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The NDIA is promising a flexible, future-ready digital platform — but first it must move on from a legacy marred by spiralling costs, undeclared gifts, and performance failure.

The National Disability Insurance Agency is again planning a total overhaul of its technology systems. It says it will ditch the current outdated “monolithic” structure and replace it with a new modular, microservices-based architecture.

In what it describes as a “strategic transformation,” the NDIA is inviting industry to help design a new IT ecosystem that will integrate participants and providers using streaming architecture, service mesh technologies, and an open, event-driven model. It sounds wonderful. If only there wasn’t a history of similar promise, marred by complete failure.

Documents released this month highlight the ambition. Everything from claims processing and fraud management, through to communications systems and marketing functions, are on the table. Even PACE, the central customer platform, might be replaced or rebuilt.

Or not. But it’s the very inclusion of this system that immediately raises concerns amongst anyone with a memory.

Built by Salesforce, PACE has become a symbol of failure. Launched with a $27 million price tag, it blew out to a massive $135 million before coming under heavy scrutiny in a parliamentary report.

In June last year, the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit uncovered more than 100 undisclosed instances of gifts and hospitality provided by Salesforce to NDIA officials. This had continued over nearly five years and ranged from drinks and meals to gifts like golf games and clubs – and all while the system was supposedly being carefully scoped, tendered, and repeatedly expanded.

Yet at the same time as these reviews and expansion of ambition was proceeding, the system itself was becoming increasingly synonymous with failure.

It’s no wonder the agency is looking to start fresh.

On 21 July the NDIA briefed potential vendors, setting an August 11 deadline for initial requests for information. Officials say the new system will need to accommodate “diverse technology stacks” to meet the varied needs of the Scheme.

There’s nothing wrong with the ambition. What’s not quite clear is what has changed that will prevent a recurrence of the previous failure to achieve exactly this promise of transformation.