Border control, budget constraints
Border control, budget constraints
Information management at the US and Australia’s departments of immigration. By Liam Tung
It seems that immigration departments, information management and IT haven’t meshed too well in recent years. DIMA’s trouble relating to Vivien Solon Alvarez and Cornelia Rau led to the Palmer and Comrie reports. Palmer recommended the National Archives of Australia review DIMA’s recordkeeping practices. They shambles they found became part of DIMA’s response when it allocated half a billion dollars to its Systems for People program aimed at upgrading its information systems.
In the USA also the The US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) has been targeted for poor progress on its business process and IT systems upgrades which were scheduled after an initial review in 2005. Govexec.com recently reported that in 2005 the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) processed 30,000 files without properly checking the backgrounds of applicants, many of which were lost. More recently 14 of CIS' busiest district offices had lost 110,000 ‘A-files’ containing information such as arrest warrants and the results of immigration proceedings. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined this was due to poor training and a lack of emphasis from managers.
These incidents go a long way to explaining why Department of Homeland Security review has been so critical; the past several years have seen the USCIS repeatedly begin business process reengineering initiatives that never fully delivered results as promised, resulting in employee confusion about progress made, as well as apprehension concerning bureau plans for future improvements.
The reports criticised USCIS’ processes for being largely manual, paper-based, and duplicative, resulting in an ineffective use of human and financial resources to ship, store, and track immigration files. Similar to the NAA’s findings the review of DIMA’s information management practices adjudicators used multiple and non-integrated IT systems to perform their jobs, which has reduced productivity and data integrity.
DHS criticised USCIS’ reliance on personnel rather than technology to meet its backlog reduction goals. Moreover, the DHS is concerned because the bureau faces large-scale immigration reform as Congress debates pending legislation reform that will greatly impact USCI’s workload.
Looking at these changes the US faces, DIMA appears to be in a rather fortunate position. For DIMA the heat is off, the media has quietened down and progress, so far, appears to be smoothly. DIMA is redesigning its recordkeeping practices according to standards set out in ISO 15489 and has imposed a 5 year moratorium on the destruction of departmental files for client related, personnel, building, current contract and procurements files. It has also established the Records Management Improvement Programme which integrates the roles of Deputy Secretary and CIO Bob Correll more tightly with DIMA recordkeeping strategy. This was found to be a serious problem for DIMA due to senior management lacking awareness of key recordkeeping databases.
But for the US, the DHS is concerned over USCI’s systems upgrade which in their current form will be groaning under the pressure of two major changes to legislation. The House of Representatives have passed an immigration bill aimed at tightening current immigration law and border security while the now Democrat dominated Senate has passed a separate bill with provisions to create a “guest worker program” and a program to “legalize undocumented aliens.”
If the latter bill is enacted it could dramatically increase the number of applicants for immigration benefits, also requiring improved biometrics management, and new systems to track guest workers and their employment eligibility. The report says IT modernization will be vital for USCIS to meet these new requirements and overcome its long standing challenges in achieving operational efficiency.
Systems or people?
While the US looks at “improved biometrics”, DIMA is looking at identity management using biometrics for the first time. It’s one of the more interesting components of the Systems for People program.
Under the banner of DIMA’s Identity Service, the spokesperson said new procedures will focus on “the first point of contact” to collect client information including biometric images in some processes. After verification DIMA says it will reuse the data in future “business transactions”.
The scope of the identity management service includes biographical data, documentary details, digital facial images and other biometric data while its biometric development partner Unisys will work in collaboration with DIMA and IBM, which has been contracted to provide the majority of services, software and hardware to the government agency.
IBM will also be assisting DIMA include redesigning its business processes, change management, systems integration and application development expertise. IBM teams will work on projects that include portals, case management, data management, change management and training. DIMA will make a good reference site for IBM’s Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. IBM will be implementing the WebSphere product suite, Entity Analytics for client data analysis with Siebel for case management, Ruleburst for business rules management and Thunderhead for automated content generation.
The key objective will be to deliver a single view of the client involving the use of SOA techniques to integrate existing legacy information with new search engine and portal technologies to provide a common front-end to access key information.
The project will also support better access to unstructured data including forms and correspondence access. Through the use of IBM WebSphere Portal, IBM Workplace Forms and Thunderhead software, the solution promises DIMA the ability to automatically generate content and improved search capability.
The first release of DIMA’s portals will occur in April 2007. The program includes the development of a number of framework services, in particular, a set of common services that can be used by multiple projects. A spokesperson for IBM says, “The use of SOA techniques and IBM WebSphere Process Server supports the incremental development of DIMA’s web services, and also supports the re-use of services across the releases.”
Unlike DIMA though, the USICS has another challenge. While DIMA allocated just under half a billion dollars to Systems for People - thanks to the public purse - USICS’ revenues are fee-dependent. Therefore to do what DIMA is doing, USICS must look for “creative ways to augment appropriations for enterprise-wide transformation”. This funding arrangement could go a long way to explain why USICS continues to have problems, but does little to explain why DIMA was in such a shambles.
Perhaps the starkest comparison between the two organisations is found in the amount required to fix identity management and business processes. In July 2006, a contractor completed a review of USICS’ possible acquisition strategies and provided a range of cost estimates from US$387 million to US$1.4 billion. Compared to the A$495 million allocated to DIMA and our 20 million people it administers, the figures for the USIC seem extremely reasonable. Of course, there are other factors to consider but it does raise a question of the government’s attitude to blunders: have DIMA’s systems taken the blame for what was really a problem caused by human practices and policy to remove ‘costly’ people from the country?