Agile Digital

About Geoscience Australia

Geoscience Australia is Australia’s preeminent public sector geoscience organisation and the nation’s trusted adviser on the geology and geography of Australia.

Background

Geoscience Australia manages over 550 ongoing employees and non-ongoing employees, consultants, contractors, research partners, visiting professionals and students who require building and or network access.

Like most organisations embarking on a digital transformation journey, Geoscience Australia was seeking to:

• Transition to cloud environments from a single corporate domain and network.
• Improve research and project collaboration remote access experience.
• Reduce infrastructure support costs by outsourcing to Managed Service Providers.
• Ensure the protection of commercial and confident data.

A staff onboarding solution was sought to deliver the following benefits:

• Compliance with the ACSC Essential 8 security requirements.
• Currency of identity data with a single source of truth synchronised across systems.
• Streamlined user experience when onboarding new staff.

Geoscience Australia had selected the ForgeRock Identity Manager (IDM) platform to power the agency’s secure staff onboarding solution.

Agile Digital was chosen by Geoscience Australia to implement the Identity and Access Management system because of Agile Digital’s industry reputation and experience in Identity and Access Management and their knowledge of Geoscience Australia.

Mission

Agile Digital was approached by Geoscience Australia to deliver on the following goals:

• Strategic advisory on the optimal deployment and enterprise integration plan for ForgeRock Identity Manager (IDM).
• Implement a streamlined onboarding workflow for new or returning employees, contractors, research partners and visitors.
• Build a foundation for creating additional workflows into the future.

Future IDAM projects will deliver:

• Offboarding workflow for exiting employees, contractors, visitors etc.
• Management of ongoing and non-ongoing APS staff during secondments, extensive leave, acting roles and role changes.

Approach

The onboarding workflow project followed the initial strategy and implementation project. Progressive projects allow clients, like Geoscience Australia, to adapt project start dates with consideration to their budget cycles, organisation change and project costing approach.

The project delivery was approached in line with Agile Digital methodology.

1. Discovery: Identified changes at Geoscience Australia since the initial advisory & implementation. These changes included new security requirements from a recent audit, IT system changes that were taking place and the HR workflow project progress.
2. Analysis and Design: Discovery resulted in minor system design changes and UI and onboarding workflow changes.
3. Implementation: User stories were reprioritised for delivery and resources adjusted to align with Geoscience Australia dependencies and budget.
4. Operation: The Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) were enhanced with feedback from the Integration Team feedback who undertook final releases. The Managed Service Provider (MSP) reviewed training instructions.
5. Delivery: Synchronised data for the user account, the organisation structure and position. With permissions assigned to the staff’s position/role. The final SOP and training resources were delivered, and the final release completed awaiting activation within the MSP processes.

Outcome

The completed on-boarding solution reduced the onboarding time from weeks to days. Also enabling

• New HR workflows for recruitment and management initiatives.
• Easier transition between Managed Service Providers (MSP), as Geoscience Australia is less reliant on MSP systems and processes.
• Reduced support burden on the Geoscience Integration Team with less manual data entry and more process validation.