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The Ministry of Social Development has begun decreasing the number of external resources used in its ongoing ICT work programme but expects to require more again for its major Te Pae Tawhiti transformation.
“There are initiatives underway that will reduce the use of individual contractors including MSD partnering with ICT suppliers to address any skill shortage areas,” the ministry told Parliament’s social services and community committee in June.
However, the Te Pae Tawhiti programme required strong specialist capability across integration, design, implementation and technical skills.
“As the Te Pae Tawhiti programme progresses, it is anticipated that increased use of external resources associated with the implementation of the new platforms will be required,” the ministry reported.
MSD said it anticipated IT projects and programmes would be impacted by funding constraints, however, within its budget, priority would be given to projects supporting critical IT assets, foundational projects supporting Te Pae Tawhiti and to ministerial priorities.
MSD also reported it was nearing the finish line on payroll and financial management systems replacement projects, which required a large amount of short-term specialist expertise.
Accenture won a two year $28.3 million contract in 2023 to replace those systems and a $13.9 million contract for “strategic partner services” on Te Pae Tawhiti alongside PwC ($13.4 million).
In March, the ministry won $183 million in funding for the first two years of Te Pae Tawhiti, which is expected to cost $2.6 billion over nine years.
While budgets and priorities for 2024/25 had not been finalised, MSD provided indicative numbers for its anticipated ICT work programme.
These included $6.6 million to expand and mature the ministry’s cloud capability and to transition key applications, where agreed, from on-premise to cloud to support Te Pae Tawhiti.
$1.67 million would be devoted to identity modernisation including the automation of user lifecycle management and a centralised application access portal to streamline access to systems.
$9.8 million would be used to deliver privileged access management and access management for clients and partners for Te Pae Tawhiti.
$5.3 million would see MSD’s content repositories migrated to Microsoft’s SharePoint while a technology security uplift would cost $5.1 million.
The budget required to shift MSD’s contact centre, currently Genesys Engage, to the cloud had not been finalised.
$7.5 million would enable core infrastructure and digital system upgrades and maintenance covering upgrades to meeting room conferencing systems, a new storage array in Auckland and boosted capacity in Wellington to reduce the risk of failure, outages and data corruption.
It would also fund continued core application upgrades and maintenance for the SWIFTT benefits system, Curam, Oracle, core platform and network remediation and the upgrade of 68 critical VMware servers.