Traceability assures quality
The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s Michael Bunyan outlined the private sector’s role in farm information systems at eolas’ outsourcing seminar.
The scale of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s IT systems help to underpin Ireland’s export reputation and many of the services are also provided externally by the private sector.
Michael Bunyan is Director of Information, Management and Technology in the department and outlined its work at eolas’ seminar on outsourcing.
Now, more than ever, there is a requirement to deliver high performing ICT services in the public sector whilst achieving cost savings and organisational efficiencies. Over the last eight years, the department has been moving from an “old mainframe IT house” to a series of internet-facing major corporate systems.
The single farm payment system is provided in a classic outsourcing model. In the last CAP reform, 22 different schemes were rolled into one payment. A major deadline for delivering this project loomed and the department went out to tender. This was awarded to Accenture and the system “has delivered very well on what it was required to do.”
Several other systems were built through web services – a classic outsourcing model – while others were built in-house. “We effectively contracted in the IT resources as we required them,” he added. The drivers, again, were urgency, scale and – in the case of the Animal Health Computer System – poor performance.
“The old system was falling apart,” he said about the latter case, “so we had no choice but to actually go ahead and build a new system very quickly.” The mixed sourcing model best suited the department’s procurement needs as it avoided dependence on one big system.
“All of these systems have assisted major organisational restructuring over the last number of years and it has also helped us to increase our shared services,” Bunyan commented. Online single farm payment processing was introduced in 2008 and 55 per cent of applications are now made through that channel.
The Animal Movement and Identification System is maintained and provided by the department but the system backing it up is largely outsourced. ID tags are fully outsourced to the Mullinahone Co-op in County Tipperary and exist in three forms: conventional, tissue and electronic. SouthWestern ensures that all bovines born in and imported into the State are registered on the national database and have a barcoded ‘passport’. The company also records all farm-to-farm movements and on-farm death notifications.
As the largest net exporter of beef in Europe, it is critical that Ireland’s traceability system delivers and is seen to deliver. The system is a requirement under EU regulations brought in after the BSE crisis.
The large peak of calf registrations in the spring helped to make the case for business process outsourcing; it complements the variable capacity required for peak and off-peak demand. “There’s a rapid turnaround between processing and delivery,” Bunyan says, outlining the benefits to the sector. A flexible staffing model allows providers to bring on staff and reduce staff numbers in a much easier way than in the public sector.
The central database is held by the department with a disaster recovery facility provided by the Department of Social Protection. On-farm herd registers are maintained by farmers.
The department also stepped in to help some of the smaller State bodies that were struggling to deliver their ICT functions, due to spending cuts. It now provides ICT infrastructure support to the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and hosts a number of data centres for other bodies. The payroll function for the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform will also transfer later this year.
