NDIA's CIO Ian Frew retires

The National Disability Insurance Agency’s (NDIA) chief information officer Ian Frew is retiring after five years heading one of the more demanding ICT roles in government.

Former NDIA CIO Ian Frew

Frew oversaw the migration of NDIA’s operations off lT systems supplied by the former Department of Human Services (which has since become Services Australia).

His team stood up platforms tailored to delivering the rapidly expanding National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). 

In a Linkedin post, Frew said he was especially proud of his team bringing NDIA’s “new, accessible” Salesforce-based CRM “into pilot last November.”

The former IAG tech chief was hired when the then-six-year-old agency was struggling to deliver the NDIS using rushed SAP CRM modules (and before that, a Siebel-based system that was judged not fit-for-purpose).

A review found the then-government knew the systems were not ready at go-live, leading to providers’ payments being incorrectly blocked.

In 2018, a joint standing management committee report heard that the agency's IT systems needed "to be significantly improved" and made recommendations as such.

In his LinkedIn post, Frew counted developing an “accessible” app for NDIS participants to lodge claims and payments in real-time and an “API framework allowing NDIS providers to connect their systems directly to the NDIA" as being among his team's biggest achievements. 

He also wrote that during his tenure the NDIA had adopted “a ‘cloud only’ approach using zero trust architecture and modern authentication technologies.” 

iTnews first learned of Frew's impending retirement back in March, however an agency spokesperson would not comment.

A source close with knowledge of the agency's operations said that Frew would be a “tough act to follow.” 

“NDIA have transitioned from a helpless satellite agency of Services Australia to a cloud powerhouse of federal government under Ian Frew, with deep strategic relationships to some of the best leading edge global technology providers such as Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, Zscaler and Salesforce," the source said.

“Ian has overseen two enormous digital transformation projects - PACE and FOE.

"PACE is the complete replacement of the highly problematic SAP CRM core business system previously supplied by Services Australia ... [with] a collection of securely integrated cloud services with Salesforce at it's heart.

"FOE is the NDIA's future operating environment - with cloud managed and controlled, cloud managed desktop, cloud managed network and cloud hosted application services.”

Frew replaced NDIA CIO Susan Monkley in 2018; she had been on secondment from the Department of Human Services since October 2017.

NDIA's current general manager of information technology and security Lyle Wells is performing the role of acting CIO while a permanent replacement is being sought.