Fledgling safety agency creates CIO role

NOPSA's role is to work with industry as well as other authorities to keep offshore petroleum operations safe.

The authority only has around 40 staff, including a small IT team and offices in Perth, Melbourne and Darwin.

The new CIO role, which has yet to be filled, will only last for two to three years as the authority seeks to deliver specific IT projects, including the construction of an enterprise document management system (EDMS).

A spokesperson for the authority said its IT platform was outsourced to Unisys West, the joint venture of global company Unisys and Perth bank Bank West.

"We've developed a lot of systems in isolation, because we hit the ground running on the first of January 2005," they told ZDNet Australia via telephone.

"We didn't have all of our systems developed, so we've sort of been trying to run the ship and regulate the industry while we're building the systems."

"But now we need to make sure the systems integrate with each other and we need to have an EDMS that services the whole organisation, because our use of a shared drive on the normal Microsoft desktop is inadequate for our needs."

Despite the small size of the organisation, the spokesperson said the CIO position was not just a glorified IT manager role.

"This position is absolutely a chief information officer position rather than just an IT manager, in that it actually manages the information of the organisation, including the IT platform," they said.