Shifting Sands

So Harrison defends the funding and progress of the $146 million IT system for the import and export of goods against criticism that it faces major technical problems, as well as against claims of budget and timetable blowouts.

Late last year Customs, after a flurry of complaints from developers and traders, pushed back a software delivery point in ICS, saying it will not announce release timing for import software until it is sure it is reliable. Parliament has also given Customs a 12-month extension on the start date for the ICS, extending the deadline to July 2005. This comes on top of an earlier 12-month extension to July 2004.

Harrison says part of the difficulties lay in the fact that the development team was entering a new world, embracing Web services, MQ Series, J2EE and so on, and hence underestimated the complexity of integrating the software development and the gateway.

"They were both basically built on time, but when we put them together, the integration activity didn't work, and we took a couple of months to do it longer than we thought we were going to take to get that bit done . . . Perhaps again in hindsight we should have taken more time for integration, but the expectation was you'd plug them together and they'd work. Well they didn't," he says.

He also admits communication with the industry was initially poor, in the sense that industry was left to expect to be given six months to test a finished product prior to deployment.

"What we actually also thought we were doing was providing a system that was still to be tested by us, as well as by them during that period. So the expectation was higher than what we had intended to do. The reaction was: 'Hang on, what is this? This doesn't work.' Well we knew it didn't work, but we were trying to respond to the need to give it to them anyway, as opposed to waiting longer to correct some of those things we knew were already wrong."

Yes, Harrison acknowledges, until recently, developers may have justifiably felt some angst: with project deadlines seeming to have become a constantly shifting target; cost estimates seemingly blowing out; the agency underestimating the time needed to integrate the system, with its 15,000 pages, 9000 business rules and 40,000 concurrent users; and admittedly guilty of mismanaging perceptions, allowing developers to believe they were testing a finished system rather than helping the agency discover bugs.

Nevertheless, Harrison says the agency has now adopted a new approach, dividing the project into three distinct phases, and only delivering product when it is comfortable it is production-ready. Then, when the software developers agree the product meets their needs well enough to allow them to do what they have to do, Customs will work with those developers on a timeline for their work.

He claims the conclusions of critics have largely been drawn from the first version of the export system, which he agrees was poor. The later version, he insists, released around the time of writing but not yet viewed by EDI's White, is significantly improved. "What I'm saying is I hope Richard [White] would agree soon that the latest version is a lot better than what he's seen up until now."

Harrison believes at least some of the apparent problems arise only from those wrong perceptions, and he expresses confidence that the software developer community, once the agency's harshest critics, is now very comfortable with the new approach.

"They understand," he says. "They've recognized that this is a significant development: they recognize that we're unlikely to say 'Here is something that is perfect' on day one. These guys know how the game's played. What they want more than anything else is for us to get it as far as we can, but to be part of the game, to have good information. And they're now far more comfortable with it I think in that regard."

However, White has a somewhat different view.

"When we're trying to develop the Australian Customs system as it now stands - the new CMR export system - we don't know whether the problem is ours or theirs half the time, because the ground upon which we're building our platform is itself both unstable and changing," White says.