Where will technology take you?

01 May 2005

The past five years have seen ICT move from a purely enabling function, to a capability which underpins the differentiation with which organisations are able to go to market.

At one end of the spectrum, IT is becoming more commoditised. Buying software and hardware, and coupling these components, is easier today than it has ever been.

At the other end of the scale, the focus continues to evolve on how technology can be used to provide competitive advantage through differentiation. Here the aim is to enable an organisation at all layers – operationally, tactically but primarily, at a strategic level.

Achieving this degree of maturity is a major challenge, but worth the effort: when technology is agile and closely aligned with business objectives, an organisation has the ability to conduct innovative and far-reaching initiatives that will differentiate it in an increasingly competitive business world.

Technology’s role within CITEC

CITEC’s Chief Information Officer, Paul Dusman says his focus is on an even closer alignment with the business, extracting more from existing systems, integrating data more effectively, and ensuring technology makes a greater contribution to the overall corporate strategy.

“In the past, the IT department’s interactions with the business were almost exclusively about technical issues,” Paul said.

“Now we deal with more areas of the business and we need these parts to understand technology so they can extract maximum value from it.

“Customers are demanding more from CITEC. They want to optimise their investment in technology, and to be able to grow and be flexible.

“Our aim is on commoditising the computing end while also providing greater flexibility and value at the business level.”

A new era in service management

CITEC will shortly go live with a fully integrated suite of solutions to deliver integrated service management.

This initiative supports a number of CITEC’s high-level business strategies: the generation of sustainable profit; best practice and ITIL-aligned service operations; proactive rather than reactive service delivery; and improved operational reporting and knowledge, to enable more effective decision-making at all levels of the business.

“These integrated solutions will give us a more intensive understanding of our service and infrastructure performance, improvement opportunities, and the capability available in various areas,” Paul said.

“Ultimately, we want our clients to have access to virtually the same information about their equipment and services that our staff do.”

Technology takes policing to a new level

The Queensland Police Service’s (QPS) Manager Information Systems Branch, Ray Brown says a number of business drivers have elevated the role of technology within the service.

“The overriding direction of the QPS is to move from being a police ‘force’ to a police ‘service’,” Ray said.

“A key business challenge is the move towards problem-oriented policing, which aims to fix the root cause of a problem rather than simply responding to an incident or ‘treating the symptoms’.

“QPS is also focused on encouraging point-of-service decision-making, and that means our staff must have timely and easy access accurate information to support their decision-making.

“Above all, we need to do more with less and technology is playing a key role in delivering greater productivity.”

Ray says a new Integrated Policing System is a major ICT investment priority for the QPS.

“OP1, as it’s known, is an ‘off-the-shelf’ system to support the recording, management and investigation of policing incidents. Replacing more than 200 current systems, it will feed into our core intelligence repositories and will also enable greater mobility for staff.”

Another ICT priority is the Integrated Justice Information System (IJIS), a whole-of-government approach to improve community safety, by sharing information and improving collaboration in the criminal justice system. IJIS involves the service, and the Departments of Justice and the Attorney-General, Corrective Services and Communities.

“Ultimately, IJIS will be a sector-wide information sharing mechanism, allowing participating agencies to see, use and act upon the information held by all other participating agencies - as if it were one system,” Ray said.

“Other benefits flowing from IJIS include the elimination of redundant data entry, and delivery of system-wide statistical information to support strategic and policy-related decision making. It will also simplify the daunting task of mining data from disparate sources.”

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