In August 2022 we were promised a new system of recording births, deaths and marriages. It was supposed to be more efficient, secure, and reliable than the current system and was set to go live late this year.
“The move is much bigger than just replacing 25-year-old end of life technology – it’s about giving people more control over their information, says Mr Montgomery.
“We’ve listened to customers, stakeholders, and our own people, and undertaken research to learn what’s important to shape our services. We are focused on giving individuals the ability to access, curate and share their data, rather than it being government capturing and sharing data without consent – we want to move away from that approach.”
Civil registration, often known as ‘Births, Deaths, and Marriages’, covers the wide scope of life event and identity data for which DIA is responsible and includes paternity orders, adoption, registering marriage celebrants, change of name, change of registered sex, civil union, human assisted reproductive technologies (HART) and surrogacy.
Work on the new system involves upgrading and replacing all life and identity – birth, death, and marriage – data registers and then moving them into a new Microsoft cloud data centre in Auckland. These registers contain approximately 80 million records.
But four months earlier, in March 2022, the Department of Internal Affairs had awarded the contract for the civil registration systems overhaul to Australian company DWS (NSW), initially for five years.
By March 2023 alarm bells were sounding on the massive project which included the other DIA arm of passports and citizenship.
Treasury’s Gateway review gave Te Ara Manaaki an amber rating, meaning successful delivery appeared feasible but significant issues required management attention.
DIA is delivering Te Ara Manaaki in two phases. The first, costing $95.4 million, began in July 2017 and ended in March 2021. The second, costing $152.8 million, runs from April 2021 until June 2025.
Phase 2 is larger and more complex than the first phase with more systems being worked on and delivering a larger scale of business change.
“The recommendations from the review were promptly resolved and reported to central agencies,” Greg Archer, general manager Te Ara Manaaki told Reseller News.
“Mitigations to these include signing fixed price contracts and ramping up our programme management disciplines.”
Crowing about securing a fixed-term contract is laudable only if the project reaches a satisfactory conclusion, which in an inflationary environment requires better-than-average management skills.
…the introduction of two new delivery partners, each with different methodologies and a different delivery ‘cadence’, also presented a new and more challenging risk landscape if strong and effective programme governance was not applied.
Te Ara Manaaki has two workstreams: civil registration, and passports and citizenship.
DWS Group – an HCL Technologies company – is replacing the ageing Births, Deaths and Marriages systems with its own, modern, commercial off the shelf civil registration system, dubbed the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Solution (CRVS), to enable identity services.
Less than two years later, and less than a year before the system was promised to go live, the plug was pulled on the births, deaths and marriage arm of the system’s overhaul.
With no public explanation and DWS refusing to comment – their silence probably a condition of a confidential court settlement – the public doesn’t know how much work can be reused, how much money is wasted or even if there is an alternative plan for the more efficient, secure, and reliable births, deaths and marriages systems update.
“A decision was made to stop work on the development of the replacement system at this point”, she [the department’s deputy chief executive of service delivery and operations, Maria Robertson] said.
Plans to replace technology for the information, called civil registrations, were part of a wider $150 million project.
The department said it was in confidential discussions with DWS and until those were over it could not say how much money was spent on the now-abandoned changes.
The discussions spilled over into the courts last week.The department and DWS at first did not agree what should happen to commercially sensitive, and valuable, information while a private dispute resolution process took place.
After two urgent court hearings agreement was reached.
For the moment plans to change the civil registrations system have stopped, contractors for the project have finished working with the department, and most staff working on the project have moved to other jobs.
Robertson said the department was “working through options” for staff not given other work.”
How sweet, they are concerned about reallocating staff made redundant by the programme termination. Wouldn’t it be lovely if they had the same respect for managing public funds?
Suze sees herself as a New Zealander whose heritage shaped but does not define, and believes unless we protect our rights and freedoms they will be taken off us by a few powerful people. This article was first published HERE
3 comments:
Anyone paying more than $1 per record for transition to a new system and more than $1 per record per annum to manage the database ongoing would be a total mug. I'm banking my chocolate fish on the fact that the original budget has already been overspent.
I could NOT give a toss about staff that have raped the "new " system with wages, conditions, work environment and of course festive frivolities ,.
WHAT about our information - Births , Deaths , Marriages probably cirulating in cyber space after being sent electronically to Australia . Confidentially into cyber space Of Course
HOW DUMB are Government Executives and Bureaucracy. Answer- Double Dumb and Triple Stupid.
Thanks Suze, now I know why it took over a month to get a copy of my Birth Certificate in October/November last year. Was/is there some sort of competition between Government Departments to see which can be the most incompetent? Asking for a friend.
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