Director appointed for immigration project

Dave Squire starts today as the new project director for the Immigration Global Management System

Experienced project and programme manager Dave Squire has been appointed project director of the Immigration Global Management System (IGMS).

He takes up his new position today.

Squire runs his own consultancy, Squire Associates and was most recently involved in a project for Housing New Zealand.

Former manager of the IGMS project, Stewart Watson, resigned in July, citing his health and the stress of a two-hour daily commute.

A spokesman for the Labour Group of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), formerly the Labour Department, discounts predictions that Squire will be dealing with a blown budget before the project finishes. IGMS is still within its original budget of $80 million, says principal communications advisor Mark Piercey, and a further $10 million is already set aside for “contingency”.

“But it needs to be emphasised that the total forecast cost is still $80 million and that figure has not changed,” he says. $75 million is contributed by government and $5 million from Immigration New Zealand’s capital resources.

IGMS will replace a system devised in the 1990s and is intended to bring more of the interaction between intending immigrants and the pertinent government agencies into the online channel. It will “enable online processing, the use of electronic documents, automation of simple tasks and significant improvements in identity management,” Piercey says.

Computerworld has sought Squire's views on the IGMS development task.