Irish domiciled global giant Accenture has been brought in to assist with the delivery of the government’s new national crime intelligence platform which aims to offer the first Australian-wide “unified picture of criminal activity”.
The contract with the Home Affairs department will see Accenture paid more than $3.5 million over six months to the end of June 2022, or more than $580,000 per month for work on the project.
A new National Criminal Intelligence System (NCIS) has been mooted since 2014 to replace the existing platform, which has been in use since 1984. The whole-of-government capability aims to provide a national information sharing environment, allowing police and law enforcement personnel to find information.
The government allocated $59.1 million in the 2018 budget for the first tranche of the project, and this figure was doubled by the end of the year.
Nearly four years later, the NCIS is now available to Australian law enforcement agencies to use in active operations, with Home Affairs now working to onboard more agencies during this financial year.
Accenture will be paid more than $3 million over the first half of this year to assist this process. The Irish-based consulting giant was awarded a $3,560,698 contract in late December listed simply as being for “IT professional services”.
A spokesperson for the department confirmed this contract relates to work on the NCIS, saying Accenture will provide “technical management and technical support services”, and that the tender for the work was listed on the Digital Marketplace.
The NCIS is half-funded by the Commonwealth, with the other half coming from the National Policing Information Systems and Services Special Account. It aims to provide targeted, timely, relevant and prioritised national policing information.
Home Affairs has taken control of the project, with the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission also working closely on it.
In late 2020 the NCIS was shifted from Home Affairs’ in-house infrastructure to Microsoft’s protected-level Azure public cloud.
The ACIC is also in the midst of having another go at replacing its ageing fingerprints matching database, after a failed attempt in 2018.
French firm Idemia has been awarded $180 million in contracts to replace its own legacy system with the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System, after a previous effort led by NEC was canned more than three years ago.
Accenture was also last year brought in by Home Affairs to deliver the permissions capability, which will initially serve to digitise incoming passenger cards to include information such as COVID-19 vaccination status.
The tech firm has been awarded contracts worth more than $60 million for this work, which involved providing an off-the-shelf platform and ongoing work on it.
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.