Defence CIO gets strategic in long-term IT makeover

Late last year Greg Farr, long-serving Australian Tax Office CIO, was poached into what at the time many considered to be the least desirable senior IT job in the country.

Farr was appointed CIO of the Department of Defence (DoD) last October and inherited an IT platform in desperate need of an overhaul.

At least one project, a planned revamp of the payroll and HR system, had stalled in development for over a year.

Fortunately, Farr is not one to shirk from a challenge.

While defence boasts one of the biggest public sector IT budgets in the country, it has also had three CIOs in four years.

Over the next 12 months he plans to redesign the entire IT platform. And that's just one of his goals.

In an exclusive interview with Computerworld, Farr spoke about the difficulties that lie ahead, the high turnover rate of DoD CIOs and the advantages of ITSM.

Farr is well aware of the high turnover rate of CIOs at defence but the department has ensured he will have an unprecedented level of access to higher-echelon staff.

"I'm the first CIO that's actually been on a level that sits on the defence committee or sits at the highest level committees," he said.

That's important, because Farr believes the lack of accessibility suffered by his predecessors may partly explain their conspicuous lack of longevity in the role.

"I think it would be very difficult for someone that wasn't in [my] position to run something as big and complex as defence," he said.

In any event, he stresses he is in for the long-haul.

"I intend to be here for at least five years," he said. "I spent 34 years at the ATO, so I'm not a job-hopper by any means."

Farr believes he has inherited a strong IT team committed the DoD and the wider Australian community.

On the plus side, Farr said the DoD IT team display remarkable problem-solving abilities.

"The way some of the people have taken what they've got and made it work I think is nothing short of astounding. I've shaken my head in disbelief sometimes that they've actually made things work," he said.

The downside is that these problem-solving abilities have evolved in part because the DoD lacks an overarching IT strategy and roadmap - omissions which, on balance, are more detrimental than beneficial.

"Without [an] overall strategy, people are making things up as they go along - because they have to, I'm not being critical of them in any way," he said.

"We need to articulate [a strategy] so we can actually operate on the same page. That way a distributed environment such as the one we're running can actually work."

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Creating an overall strategy is among Farr's top priorities, but perhaps more important is the development of a robust and stable IT operating environment, something Farr feels the DoD currently lacks.

"A lot of IT should be a light switch - you turn it on and it's there," he said.

"You don't care who the electricity supplier is, you don't care which generator they use - you just want it there. You want it reliable, cheap and on demand."

Farr said IT departments can not expect to introduce innovations without a robust underlying IT environment because if they fail to provide one, nobody within the organisation is going to want to talk about anything else.

"And there's still a little bit of that [in the DoD] - people still want to talk about the service problems they're having rather than what strategic IT can do for them," he said.

But it will require more than cosmetic changes to the system to ensure this level of service, which is why Farr believes a paradigm shift is in order.

He wants to relinquish control over the areas his IT team improves upon to the DoD's IT userbase.

"We've just compiled the top 10 irritants list for the defence information environment detailing what is causing people the most grief. We put that together based on feedback that we've received," he said.

Farr wants to "give the users control over the priorities - an IT shop shouldn't really be focused on its own priorities."

Last month's announcement by the Minister for Defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, that defence was to begin work on a new white paper this year hasn't caused Farr to change his plans, but it has forced him to re-prioritise.

The white paper, the first commissioned since 2000, will require a lot of input from the DoD IT team, Farr acknowledged.

"We have to focus on that white paper during this coming 12 months. It's going to be a very short window for us," he said.

"But at the same time we're doing that, we can't let things slip. So we're going to have to be really determined in what projects we'll undertake [and] how we'll deploy our resources across the ICT community."

Many of the operational changes Farr wants to bring about will rely on the principals of ITSM, a discipline Farr is a strong proponent of.

"I think that it's critical that there is a highly disciplined, highly documented framework if you are going to run IT effectively. I don't think there's any two ways about it," he said.

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But, Farr believes, while ITSM has a number of advocates within Australia, some of which proselytise on the discipline "with almost religious ferver", far fewer are actually putting the principles into practice.

"Not many people have actually put it in place, tested it out and been able to demonstrate...a level of improvement."

"But I think there's a growing understanding of the need for it, and I think as communities practice and start to understand the practical realities of it rather than the theories, [ITSM] will be much more widespread.

Farr will have a chance to convince Australian IT professionals of the importance of ITSM in person. He is a keynote speaker at the upcoming itSMF Australia National Conference and Expo, which will be held in Canberra August 27-29, 2008.