Defence chief information officer Chris Crozier is two-and-a-half years into his five-year contract for the role and says the momentum toward change has kicked up a gear.
Mr Crozier spent 37 years in senior executive roles in the private sector that included lengthy CIO stints at BHP and Orica before moving into the public service.
In this episode of the Commercial Disco podcast, Mr Crozier talks candidly about the core challenges inside Defence, and the priorities that have been put in place to get on top of them.
For anyone engaged with Defence as a supplier or contractor – or who aspires to be a supplier – this is a valuable conversation and is revealing about where Defence is applying its resources.
He says a relentless focus on tech renewal – and reducing the so-called ‘tech debt’ of legacy systems – has been and continues to be a focus of work.
This is also the case with reducing the numbers of contractors working within Defence IT compared to full-time staffers (he said the proportion of full-time tech workers has grown from around 20 per cent when he arrived to 70 per cent, a massive turnaround).
Mr Crozier has also focused increasing the number of tech suppliers on the Defence ICT panel arrangement (growing from roughly 300 to 550 since he joined) with a heavy emphasis on local SMEs.
Just as building the capability of his internal workforce has been a key, Mr Crozier says building industry capability through engagement with local suppliers is also critical.
If you are an Australian tech SME with product to sell and you want to engage with Defence, Mr Crozier offers practical advice through this interview.
While the public-facing Defence technology that gets most media and industry attention – like the giant enterprise ERP systems or its Microsoft 365 office environment – it’s the more ‘secret’ platforms and war-fighting tech that takes most of his time and attention.
“Whilst [the] enterprise technologies, ERP, the collaboration suites and so on are important and they drive productivity, they are not the systems that we will fight a war on,” Mr Crozier says in the podcast.
“I’ve been blessed to be able to come in at a point in time where the Defence Strategic Review highlighted that we needed to shift… that we needed to take a greater level of risk to adopt those [best-in-class] technologies for the war fighter,” he said.
“And so the last two and a half years, I would say, 60 per cent to 70 per cent of my time has been committed to these war fighting technologies.
Mr Crozier says it is Defence doctrine that the men and women in the armed forces deserve the best technology to keep them safe at a price that Australian taxpayers can afford.
“And my job is to ensure we do that, and we do that efficiently and effectively.”
There are some great insights in this interview on the technology directions taken by Defence, and the challenges it faces, including in how to make tech recruitment attractive to the best millennial talent available.
“I’m here for the service of the country, and I’m seeing more and more people wanting to be part of that,” Mr Crozier said.
“And we can’t compete on a price point with private industry [for the best tech talent], but what we can compete with is an absolute sense of purpose.
“When you come in and you’re new, you are embraced by this organisation, and you see that everyone is driven and that it really is a privilege to work [here].
For attracting the top tier millennial talent, getting to work on world’s best technology in service of the nation’s fighters … “that’s just the cream on top.”
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.