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The Year in Summary
The Industrial Registry has moved forward with its efforts to reconstruct further its financial management, reporting, budget and contract management effort. The results, which have yielded demonstrated improvements in the Registry’s administration of public resources, are in evidence in the following cameos, and elsewhere in this report. Similarly, the Registry has continued to rebuild its national communications network and modernise its information technology platform so it can, over time, provide improved and new services to the Commission, registered organisations and parties, as well as the wider community. It is important to approach these developments strategically to ensure the organisation can quickly capture innovations – such as web-based case management – that will develop as broadband access improves and wireless networks emerge. The developments to date have been most evident in the enhancement of the AIRC Home Page (www.airc.gov.au) and intranets from which all published documents, including organisations’ rules and transcript, may now be viewed and downloaded. But it is further evidenced in other areas as well: in the past 12 months the Registry has doubled the number of electronic payments to staff and suppliers (thereby reducing manual handling requirements) and this trend is set to continue. These developments were driven by the newly integrated Information Management and Technology Team, and the changed skill profile that initiative triggered across the organisation. An overview of the wider developments in this respect is provided below. The introduction nationally of the new Case Management System (CMS) commenced on 1 January 2001. The new CMS is being progressively released by way of managed modules over the calendar year, to ensure the new process re-engineering requirements are absorbed by employees sequentially and with reduced conflict with their ongoing responsibilities. CMS provides the literal backbone to the organisation – it tracks the progress of an application from the point of receipt, through any hearings process, through to the publication of any order or decision. It is also the means through which Commission workflow is allocated and reported on for internal purposes, and provides the software by which parties may be automatically notified of their listing times and places, directly from a Registry desktop (by email or facsimile). CMS will also provide an interface with the financial management system for assistance in auditing expenses and reviewing contract management performances. Importantly, in the future, CMS will also automatically download applications made through the AIRC Home Page or by email, thereby reducing processing times and other administrative delays for the Registry and parties across the wider community. In this respect, it should be noted the Registry has completed the development of a suite of email and web-based application forms and submitted these for the Commission to consider in the context of its rules. Some elements of the new Windows-based CMS, which replaces a now 16-year-old Case Tracking System, are cited below. As is implicit in the above, the Registry’s skills profile has been undergoing continuing change. This is the result of both internal retraining and recruitment exercises. Because so much of its business is in data processing and the publication and dissemination of documents, the Registry is focusing on building web publishing and web solutions-related skills, as well as attracting qualified information technology (IT) staff able to maintain the new systems and services. Also, there have been intensive efforts to build and transfer professional project and contract management skills across the Registry workforce. Relatedly, the agency also moved to widen its links (through active promotions in the media and an expansion of the Graduate Program (see page 109)) with the legal education and training community to ensure an increased supply of legally qualified associates and relief associates to assist Members of the Commission in the coming calendar year. These initiatives ensure there is an injection, continuously, of contemporary skills and perspectives into the organisation. Notably, many of the recent graduates have a high level of IT literacy. In the broad, organisations that have long embodied paper-based work practices and high levels of stratification do not easily make the transition to electronic processing and team-based workflow management, and the changed work values these imply. The Registry is one such organisation. The diffusion of contemporary skills is incompatible with the old organisational structures that were built on small, often personalised and autonomous work areas (many of which were low-skill), limited across-organisational efforts and opaque client service accountabilities. It is for this reason that the Registry was collapsed to a simple three-team structure, emphasising team building activities, cross-skilling and performance planning based on the Australian Public Service (APS) Values and a concise suite of output indicators. The resulting improved outcomes are already in evidence in some areas, particularly so across the Information Management and Technology Team, and in some areas of the Statutory Services Team. A summary of developments in team building strategies is provided below. Relatedly, the team and individual performance appraisal system has entered its second generation, and has now formally integrated the APS Values as the principal organisational framework. Planning has also commenced to collapse the People and Planning, Resource Operations and Accounting Services teams into one fully integrated and cross-skilled Corporate Services Team. This would complete the Melbourne-based teams restructure. Further still, the Registry has developed a comprehensive suite of internal and external client satisfaction measures to ensure accountabilities and performance against stated objectives, and to encourage ‘learning’ on the part of the organisation. For the same reasons, the Registry has also implemented a comprehensive feedback mechanism focusing on internal and external clients. That said, there are still significant challenges ahead in building an effective and genuinely integrated performance-based team system across the Registry. As reported in last year’s annual report – and it is still relevant – some team managers are yet to apply uniform expectations across their teams or to adapt, in toto, to the role of professional managers. Further, the team structures are still less than optimal in some areas, and the performance and outputs focus is not the driver it should be in some Registries. Similarly, there is still progress to be made in wider areas. The broadband classification structure, introduced in the Australian Industrial Registry (New Directions) Agreement 2000 to underpin the team, skills and career development agenda, has not operated, in its entirety, as planned. It has instead been subject to some industrial tensions as is sometimes the case in exercises such as this in which traditional work patterns and long entrenched classification structures are disturbed. This has mitigated the contribution of the new broadbanded classifications structure to the aforementioned changes. In addition, there have been difficulties, at points, in diffusing low-skill work across the Registry, within the broadband context, to ensure ‘skills ghettoes’ are minimised. Generally, however, the 2000-01 financial year has been marked by a range of strategic developments that go directly to the Registry’s long-run effectiveness as an organisation. A number of the more substantive of these developments are canvassed under separate headings below.
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