2009 Q1 News Headlines

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Centrelink boosts its real-time BI capability:

Centrelink boosts disaster tech

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Mahesh Sharma | March 31, 2009

CENTRELINK will use GPS-enabled phones and RSS feeds to improve its response to disasters such as the recent Victorian bushfires and Queensland floods.

The agency played a key role in the recent bushfires and floods as it distributed more than $100 million worth of government support payments to victims.

But its resources were under extreme pressure as it responded to a spate of natural disasters across the country. It now plans to use mobile phones with Global Positioning System (GPS) capability to track where staff are deployed and what skills are available in an area.

This information will be fed back to a command centre in real time and displayed on a screen.

The department will also use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds -- which allow a single message to be sent out to a group of subscribers -- to allocate resources to different areas to meet changing demand.

The new technologies will improve the management of Centrelink resources during a crisis, according to the department's technology head, John Wadeson.

The organisation was starting to link up to "geo-coding-type systems" and assessing whether it could use mobile devices "to make sure we know where everybody is and account for everybody all the time", and help with resource planning.

"In these disasters a lot of policy work goes on. A lot of instructions have to go out, so communicating with people is really important.

"We can use these things to say it has just been decided that this needs to be done" and "our staff are expected to work with those new rules".

Asked if the department would consider using Twitter, a one-to-many message service, Mr Wadeson said nothing was off the table.

"Everyone has heard of Twitter," he said.

"We're desperately avoiding sitting here saying we'll do one thing or another.

"Those decisions are ahead of us and we don't want to start a marketing run on us, but nothing is off the agenda at this stage."

The organisation's control centre for the Victorian bushfires was a cluster of whiteboards set up in a building in the Melbourne CBD.

"I went down to the control room, which we set up for the fires and they had big whiteboards everywhere with a whole lot of names and a whole lot of arrows.

"It works, but it requires a lot of people."

E-services initiatives director Jeff Davis said the technology could be used when too many resources were allocated at one site that could be used at another.

When the department was maintaining several sites, Mr Davis said, "we may have six people to a particular site and only have 20 customers at that site", but another site will have "two staff and 100 people queueing".

"If you had this real-time information you would be able through the command centre to reallocate those staff to the other site.

"It's also the skill sets. You might have a social worker at a particular site and not covering the crisis centre, for instance, so you can reallocate the social worker across, or the person on the ground knows where the social workers are and can refer the customers to those sites."

Mr Wadeson has demonstrated the technology to the department and has received feedback on possible improvements.

He expects much of this will be in place before the next bushfire season, at the end of the year.

He doesn't expect the cost to be large because Centrelink will use off-the-shelf products.

"If we're buying industry standard product, we're not looking big development costs," Mr Wadeson said. "We're talking really small beer."

However, because of the nature of disasters it was crucial the technology be perfected before it was deployed, and there were still problems with communications infrastructure.

"You can't afford to use disasters as a practice zone," he said.

"You have to go into them confident things are going to work. People don't want to be stuffed around in these situations.

"We won't be doing anything until we're sure it's going to work, and then you have to pick the right place.

"In some places there are literally no communications at all," he said.

"Every disaster is different, every situation is different."

Mr Wadeson has ruled out a massive core processing systems overhaul in the near future, as existing systems can handle the workload.

The focus was to move to a "virtual Centrelink", starting with the digital scanning and electronic processing of documents, he said.

His remarks follow comments he made last week that Centrelink would cut business as usual spending by $14 million in 2009-10 and by $40 million by 2011-12.

The number of contractors will be capped at about 200, almost half the number employed two years ago.

The cuts were in response to recommendations from the Gershon review, aimed at cutting spending across the federal public service.
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THEY tell us where to eat, how to find friends, when to make a left turn. Oh, and they can also make a phone call.

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From Australian IT:

IBM wins $3.2m Energy Australia monitoring contract

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Mitchell Bingemann | March 31, 2009

ENERGY Australia has awarded IBM a $3.2 million contract to provide a real-time network monitoring system as the utility provider takes a step closer to completing its intelligent network program.

In April IBM will begin construction of a distribution monitoring and control system for gathering and analysing raw data from 12,000 fibre-optic sensors installed in Energy Australia's electricity distribution network. The system will be used by about 30 in-house Energy Australia staff to monitor the utility's grid in real time.

Like network monitoring systems used by major telcos, the system will give Energy Australia a street-by-street view of its electricity grid and will alert staff to power failures, overloads and potential network faults in real time.

It will also be used to manage distributed energy sources such as solar and storage devices.

"This will make our network smarter and more reliable," said Energy Australia intelligent networks manager Adrian Clark.

"It will give us a real-time view across all our streets and suburbs.

"Every minute of the day we will have data being fed back to us, which will allow us to provide better power supply to our customers."

At the moment, if a network fault or power outage affects any of the 1.4 million homes and businesses that Energy Australia services, the utility must send an assessment team to the site of the fault before repairs are done.

Mr Clark said with the new system in place, Energy Australia would be able to pinpoint faults as they happened, allowing it to send out repair teams more quickly.

"This new system allows our staff to respond to faults in a more proactive and timely manner and it allows us to plan the network better and the condition of our equipment in the field," he said.

Energy Australia expects the project to reduce the length of power outages and network faults by about 10 per cent, on average.

Once the IBM project was complete Energy Australia planned to use the system to test a range of services for customers, Mr Clark said.

"It's not just about responding to faults quicker or getting better power supply, it's also about helping us to introduce and think of new ways to incorporate new energy initiatives such as renewable energy and load storage as they become more widespread on our grid," Mr Clark said.

IBM communications sector general manager David Murray said the system could also be used to help Energy Australia track its customers' power usage.

This would help Energy Australia enhance and improve its ageing infrastructure and understand customer behaviour and its impact on usage and the environment, Mr Murray said.

"This is one of the important steps to enable the consumer and the business to have an intelligent view of their usage patterns," he said.

The system is part of Energy Australia's $130 million intelligent network upgrade, started in 2006.

The utility has already upgraded its network with 800km of fibre-optic cable to 200 major substations and depots, installing hundreds of communications switches and testing a WiMax network to allow two-way communication across its electricity network.

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TOYOTA Financial Services needed its IT department to function more effectively and provide customers with better service.

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EUROPE-BASED Lebara Mobile has signed up with Vodafone Australia as the latest mobile service provider to use the latter's infrastructure. Lebara will join Crazy John's and GRLmobile as Vodafone mobile virtual network operators in what is proving to be a popular move for aspiring mobile providers seeking to avoid capital investment.

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The Australian Securities and Investments commission has taken its first scalp in its campaign against misleading advertising of banking products.

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Big banks usually lag behind the regionals in consumer surveys. It is a truism that small and friendly goes down better with the customers than big and efficient.

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ANZ chief executive Mike Smith told the Australian Financial Review that valuation of potential banking acquisitions in Asia had become more attractive and underpinned his plan to give the bank a stronger regional presence.

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ANZ National became the first New Zealand bank to issue offshore with a New Zealand Government guarantee, when it issued US$1 billion of three-year bonds in the US s144A market on Thursday.

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Cashcard and Bank of China won clearance from the competition watchdog for their “Feesmart” proposal, or a sub-network that allows smaller banks to link to Cashcard’s fleet of more than 5000 ATMs.

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