Moving on up

By Stephen Bell | Friday, October 09 2009

Allan Frost was CFO, then CIO, at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, before joining the NZ Transport Agency as group manager. Today, governance, consolidation and collaboration top his agenda at the newly-merged organisation.

It’s not easy breaking down long-established walls between silos of information processing. As soon as one battle is won, it is clear that another has to be fought.

Yet, Allan Frost has a clear vision of what needs to be done for greater effectiveness, efficiency and cost efficiency in the transport sector.

He has been almost a year in the position of group manager at NZ Transport Agency having previously been CIO for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF), and was involved with the various border-policing agencies that have already established a large degree of inter-agency co-operation. Before that, Frost was chief financial officer at MAF, which, he says, gives him a particular outlook on the task of steering ICT.

Frost is now group manager at NZTA. His group comprises information services, finance, risk and assurance, legal and corporate support — more than 260 people. CIO Craig Soutar reports to Frost and Para Ganesan is the deputy CIO, but in practice, Frost says, “I treat them both as IS leaders. The IT shop reports to me through them.”

Consolidation and complexity
As a single organisation, NZTA is just over a year old. It was created by amalgamating Land Transport New Zealand and Transit.

Land Transport NZ had previously absorbed Transfund. As such, three organisations were effectively brought into one. “In IS this means we have duality in everything and duality is an understatement,” says Frost. So getting rid of the duplication has been the first priority.

“An organisation coming together means we’ve got two or more of everything. We have eight datacentres; I’ve got two images, two email systems, two finance systems and two record systems.

“Some were compatible. The finance systems were both Epicorp, so that was relatively easy. The email system was a little more complicated, because we had Novell and Outlook — we migrated everything over to Outlook. The records management systems are different.

“From an infrastructure perspective we’ve inherited the old datacentres and we have to decide on consolidation, sourcing and virtualisation strategies.

“We inherited two telecommunication approaches, using almost every major provider — TelstraClear, Telecom and Vodafone and we have to rationalise that down.”

Another current focus is on building governance, Frost says. The merged organisation has become too large for governance to be conducted separately for each current project. A higher-level governance structure has become necessary and programmes of work have been grouped in portfolios.

“We’ve had to start thinking about what the programmes of work are, what are the portfolios, how do we manage them and how do we manage the interlinkages.”

Building governance and capability across the organisation is “quite standard” he says, with NZTA using the tried and tested ValIT framework.

“In MAF [where he was CIO] we only had about six or seven major IS projects. We had project governance and then entity governance to oversee that — the IS Governance Board (ISGB).

“Given the complexity of NZTA, we have [many more] projects running at the same time. We decided on portfolio governance. We have three portfolios that govern the overview of the programme of work and the overview of the projects.”

The three portfolios are enterprise, management of the State Highways and access to and use of the roading network — motor vehicle licensing and road-user charges

“We had two cultures,” Frost says. “LTNZ was very strongly process-oriented and very process-centric. The process was seen as important rather than the outcome. We had business analysts and project managers who were almost more concerned about following the process, than they were around delivering a project or a service.

“Transit was a little more process-flexible and had far more of a results orientation. The outcome is that we get things done, but you get a lot of point solutions to point problems.” The eventual portfolio of applications is then less tidy.

In merging two historically successful approaches, he has been conscious of “not throwing babies out with the bathwater”, but to use processes that enable the merged IS operation to get good outcomes. “That’s been quite successful,” he says.

“It’s all about people at the end of the day, about large teams coming together. The stickiest patches were in giving the teams clarity of direction and clarity of vision.”

Engaging the business
NZTA is still working on establishing strategic business priorities for the merged organisation, Frost says. “There’s a lot of work underway in developing the business strategies around that. IS [needs to be] part of that journey, because sooner or later those business strategies turn into systems and processes to enable them.”

He is in the process of setting up a project management office. NZTA has appointed an enterprise architect who will be involved with the business around developing some of these strategies. “We’re using senior IS leaders with architecture expertise to strongly link into business strategies,” he says.

This is the third main focus for IS; on “engaging the business”, having IS come in behind the evolution of business strategies for the merged organisation. “Hopefully, as the businesses mature in its strategies and IS needs, we’d have tidied up the duality and our capability and systems and processes,” and can appropriately service the needs of the business, says Frost.

He sees his previous career experience as contributing an important skill set for the present position. “I was pretty happy with my previous position [as MAF CIO], but this move gave me a huge career development opportunity. Some might view it as being pushed in the deep end. Two-and-a-half years as a CIO really rounded off a lot of my thinking about systems in IT and how you use IT as a great enabler.”

This has been combined with an accountancy and finance background. “I think that’s always a good healthy skill set.”

As a former CFO “you like good governance, good planning, good business cases and good benefit realisation,” he says. “And I like to see the costing being whole-of-life and the benefits being whole-of-life. As a former CFO, you start viewing IT from a more holistic, whole-of-life perspective. You start saying, ‘If we’re doing this investment are we driving enough benefits, or are our ‘benefits’ just clichés in a business case’?”

The high-level strategic priorities are to improve customer service and reduce compliance costs to improve the efficiency of public transport; the efficiency of freight and improve road safety.

The Roads of National Significance project has emerged as a more recent business priority, says Frost. Certain routes have been earmarked as priorities for maintaining from a national rather than regional perspective — again there is a focus on breaking down silos.

Smashing borders
Frost’s MAF background has given him a useful model for what he sees as another extension of this thinking — breaking down the broader boundaries and duplications across the transport sector as a whole.

CIOs and high level managers like Frost “need to think about how the sector provides better service delivery to its customers and how do you get all the agencies to work together using systems and processes to provide a seamless integrated service,” he says.

“In my previous role, the border agencies were looking at how to provide an integrated service to importers and exporters across agencies. I don’t know where that’s advanced to. MAF and Customs have been evolving an integrated border management system with a ‘Trade Single Window’ as an important component. We’re not going to ask importers and exporters to fill out the same information four times for each … we’re going to try and provide them a one-stop-shop and an integrated service. I think that’s advanced quite a bit.”

The health sector has provided perhaps the most shining example of sector-wide thinking, says Frost, with more of the District Health Boards sharing service provision across wider regions.

The border agencies, like any other government agency in the present economic environment, are under the cost-cutting knife and some of the grand border management proposals may have to be trimmed.

“I just hope they don’t lose that concept,” says Frost, “because it’s quite powerful and provides an integrated seamless service to importers and exporters. Siloed agency thinking has seen the customer transact with four different agencies and give them 80 percent of the same data four different times.”

Evolution of a shared-services approach “requires one agency to lead and some other agencies to follow”, he says. And though there are complex overarching governance and management structures, a lot of the practical forks on the information systems side are down to co-operation among individual CIOs.

“In my previous role I was quite pleased with where that thinking was evolving,” Frost says.

In the transport sector he thinks there is ample opportunity for inter-agency collaboration between land, maritime and airways.

“We’re working on it,” he says. One strategic focus for the sector overall is a customer segmentation strategy. “We’re thinking about who our customers are” and what groups they fall into. “So we’re starting to think about [a sector-wide strategy] but we’re not as mature as the border sector has been.

“We aim at improving customer service and reducing compliance costs. It’s really round that strategic priority, trying to focus on our customer and how best to service the customer. We’re trying not just to think about that from an NZTA perspective [but] from a holistic perspective. That’s hard to do, because you’re dealing with several entities with their own agendas and approaches,” he says. “But we have to end up collaborating.”