AUSTRALIA'S PROPOSED ID CARD

Two relevant articles below:

A mess from the start

The federal health and welfare smartcard project may be heading for big problems, according to experts concerned by a lack of detailed planning and apparent Government willingness to work outside the business case.....

Regardless of its public or political implications, Cabinet's approval of the smartcard has signed the Government up for the mother of all IT projects. It is the biggest IT project - and certainly the biggest IT story - ever to come out of Canberra. Gartner Asia-Pacific research vice-president Richard Harris said poor definition of project details by the Government was a serious concern after a comprehensive business case had been developed by independent consultants. Cost blow-outs and deadline problems were a fact of life for even the best-planned IT projects, and the industry was worried the Government has made the job more difficult by adding last-minute features relating to national security.

"Trying to consolidate 17 ID cards into one system is a big, big job," Mr Harris said. "The history generally with large projects like this is that they don't finish on budget and they don't finish on time," he said. "For the billion-dollar ball-park cost that has been announced, it's difficult to know what is included in that figure."

S2 Intelligence research principal Bruce McCabe said government risked disaster if it is contemplating function creep at this early stage. "This is going to be an extremely complex project anyway, because of the amount of integration work it requires," Mr McCabe said. "What are the chances of it finishing on time and on budget? Virtually nil, if you look at the experience of other large projects."

The stream of IT vendors beating a path to Human Services Minister Joe Hockey's door, as the minister driving the project, is about to turn into a torrent. After waiting a year for the decision, the announcement was everything the vendors could have wished for - it is big, and it is budgeted.

The announcement was delivered with curious lack of detail for such a big-ticket item. That's all the more surprising because of the enormous and well-known risks that large and complex IT projects carry. With a billion dollars on offer, the industry does not know where the money will be spent, or the specific projects involved. Cabinet approval means a Human Services team is working around the clock preparing forward costing for a four-year project in time for the federal Budget. More details will be known when Treasurer Peter Costello delivers his Budget next Tuesday. The Prime Minister said the card would cost about $1 billion and would save $3 billion over 10 years, but it is hard to understand where the saving will be made because so little is known. Mr Hockey has committed to releasing the business case prepared by KPMG following complaints from industry groups.

It remains to be seen how much help this will be. Commercially sensitive information, mainly on costs, would be stripped from the KPMG document for fear that it would adversely affect the tender process, Mr Hockey said. It is apparent that the smartcard plan Mr Hockey took to Cabinet is not the one that was announced, nor is it the one for which KPMG wrote a business case. When the Prime Minister announced the project at Parliament House, Mr Hockey and Attorney-General Philip Ruddock were present. Mr Ruddock had been pushing a national ID card proposal. The ID card plan was axed at the same Cabinet meeting that approved the Hockey smartcard. Mr Howard said the Hockey smartcard had been given enhanced identity security features, but the Government would not say what those add-on features were, or what impact they would have on cost. Mr Hockey had previously said his card would not contain biometric details.

There is a suggestion the high-definition biometric photograph of millions of cardholders to be stored on a central database, called the Central Common Registration System, may have been added by the Attorney-General's Department. This is not a small change, and it has enlivened suspicion from civil libertarians about whether the Government will use the initial access smartcard project as a platform to revisit the national ID card proposal later. The Prime Minister denies this, saying the access card is not "a Trojan Horse for an ID card", but won't rule out adding more functions to the smartcard later.

The prospect has alarmed the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which has run a campaign opposing a national ID card as too expensive, too complex, and adding an extra layer of red tape for business to deal with. Chamber chief executive Peter Hendy remains deeply suspicious about plans to change Mr Hockey's smartcard into a fully blown ID card. "There's concern across industry that if the original and more narrow identification purpose is expanded, this may result in a compliance burden for business," Mr Hendy said. The chamber's concerns are based on "the need to create a national identity register to cross-check with bearers of the card and the prospect that once introduced an identity card would be used for far more extensive purposes than originally intended." ......

There is another potential parallel to corporate experience with single-view customer relationship management systems: their complexity and propensity to cost far more than planned. "If you look at the Commonwealth Bank and its CommSee project, you can see that it was difficult and (is believed to have) cost several hundred million dollars," Mr McCabe said. "The bank had budgeted for about $100 million, and it is just one organisation. "What the Government is doing runs across many departments and a lot of different systems that need to be integrated......

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For comparison:

The cost of Western Australia's vehicle licensing and registration system is expected to blow out to at least $82 million, $57 million more than anticipated. A report from the West Australian auditor-general on the management of the Transport Executive and Licensing System (Trelis) finds an "inadequate" level of project management. The auditor-general could not find an approved business case for the project but did find various unsigned documents from 1999 that anticipated costs for the system at just $24.5 million. The report also says business continuity procedures were still to be tested and several security weaknesses were being dealt with by the Planning and Infrastructure Department.

The Trelis system was plagued by problems when it was launched, a full two years late, in July 2004. The system contains personal information on the state's 1.3 million licensed drivers and 1.9 registered vehicles. The project was initiated in 1999 by the former Transport Department. The original intention was to replace the existing licensing system operated on the West Australia Police computer with a system that would meet the requirements of the National Exchange of Vehicle and Driver Information Systems. Trelis, which is one of the largest Java development projects in the world, was supplied by Australian Defence Industries. Releases 1.0 and 2.0 of the system were delivered on time and budget but it was discovered later that the 2.1 update was incompatible with Release 3.0. After several reviews and postponements, the system was introduced in July 2004.

From July to December that year a combination of user, data validation and system processing errors occurred, resulting in about 22,000 transactions being manually processed. As a result of technical constraints, only six million data records out of 20 million were cleansed at the time of launch and the unclean data contributed to the problem. A project is under way to clean the remaining 14 million records. "Trelis experienced some teething problems, but let's remember we went from an antiquated system that couldn't cope to one that can grow," department director-general Greg Martin said in response to the audit. The report says tests indicate the system is now reliable.

It needs to handle more than 6.5 million transactions a year, yet since the system was introduced millions of dollars have been spent fixing software problems. In the year after it went live, about $2.8 million was spent. Further funding has been approved, and by June 2009 total costs are expected to come in at $82.2 million. According to the department, this figure will represent about 1.25 per cent of the revenue Trelis collects during the same period.....

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