National Native Title Tribunal
Technology For Justice
1998
National I.T. Infrastructure Deployment Project
Peter Bennington
Manager Information Systems
National Native Title Tribunal
Perth, Western Australia.
March 1998.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Key Address
2. Strategic Information Systems Plan
3. Infrastructure Deployment - Phase 2 of the ‘Plan’
3.1 Scope
3.1.1 Major Local Area Network Upgrade
3.1.2 Wide Area Network
3.1.3 Regional Infrastructure Installation
3.1.4 Perth Infrastructure Installation
3.1.5 National installation of Lotus Notes
3.1.6 Training and Education
3.1.6.1 Technical Training
3.1.6.2 Staff Training
3.2 Complexity
3.3 Benefits
3.3.1 Benefits to community
3.3.2 Benefits to users
3.4 Quality standards.
3.5 Innovation
3.6 Effectiveness of solution
3.7 Post Project Service
3.8 Documentation
The National Native Title Tribunal is a Commonwealth Government body established under the Native Title Act 1993 to facilitate the making of agreements among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, governments, industry and others whose rights or interests may co-exist with native title rights and interests.
The Tribunal commenced operations in January 1994 and Perth was chosen as the Principal rRegistry. Regional staff were located in Sydney where they co-located with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. By the 30 June 1995 staff numbers had grown from 10 to 57. This growth rate continued and to date there are 230 employees and staff numbers grew rapidly to around 230 by 1997. Co-location with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal was not considered to be a viable long term option. longer viable and Therefore, new registries were established in every Australian capital city with the exception of Hobart. A further Regional Registry was also established in Kalgoorlie. (except Hobart) and Kalgoorlie.
To cope with this rapid growth, an Information Technology section was established in July 1995. R ecruitment was completed by early 1996. As a new organisation there was an opportunity to setup a National IT Infrastructure from the ground up. This could be completed without inheriting any previous without the need to worry about legacy hardware or information systems or their associated problems.
To ensure that the Tribunal could take advantage of this rare and exciting opportunity, the Tribunal’s first Strategic Information Systems Plan (the ‘Plan’) was developed in early 1996.
The Plan provides the Tribunal with a high-level management planning tool within which areas of strategic importance can be identified and prioritised. Strategies have been developed so that IT can meet corporate objectives.
2. Strategic Information Systems Plan
The Strategic Information Systems Plan (the Plan) was developed to support the National Native Title Tribunal’s existing business functions and its future objectives. It addresses the interests and requirements of both internal and external stakeholders, taking into account potential changes to the Tribunal’s operations that may occur in the foreseeable future.
The Plan is cognisant of Federal Government information systems/technology (IS/IT) initiatives, those of other agencies (e.g. the Federal Court) and incorporates appropriate, proven computing industry trends and practices. Key inputs to the Plan were obtained from interviews/workshops with (in excess of 50) Tribunal personnel, interviews and phone canvassing of external interests and reviews of various Tribunal and other government agency documentation.
The strategic applications software platform recommended for the Tribunal is the Lotus Notes product suite. Packaged and other specialised software has also been allowed for, and the existing Human Resource (NOMAD) and Financial (FINEST) applications retained.
Integration is the underlying principle for all systems development. The overall solution will address the Tribunal’s information requirements by providing, inter alia:
The approach is for systems to be built and implemented in modules. Such a strategy will ensure that the implications of continuing changes to the Tribunal’s functions, procedures and structure have minimal impact on the Tribunal’s evolving information systems.
The recommended technologies will provide only part of the overall solution. Information management strategies, procedures and standards (e.g. governing the use of electronic mail) have also been developed, applied and adhered to throughout the Tribunal.
Similarly, the impact of the change (explicit and implicit in the Plan’s recommendations) on Tribunal personnel has not been ignored. Areas such as training and education sessions, concomitant with an ongoing awareness campaign must communicate impending changes to staff’s work practices and enable them to participate in the process.
A phased approached to implementing the Plan has been adopted and changes are being introduced incrementally. The Plan divides the evolution of the Tribunal’s information systems and information technology into three distinct phases;
Phase 1 - Installation of base office automation systems and technology. This period was from June 1995 to June 1996.
Phase 2 - National IT Infrastructure Deployment. The IT infrastructure is designed to cope with changes in technology so that when the Tribunal identifies new products and features required to meet business needs they should be capable of being implemented with minimal change to the underlying data or infrastructure. The Tribunal has now developed a sound IT infrastructure to support our central and regional information systems.
Phase 3 - This phase is applying the suite of information systems to meet client requirements.
3. Infrastructure Deployment - Phase 2 of the ‘Plan’
This section relates to Phase 2 of the Tribunal’s information systems Plan and the work done by the IT team in managing and implementing IT Infrastructure from June 1996 to September 1997 based out of Perth.
As the Tribunal entered a period of significant growth, the Information Technology Section were faced with the challenge of coping with this growth and at the same time ensuring that technology and systems were deployed in a manageable and standardised manner.
Before commencing the project the IT team agreed that a common vision was required and agreed on the following objectives :
The IT technical team approached the National IT Infrastructure project (Phase 2 of the Plan) by breaking down the project into many smaller projects and implementing each in a phased and controlled approach. Clearly there were also components of the project needed to be completed first, such as the Wide Area Network. This would enable the Tribunal to proceed with the setup of regional offices.
All management, planning and implementation was orchestrated from Perth. Members of the Perth IT team travelled to all capital cities during the implementation of infrastructure in regional offices.
The National IT Infrastructure Deployment project comprised the following:
3.1.1 Major Local Area Network Upgrade
The Local Area Network in Perth was completely replaced to cope with the increase in staff numbers and to ensure that it was capable of supporting planned application systems.
A switched fast Ethernet network was installed that was capable of scaling to several hundred users.
This solution comprised the installation of 250 x Category 5 Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) cables, 15 x Baystack 10/100 Base T hubs and 2 x Cisco Cat5000 100 Meg switches. A dual Network protocol of Netbeui and TCP/IP was adopted.
Sharing a Wide Area Network (WAN) infrastructure with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal was no longer viable and a new national wide area network infrastructure was designed and implemented to cope with the increasing number of regional offices spread across Australia.
The WAN was standardised on 64Kb ISDN technology with Cisco routers in all offices. The Department of Administration Services National Network (DASNET) was chosen as the Tribunal’s telecommunication carrier.
3.1.3 Regional Infrastructure Installation
IT Infrastructure was installed in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Kalgoorlie, Darwin and Sydney. All of these were complete office fitouts and included the installation of :
3.1.4 Perth Infrastructure Installation
The Principal officeRegistry in, Perth, has is the location for accommodates the bulk majority of the Tribunal’s staff. Around 150 of the 230 staff work in the Perth OfficeRegistry. The infrastructure requirements in Perth were substantial enough to warrant a separate sub-project.
Following the Local Area Network replacement, servers were installed in Perth for file, print sharing and email. In addition servers were installed for applications such as Oracle, Systems Management Server, SQL Server, applications development and testing, World Wide Web publishing and Lotus Notes (see below).
In addition, the Tribunal was connected to the Internet and a security firewall and web proxy servers were installed. The Internet is delivered to the desktop.
3.1.5 National installation of Lotus Notes
The technology provided within Lotus Notes, namely replication, allows the Tribunal to address their regional office model and remote computing requirements.
In no small part, the success of this project is attributed to training of technical staff in new technologies. It is not sufficient to ensure that technology is successfully implemented as technology requires on-going management, maintenance and fine tuning. All IT personnel were trained in the technology related to their job function. In addition all consultants were required to transfer their skills and knowledge to permanent staff.
All staff were educated in how to use Lotus Notes to a level appropriate to their usage. A National training program was instituted through the IT Help Desk and training courses were developed and presented for the following :
3.2 Complexity
With a small Information Technology team of eight professionals, tThe enormity of deploying a National IT Infrastructure in just over 12 months represented a complex project. Particularly as The complexity of the project was primarily due to two key factors:
The complexity of the project is also evident in the number of smaller sub-projects that were instigated to comprise the whole National IT Infrastructure project. There were a large number of inter-relationships and dependencies between sub-projects and clearly this required close management and intricate planning.
A standardisation strategy was adopted to reduce the complexity of the project and to reduce the on-going IT support requirements.
As a new cCommonwealth Government agency, the National IT Infrastructure allows the Tribunal to operate efficiently and effectively. The community will benefit as the Tribunal uses technology to reduce running costs and to provide timely information regarding native title applications.
In addition the Tribunal is now positioned through IT infrastructure to provide accurate and up-to-date information on Native Title to its stakeholders and interested parties across Australia.
Given the politically sensitivitye nature of the Tribunal’s work, it is imperativeimportant that the message being delivered about Native Title to all levels of Government and the community as whole is both correct and a consistent. message about native title is delivered to all levels of Government and to the community as a whole.
The benefits delivered to users are wide and varied and they include, but are not limited to :
The above are the obvious primary benefits delivered, however there are numerous secondary benefits which will only be realised by further implementation of the Tribunal’s strategic Plan. Clearly realisation of these secondary benefits would not be possible without the appropriate IT infrastructure.
The Tribunal uses APT as its methodology for the implementation of infrastructure projects. and the The standards and guidelines in this methodology conforms with the international standard ISO9001 Standard.
As a new organisation the Tribunal hasn’t had the opportunity to explore the business benefits that Qquality Sstandards can offer. To over come this, the Tribunal’s IT section partnered with local industry that were certified to the international standard ISO9001 Standard. This also assisted in managing peak work loads and enabled the fast tracking of the National IT Infrastructure project.
Alphawest provided the wide area and local area networking expertise., Platinum Technologies provided the Lotus Notes skills. and tThe Tribunal’s IT team provided the remainder of the skills required including for the implementation management and planning.
Establishing a Commonwealth National IT Infrastructure in the only Commonwealth Government agency with a head office based in Perth has not been undertaken before. This presented its own challenge and many business process and policies were initially required to be established and reviewed frequently as the landscape of the organisation changed from 10 through to over 230 plus staff.
What are constant variables in many infrastructure projects were typically variable or largely unknown for the Tribunal. For example the number of users, type of applications and volumes/size of databases can usually be reasonably estimated in most organisations. These factors were typically variables in our capacity plans and traditional methods for planning and designing infrastructure were not considered appropriate.
Planning cycles were measured in months not years and an early decision was made to have sound strategies in place which would guide what amounted to less longer term planning, and more frequent short term planning.
Flexibility and scalability were the key strategies used to ensure that the infrastructure was capable of meeting the Tribunal’s regional registry model and changing business needs.
The best way to measure the effectiveness of the National IT Infrastructure project (Phase 2 of the ‘Plan’) is to answer to following questions:
1. Could the Tribunal achieve its business objectives without the IT infrastructure?
Answer - NO. Several corporate objectives are reliant on the corporate IT infrastructure being in place and fully operational. The more notable corporate objectives being :
2. Has the completion of Phase 2 of the Plan enabled the Tribunal to proceed to Phase 3 of the Plan?
Answer - YES. Phase 3 of the Plan was about implementing the planned suite of information systems to support the Tribunal’s business needs. Already several strategic information systems have been implemented in Lotus Notes such as
In addition, a Library Management System package has been implemented and Records and Document management is planned for 1998 as is the re-development of the Tribunal’s core business system, the Case Management System.
A national IT help desk comprising three IT professionals was established, in Perth., comprising three IT professionals Part-time help desk officers were also physically located in the larger regional offices, of Sydney and Brisbane.
The national help desk was established to provide first level IT support and training to their clients in Perth and in the smaller regional offices. The help desk officers located in Brisbane and Sydney provide these offices with first level IT support. Post implementation support is continuous as is the on-going education of staff in the use of office automation products to ensure that they are receiving maximum benefits of the technology at their disposal.
Second and third level IT support is provided by a technical support team based in Perth. To assist in providing a high level of support to not only the Perth office, but also to regional offices, Microsoft’s System management Server was implemented so that routine server and network monitoring in all offices could be done remotely and pro-actively.
In addition, site visits every quarter by one member of the technical team have been instigated to offices located outside of the Perth.
