004:
I also hear that the very questionable sentinel I.T program, which was introduced by a friend of one of the GWM Don's, is a complete and dismal failure! Slow, clunky, and full of more holes than what is in Professor Reasons block of Swiss cheese! The amount of time spent trying to accurately use the system has resulted in several months of work backlog including audits and surveillance tasks. No risk in that is there?
Hmm very interesting rumour 004!
So this was the system instigated on mate's rates.."
I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine fellow trough dweller!"...that had drawn the interest of one Senator Fawcett at the last Senate Estimates and still has an outstanding QON (no surprises there!!
) some 4 months later:
Senator FAWCETT:I will swap to yoursurveillance manual. You are obviously aware we have been taking an increased interestin surveillance activities. As part of my background reading for that, inlooking at your surveillance manual, in the introduction section it talks aboutSky Sentinel, the approved IT surveillance management tool. I have done someresearch over Google to try and find out who provided that to CASA and theredoes not appear to be a commercial provider. Can you tell the committee wherethat system has come from?
Mr McCormick: Yes. That system was developed in-house by one of our inspectors in Perth and at the time it wasbased around the issues of Perth and operators. By putting in information and background on operators it allows us to have a risk-rating on organisations, giving us more insight into organisations that are higher risk than would perhaps be seen by a manual search, given the large number of certificates that people hold. It is one of the first systems rolled out in the world. There may be others. We have trialled it for many months, if not a year, in Perth. We have now refined that. We own the IP to it and now every inspector has on their desk an IT based system which gives them indications of what the risk-ratings are of the various organisations that they are overseeing. Coupled with that, of course, we have moved into the certificate management team approach which was to put together our safety systems inspectors, our airworthiness inspectors and our flying operations inspectors in teams so that they could better use that data.
Senator FAWCETT:You said that you own theIP. I take it that was developed by CASA staff in CASA time?
Mr McCormick: In fact, I think it was developed in the person's own time, but on the IP issues there are other systems that are similar in the world and we took legal advice on the IP issues.
Senator FAWCETT:Was that person recognised or rewarded in some way for their contribution?
Mr McCormick: They were the employee of the month, from memory.
Senator FAWCETT:So no other recognition or award given to them? No payment?
Mr McCormick: We did have to buy the IP off them. That is correct.
Senator FAWCETT:How much did that cost?
Mr McCormick: If I can confirm that, it was somewhere between $25,000 and $37,000.
Senator FAWCETT:I am assuming that you have then rolled that out across the organisation. Do you have a quality assurance IT department that looked at that? What was their advice about a home-grown system across the whole department?
Mr McCormick: What we had to do with the system was to address that very issue. We had to take the IP from the person and the system and then, in the parlance, cut it into professional code so that it is supportable by modern systems and of course to take out some of theprogramming issues which may have been loops or things to put it on a professional basis. So the system we use now has been done by our professional IT department and we do have QA. We are, in fact, at this stage rolling out quality assurance across all our flight operations to ensure we have standardisation. That is being done by a very senior CASA manager who has previously been the regional manager for southern region.
Senator FAWCETT:Were there any concerns expressed by your IT department about that approach?
& further on in Hansard
Senator FAWCETT:Mr McCormick, when the decision was first taken to proceed with this, what was the expected expenditure that would be required from CASA to roll out this system?
Mr McCormick: When we originally looked at getting to a risk based IT system we were looking at projects which we had had running for some time which were addressing this very issue. They had previously had budgets of varying amounts, so the actual purchase of this software and this system was not undertaken until we had an idea of the costs involved.
Senator FAWCETT:My question was: when it was first approved what was the capital expenditure that was approved for the project?
Mr McCormick: The capital expenditure was a very small amount of money. It was a case of how much it was going to cost. It was costing somewhere at a maximum of $37,000 to purchase it. It is not a large amount of cost in total, even capital or op-ex to roll that out in the organisation.
Senator FAWCETT:So since that initial decision have there been cost overruns where subsequent allocations of funding have been required to enable the implementation to occur?
Mr McCormick: I am not too sure that we can break it down that way. I will ask my chief financial officer. We do not have that breakdown, I am sorry.
Senator FAWCETT:Can you tell me the final overall cost of the system as of this budget?
Mr McCormick: For the CASA IT tool SkySentinel business and technical implementation, development implementation and the new CASA surveillance manuals from March 2011 to June 2013, the total cost was $2,419,157, but we do not have the breakdown of the Sky Sentinel out of that at this stage.
SenatorFAWCETT:Can you come back to the committee today, if you can, or tomorrow with that figure? I would be interested to know how much that was.
And now the rumour is that this surveillance IT tool is a clusterf*#k and has potentially circumvented several slices of swiss cheese on the safety risk matrix...hmm how potentially embarrassing for the FF GWM contingent and (as Gobbles once said
) TICK..TOCK!
ps While contemplating the Sky Sentinel rumour the Jeff Boyd article on Pro Aviation is worth a read
:
A Bridge Too Far