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Central Government, Technology

Modernising Australia's tax service

By Jianggan Li | 31 July 2008

Jianggan Li speaks with Todd Heather, Acting Chief Information Officer, Australian Taxation Office (ATO), to find out how its modernisation plans are coming along.

As the ATO’s Acting CIO, Todd has responsibility for the Information and Communications Technology Division. Todd began at the ATO as Chief Technology Officer in 2004 taking on responsibility for IT strategy and enterprise architecture. Last November, he was appointed to act as CIO, as the former CIO was promoted to Acting Second Commissioner.

Before joining the ATO Todd spent 15 years as a management consultant in Canada and Australia, in firms such as Price Waterhouse, DMR Consulting and Fujitsu Consulting.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is the principal revenue collection agency of the Australian government, collecting approximately 92 per cent of revenue at the federal government level.

The organisation manages 10 million personal taxpayers, three million businesses and non-profit organisations and regulates approximately 300,000 self-managed superannuation funds.

As any other public organisation which has a long history of computerisation, the IT infrastructure of the ATO evolved from an entirely mainframe-based system with old-fashioned terminals in 1990s, to integrated midrange and mainframe environment with PCs and a web portal.

“We went through this process which we call modernisation,” says Heather. “Our clients – Australians – are able to connect to our portal; the transactions performed there will be sent to our midrange and mainframe computers.”

The IT team at ATO have tested the web portal with most common browsers. “So we’ve evolved from an environment that was standalone to a system that is highly integrated over the last ten years,” he says.

Key challenges Heather says that he is currently facing three challenges with the IT infrastructure. The ATO is implementing an ‘Easier, Cheaper and More Personalised’ change programme. “It is a very large multi-year programme to replace our legacy core systems with new systems and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software packages,” Heather explains. “We are midway through that project at the moment. It is a very big project which has many challenges”

In the meantime, Heather is engaged in the preparation to go to market for new outsourcing agreements. The infrastructure of the ATO is outsourced and the agreement has to be refreshed in the next two years. “That’s also a huge project because there will be perhaps A$1.5 billion in the renewed outsourcing projects,” tells Heather.

Heather is also working on the impending roll out of over 5000 laptops to replace a portion of the desktop fleet. He explains that there are also a number of challenges they are facing in their data centres.

In addition to the common issues of managing cost, ensuring availability and facility issues around power management, heat and air-conditioning, the ATO is also adopting the idea of green computing, reducing the carbon footprint and to be more environmentally friendly.

“We also need to have a more responsive mid-range environment where we can get new servers and storage online more quickly,” Heather says.

He reveals that the consolidation attempt within the data centres did not work very well because “the opportunity to co-host applications on the same server was limited by application scalability”. The agency has instead chosen to focus on virtualisation.

Server virtualisation will enable the ATO to implement power saving by powering down idle servers in non-peak periods.

“We are expecting to reduce the number of physical servers by at least 80 per cent,” notes Heather. “This will make us quicker in provisioning servers because they are virtual, reducing our environmental footprint to be greener. It will improve availability and disaster recovery.” Lights-out data centres

ATO currently runs three data centres, including a primary data centre and two secondary ones. They are all outsourced. “In order to run them effectively, being able to turn off some of them is a requirement,” says Heather.

So, the solution is to operate secondary data centres from the central data centre and have remote monitoring and administration.

“It’s quite important for us to move towards more lights-out operations,” Heather comments. “We will have lights-out only in the secondary data centres while we will maintain manned operations in our primary data centre.”

In addition to the data centres, The ATO is also virtualising workstations. “We at the moment have two networks – the developer network and the production network,” tells Heather. “Developers at the moment need two or more workstations if they work on multiple environments. We are creating a virtual workstation environment that will enable developers to have multiple environments on the same physical computer.

“That has a very positive impact on our IT staff,” Heather explains. “Because they will be able to create a new environment themselves, by just selecting the environment they want from the library.” If there is any problem with the environment, they can create a new, fresh one very easily, he says. The ATO has a fairly large in-house development capacity: Of the 1700 or so people working in the IT department, about 1000 are working in development.

“We do partner with other organisations to develop our applications,” explains Heather. “We are also increasingly using COTS software, which only requires in-house configuration.”

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