Building a new data analytics and information management system was overdue and essential to working with overseas defence partners, the tender said. File photo. Photo: NZDF
The Defence Force is moving to rectify "serious deficiencies" in how it handles information stored in its old and risky systems.
A series of official reports into Operation Burnham since 2020 have found the NZDF had such poor record-keeping that exhaustive efforts failed to find crucial information.
"Users ... often cannot locate and routinely have to recreate information, leading to wasted time and a lack of confidence over what information is assured. This risks making decisions based oninaccurate or out-of-date information," a Cabinet committee minute in July 2023 said.
The NZDF has now put out its first tender to get market feedback about the options for fixing the "obsolete" systems, in three phases over five years.
The tender said, in addition, it urgently needed a "minimum viable product" as a stopgap to be installed as early as the 2024-25 financial year.
In May, Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier said a further investigation he did found "failures by the New Zealand Defence Force to share all crucial information had a major impact on his ability to fully investigate earlier Operation Burnham complaints and undermined the fundamental purposes of the OIA (Official Information Act)".
"Staff who were tasked with finding that information didn't even know it existed and so didn't ask for it. Incredibly, there were no formal ways of checking this," he said.
The investigations into what NZDF knew and told the public about the SAS's involvement in a 2010 operation in Afghanistan "highlighted systemic issues with how the NZDF stores and retrieves information, and how trustworthy it is once found", the Cabinet paper said.
It raised "systemic issues" around "transparency and accountability" of Defence to the public.
Building a new data analytics and information management system was overdue and essential to working with overseas defence partners, the tender said.
It had been held up in part by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The initial funding would come from baseline budgets, the Cabinet paper said
Defence has been struggling with staff leaving, though the attrition rate has dropped since last year. It also faces difficulty keeping ships and aircraft operating. Helicopter availability plunged by about half in recent months.
The agency is due to deliver its new Defence Capability Plan to the government this month to outline spending priorities through to 2040.
Coalition partners NZ First and ACT both want defence spending to double to 2 percent of GDP - it is at about $6 billion a year now.