The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) conducted a future needs review to strengthen its effectiveness in pursuing its funding priorities and agency objectives. The review identified ARENA’s technology landscape (grants management system and financial management system) as overly complex and weakly integrated. 

Historical dependence on other agency systems and services resulting from Machinery of Government decisions and the associated rapid onboarding to new parent departments had led to operational complexity. This impacted the broad usability of technology platforms, delivering a sub-optimal user experience and resulting in productivity impacts for both internal and external stakeholders. 

The goal of enhancing ARENA’s technology was to deliver a better customer experience, drive internal delivery efficiencies, and provide an authoritative source of information for ARENA, its stakeholders, and its executive management team. 

Pragma was engaged by ARENA to research, plan and design enhancements to its entire technology landscape. This included the development of a business case, and implementation planning and delivery. 

In developing the business case Pragma undertook extensive user research and interviews with a range of key internal stakeholders, shared and common service providers across government, as well as commercial providers for grant and financial capabilities. We delivered a current state analysis and overview of ARENA’s current technology landscape detailing capabilities of grants, financial, customer and business intelligence systems.

We presented thorough options assessments including benefits, costs, and risk for three primary options, and outlined an implementation approach for the recommended option covering governance, procurement and delivery practices.

Following the endorsement of the business case, Pragma delivered a detailed plan to implement the technology enhancement project. The plan was endorsed at Board-level and this work enabled ARENA to deliver enhancements that will: 

• Enable better visibility of program and organisational performance against program and investment priorities, and more efficient management of grants. 
• Provide a digital end-to-end service that has a single view of its interactions with clients. 
• Integrate the financial management and grants management platforms. 
• Improve reporting capability, including a regular view of customer service levels, delivery efficiency, outputs, and outcomes. 
• Deliver greater compatibility with other government departments and future shared.