The Easier, Cheaper and more Personalised Change Program is the program developed to address these issues, including the priorities from listening to the community and the staff.

What is this program? It is primarily about improving the client and staff experience. However it is also about improving productivity and flexibility, to respond to both government and community needs in an ongoing way. It is a five-year program, started in 2003 after listening to the community. It covers new products and services for all segments and channels of interaction with the community.

It has had quick wins such as the tax agent portal. We realised that while some things will take until 2008 to achieve, if we were waiting until then to start the real improvements for the community, we would have long ago lost the confidence that we needed to gain and regain.

The program replaces essentially all existing Tax Office business processes and systems, front and back end. One way of typifying the change is that a call centre representative currently responding to a tax payer or tax agent enquiry may have to access anything up to 16 systems. Following the introduction of the Change Program it will be just two systems, a quite radical improvement for staff.

The program is based on enterprise-wide approaches. Often in the past we have had different approaches and systems according to which revenue product or which client segment was being served. In the new approach we only customise where necessary.

The program will affect most of our staff over the period. We have just introduced the new Client Relationship Management system to our call centres (about 3,000 staff). In further releases during this year we will add case and correspondence management, content management, reporting and record keeping to about 12,000 staff. In our final releases during 2007/08 we will replace all our processing systems, and nearly all staff will be involved. The total cost is about $450 million.

A key learning from previous attempts at large scale change was that we needed to address the program and manage risks at three levels – Strategic Positioning and Intent, Program Design and Development, and Program Implementation.

We also decided to separate our approach into very deliberate phases.