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IP Australia tenders for business intelligence and analytics revamp

Part one of IP Australia's business intelligence and analytics capability will see the agency engage with a consultant to deliver an initial roadmap for the project.
Written by Aimee Chanthadavong, Contributor

IP Australia is looking to revamp its business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) capability solution with the assistance of a consultant.

The federal government agency responsible for granting rights in patents, trademarks and designs, and plant breeder's rights has issued a request for tender in hope to find a consultant that would be able to deliver a roadmap for its BI&A solution that will be able to help standardise enterprise reporting, simple ad-hoc reporting, trend analysis and forecasting, data mining and economic research, and statistical analysis.

IP Australia expects as part of the roadmap the consultant will be able to detail information around functional and non-functional requirements for the BI&A solution; expected business outcomes and benefits; cost estimates of building the solution; risk assessment of building the solution; and all major dependencies and constraints.

At the same time, IP Australia said the roadmap is required to deliver a solution design that will help the agency perform core business capabilities with less effort; provide data users access to all internal and relevant external sources; and resolve security concerns around transferring data in and out of the proposed solution, within or without the IP Australia network.

The hunt for a consultant is one of two parts to building IP Australia's end solution, which it expects will be modern, standardised, flexible, and integrated.

The second part of the BI&A project will involve building, implementing, and maintaining the solution in accordance to the roadmap. IP Australia plans to issue a separate request for tender to find a managed service provider to deliver those services.

IP Australia warned that as part of the scope of the roadmap, the consultant cannot develop a roadmap that will result in vendor lock-in.

"IP Australia must be able to undertake an open approach to the market for Package Two to select the supplier who will build, implement, and maintain the system as designed in the roadmap," it said.

IP Australia expects a roadmap will be delivered by end of November 2016.

The BI&A solution revamp will form part of IP Australia's wider transformation currently underway that aims to consolidate key processing systems, extend the data it captures, and ensure it meets its "data is available to those who need it -- anywhere and anytime" vision.

To date, IP Australia has implemented a new IP rights production system, an integrated service request processing system, and a customer data hub.

It said given the introduction of these new systems, a significant amount of data holdings are not ingested into its existing data warehouse, and would require "significant remediation" to the existing BI&A capability to accept new data formats, structures, and semantic changes that exist as a result of the transformation program.

Additionally, the existing bespoke processing systems have "little consideration of downstream data usage requirements".

"This has led to a current state where data from legacy systems are ingested through bespoke structured query language (SQL)-based ETL (extract, transform, load) into a central data warehouse. This data warehouse has evolved over a number of years in a piece-meal approach without an agreed role or purpose within IP Australia," IP Australia said.

"The result is a data capability which is sub-optimal, complex, and inflexible in how it provides information to its users and IP Australia more broadly."

Additionally, IP Australia said the new solution will replace existing approaches that various areas within IP Australia have previously invested into to meet their specific data consumption needs.

"This has resulted in an uncoordinated and ineffective approach that has made the problem more difficult to resolve as well as building a technical debt which will need to be remediated," it said.

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