paper interview forms used for contact tracing and support automated allocation of cases to contact tracing teams. The CCMP was integrated with PHESS and provided secure online access using MFA for all internal and external contact tracing staff (including metro and regional health services).
• SMS case notification and interactions - using Whispir
• Analytics and operational dashboard reporting - including implementation of a new PHESS Data Model (data mart) and integration into the DHHS Common Data Layer to support analytics and reporting for Victoria's COVID Dashboard.

This work enabled rapid delivery of new functionality as well as the incremental development and state-wide roll-out of an integrated testing and contact tracing platform across a large and fragmented ecosystem of testing sites, pathology labs and both metro and regional health services.

The solutions, developed by the in-house team in the department's .NET framework on the Microsoft Azure PaaS platform, supported Victoria's testing and contact tracing staff to effectively manage over 3500 positive cases - hundreds of cases per day - during the 2nd wave of the pandemic.

Significantly, the systems enabled the fully integrated and digitised end-to-end Test-Trace-Isolate process necessary to augment PHESS to deliver on, and transparently report against, Victoria's contact tracing KPIs:

• an average of 24 hours between testing and notification of positive cases to instruct them to self isolate
• an average of 48 hours between testing and notification of close contacts of positive cases - to request that they get tested and self isolate.

(5) Other COVID-19 systems delivered supported a wide range of emergency responses, including COVID self-assessment, surge workforce, rent relief, PPE inventory management, call centre operations, door2door welfare visits, and an extensive array of data analytics and reporting solutions to support public reporting and pandemic response decision making by the Government.

This work would not have been possible without the digital fitness enabled by our in-house teams and their Platform+Agile approach. The ability to accelerate disciplined agile delivery of new systems in a complex and highly dynamic environment was a key enabler of Victoria’s pandemic response.

Post Script: A project to implement a new contact tracing CRM system on the Salesforce platform commenced in early September to replace PHESS and the in-house-developed .NET systems. Project completion is scheduled for January 2021.