One Defence Data – Another ‘Big Consultant’ issue?

Hidden in the pre-Christmas holiday fun, the ABC[1] published an ‘investigations exclusive’ by Linton Besser and defence correspondent Andrew Greene[2] that needs more attention.

It appears project ICT2284 (One Defence Data), a $515 million project to unify and exploit the data resources held by the Department of Defence is in trouble due to Hastie (pun intended) decisions made before the last election. Within this overall project, a $100 million One Defence Data “systems integrator” contract was awarded to KPMG Australia Technologies Solutions on the eve of the last federal election, and the then assistant minister for defence, Andrew Hastie, announced KPMG’s contract, promising it would “deliver secure and resilient information systems”.

This award was made after KPMG had been paid $93 million Between 2016 and 2022, for consulting work on a range of strategic advice, which included the development of ICT2284 and its failed forerunner, known as Enterprise Information Management, or EIM.

Unsurprisingly, the review by Anchoram Consulting highlighted both governance and procedural issues including:

• The project has been plagued by a “lack of accountability” and conflicts of interest.
• The documents suggest there is profound confusion inside Defence about who is in charge and what is actually being delivered.
• Core governance documents have not been signed off and key requirements of KPMG’s contract have been diluted from “mandatory” to “desirable”, sometimes in consultation with KPMG itself.
• The project had been “retrospectively” designed to justify a $100 million contract that was issued to KPMG Australia Technologies Solutions, or KTech, exposing the department to “significant risk”.

The heart of ICT2284’s problem appears to be the project’s fundamental design work had “not been done due to … the rush to meet deadlines tied to the Cabinet submission and related procurement activities”, with “no understood and agreed, desired end-state”.

Predictably both the area of Defence running the project, known as CIOG, or the Chief Information Officer Group, and KPMG reject the report findings.

The full ABC report is at: https://amp.abc.net.au/article/103247476

From a governance perspective the biggest on-going issue appears to be the lack of capability within CIOG and government generally to manage this type of complex project. The downsizing and deskilling of the public service has been on-going for decades (under both parties). This means the outsourcing of policy development to the big consultancies is inevitable, and their advice will be unavoidably biased towards benefitting them.

The actions by the current government to reverse this trend are admirable but will take years to be effective. In the meantime, we watch.

For more on governance failures see: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI-ORG-005.php#Process4

For good governance practice see: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI-ORG-005.php#Process3

[1] Australian Broadcasting Corporation

[2] Posted Tue 19 Dec 2023 at 6:41pm: