What you need to know

• Australian Computer Society has very significantly improved both customer and employee experience through an 18-month digital transformation that first tackled business skills assessments for tech workers wanting to come to Australia, and which now turns to the core business of membership.
• Due to the way it collected information, only 15 per cent of applications were ready to be assessed after the first round and the backlog of processing 40,000 or more applications could stretch six months.
• Fraud is a system risk in business migration, and ACS now has much more robust controls in place.
• The wider transformation will also help across the business. The executive in charge of the transformation said the previous growth of systems was subject to mismanagement as well as data silos, leading to what he described as 'crap in, crap out.'
• But it couldn't do the work alone, and sought help from partners such as Helium for front-end work and Cloudwerx for back-end integrations, part of what the ACS calls its "flex approach" to services providers.

Australia is a net importer of technology skills, and a nation with an ongoing serious technology skills deficit. But getting those workers into the country can be a frustrating experience both for applicants and the companies looking for new tech skill capabilities. Wait times of half a year for application assessments were not unusual, forcing some applicants to return home before the process was complete.

Then there's the risk of fraud, a systemic problem across immigration, and not unique to the Australian Computer Society, which has two long-term two government contracts that it has executed for the best part of 20 years. But a poorly performing system put pressure on the assessors, and lacked sophisticated identify methods added to the risk, according to the executive in charge of the transformation, CIO Richard Wiltshire.

"Fraud is a pervasive issue right across the across all industries doing skilled migration.  We addressed it through a bunch of different controls," he tells Mi3.

That started with an overhaul of the organisation's business processes. "It's longer just one person putting eyes on something. There's validation. We're using a platform called ID burst to do the identity check upfront."

For the ACS, there's a two-fold benefit. It is no longer having to hold sensitive individual data - and creating a cyber risk honey pot into the bargain. "In the past, we would accept a photocopy of a passport, we didn't even ask for JP certified passport," says Wiltshire.

The new system also eliminates opportunities for fraud by migration agents. "It requires the applicant themselves to have physical access to those passports."

Digital transformation at the ACS has done more than address the fraud issue. Wiltshire says it has radically streamlined the process for skilled technology migrants wanting to work in Australia and made life much easier for staff assessing applications. It's also reduced business risk for the group, given the importance of the government programs it administers to ACS revenues.

According to Wiltshire, some of the technology the ACS used to manage those contracts was as old as the contracts themselves. "The last update to the technology was in 2017 but all that really did was digitise a paper form."

He describes the old approach as, "Really crude processes, poor forms of fraud control and integrity checking. And it could be suggested that we had no real visibility of who is coming into the country, other than the people within the organisation doing the assessment."

The volume of applications - about 40,000 a year - also created a significant risk. "It's a decent load. Our backlogs were stretching to 18 weeks to complete the assessments," continues Wiltshire.

The timelines created significant potential problems for applicants. "You could be in Australia going through that process and find that you have to return a home because we couldn't complete the paperwork within a reasonable timeframe."

It was the issues like fraud control and quality management that raised systems up the risk register, until it became clear that it needed to be prioritised. When the transformation journey began, it was the first cab off the rank.

Pain point

A key pain point Wiltshire and his team wanted to address was improving application processing capture. Due to the way it collected information, only 15 per cent of applications were ready to be assessed after the first round.

"That contributed significantly to the delay," he says, adding applications could stretch out for six months depending on how long it took the applicant to respond.

"There are government written policy and procedure documents that are all in governmen-tese, written in heavy government bureaucratic language that we then pasted on our website as instructions in how to complete [the application]. And it didn't give you any advice. You literally had to sit and read through 200 page PDFs of government-ese documentation. English might be your second language and we didn't really give you any way to communicate with us."

Furthermore, says Wiltshire, the ACS assessed applications but didn't communicate with the applicant through the process. "That's not a great position as a technology institution."

ACS now uses Salesforce Experience Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager and Mulesoft at the core of its tech stack, with what Wiltshire describes as "a bunch of ancillary pieces of technology". When Salesforce was first introduced last decade it was on-premise, but has now moved to the cloud.

"As part of this transformation, we rebuilt a foundation for the organisation to continue to build on, and moved away from a monolithic architecture to a modular architecture."

Human centred design

During the transformation, ACS took a user-led human-centered design approach to build out the portal, a process that took about 18 months in total and it went live at the end of Q1 this year.

"We took the stereotypical People, Process, Technology approach," explains Wiltshire. "The first three to six months of that [process] was design, theory, business, process engineering, and restructuring the organisation to be able to better support the platform. There were also tactical initiatives, such as focusing on improved efficiency within an existing platform while we're building out a new one."

After the design phase was finished, there was about nine months of heavy building across a couple of teams. To complement the work of internal teams, ACS commissioned an external service provider - Helium to help with front end development, as well as Cloudwerks for back-end integration.

That reflects the ACS's operating model which Wiltshire describes as a flex model. "We have institutional knowledge and key resources within the organisation, and we flex our partners."

Helium chief personalisation officer, Harold Janson, flags the association's technology debt as a issue in the implementation. But he also says the way ACS is using its software is a bit different.

"The thing is they are using the software a little bit differently than how people usually use it most, which is more of a portal-based [approach]. It allows the business side of ACS, to be able to control the platform, as opposed to any new changes, having to go through to the technology team," he says.

Uber Eats the North Star for usability

The scale of the transformation called for some bold decisions, Wiltshire says. One of those was to build out an entirely new Salesforce tenancy.

"We looked at the original platform. And it was six or seven years worth of mismanagement. To move forward would have been a two to three year journey just stabilising the tech. The decision was made very early on to build a new one. We set an entirely new Salesforce tenant, and then started building upon that," he says.

To address this, the team took an approach modelled on insurance claims methodology.

"The design methodology we used took the concept of the claims platform. What do you do within a claim? So you submit documentation, there is an assessment of that, and as a result of the claim the insurer pays up. In the case of ACS, we give you a big rubber stamp. That means you can take it to the next stage for immigration."

The result the ACS team wanted from a usability perspective was something "as good as Uber" says Wiltshire.

"The target we had was it must be as easy  to use as Uber Eats. It's a very slick experience. If you can order food, you should be able to order up your skill migration assessment.. That was a very strong, philosophical view."

Wiltshire says the early signs are good - Mi3 spoke to the IT chief at a time when the new system had been live for eight weeks. "We've gone from heavily bureaucratic PDFs to explainers, videos, in easy-to-understand language, a portal to communicate with the assessors, which is something that we didn't have in the past," he says.

There's also two-way interaction to give applicants an understanding that the ACS is there to support them, not judge them.

"It's enabling a much faster turnaround from a results perspective, we are six weeks in, and we've got significant volume coming through the platform. We've shut down the old platform for existing applications and ramped up the new platform," Wiltshire says,

"We delivered 98 to 99 per cent of what was required for the for the launch of this platform. We delivered a very mature product on day one, but there's still some work to do. We are looking at artificial intelligence to remove even more of that administration and  pushing things through the workflows quicker."

But really the next big thing is membership. ACS's membership cohort is between 40,000- 45,000 strong. "They come from incredibly diverse backgrounds with very different areas of specialisation in technology," says Wiltshire.

"Like all organisations struggling to maintain membership in an era where membership is in decline, the need to focus on personalisation. For instance, communicating to a CISO, and advising them of the upcoming CISO events in their locations that are targeted right to them."

That project is now underway. Once again, the Salesforce application, which is now the system of record at ACS will be key, and once again Wiltshire expects to the result will overcome some serious historical limitations.

"If you're not getting the right information in from the right business units, you've got rubbish to deal with." It's a process Wiltshire calls "crap in. crap out".

In the past, he says, "The ability to personalise, the ability to even report on key forms of data was quite tough. Right across the business, there was no one person that owned the system of record, and that led to uncontrolled governance of data."

"I think that's the secret sauce to how we're going to deliver effective membership, as well as the dirty work underneath, which is getting a system of record effective and accurate and putting the right controls over the business so that don't screw it up," he adds.