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DEEWR IT Strategy 2009‐2012 Version 1.0
Assuring DEEWR’s current and future success through technology
Table of contents
Foreword 2
1. Introduction 3
1.1 Purpose 3
1.2 Audience 3
1.3 Approach 3
2. Business Requirements 4
2.1 Supporting our goals 4
2.2 Implementing our Approach strategies 6
3. IT Strategies 9
4. Appendix A: Assessment of current IT environment 12
5. Appendix B: Technology trends 14
6. Appendix C: Ongoing Business engagement model 15
6.1Introduction 15
6.2 Strategic engagement 15
6.3 Governance bodies consulted for version 1.0 16
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Foreword
DEEWR was established with the vision of ‘Creating a productive and inclusive Australia’. As a
consequence, it touches the lives of all Australians. Internally, we have set ourselves the task of
increasing productivity by creating an organisation that cares for its staff, works collaboratively and
delivers results. If we are to achieve all this, and to do so in the most positive, effective, and efficient way,
the Department, its staff, agencies and business partners need the best systems and tools to do so.
Information technology is one of the department’s key resources. From phones to email to the internet,
through to business systems supporting critical departmental processes and functions, IT is now an
integral part of nearly everything we do.
The pervasive nature of IT makes delivering existing IT services reliably and efficiently a critical business
issue. This issue is made more complex by the need to deliver new and changing services that support
the strategic needs of the department – often at short notice. IT therefore needs to enable agility.
The DEEWR IT Strategy 2009 ‐ 2012 provides a tool to help manage the delivery and transformation of IT
services. The Strategy outlines the key strategic business requirements of the department and melds
these, together with an assessment of the current IT environment and technology trends, to produce a
set of eight key IT strategies. These strategies cover services to the Government, public and stakeholders,
services to the department, and core internal IT services.
Figure 1: The eight IT Strategies cover services to the Government, public and stakeholders, services to
departmental staff, and supporting IT initiatives that reside mainly inside the IT groups.
The strategy provides a foundation for the department’s use and management of technology. It will
guide business planning and IT investment to ensure the best possible support for the department now
and into the future.
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1. Introduction
1.1 Purpose
Strategy is about defining the right things to do and works in concert with structure, governance,
architecture, processes, culture and metrics to provide a key control mechanism over the department’s
resources.
One of the department’s key resources is information technology. DEEWR’s IT strategy specifies how IT
will contribute to the department’s future success by supporting the strategic direction of the
department. The Strategy outlines the key strategic business requirements of the department and melds
these, together with an assessment of the current IT environment and technology trends, to produce a
set of IT strategies. These strategies guide changes to people, processes and tools needed to execute the
DEEWR Strategic Plan and ensure our future success.
1.2 Audience
The primary audience for the IT strategy is the DEEWR Executive as well as departmental staff in both IT
and the broader department who seek to understand how IT can help achieve the department’s
strategic goals.
1.3 Approach
The development of this document has been overseen by the IT Management Committee, in close
consultation with the IT Committee and other DEEWR governance bodies and stakeholders.
It takes the DEEWR Strategic Plan 2008‐2011 as its starting point and, through consultations across the
department, elucidates what business requires of IT to achieve this plan (Section 2). Next it describes a
number of strategies that aim to address these requirements (Section 3). As well as being driven by these
business consultations, these IT strategies are informed by a broader scan of the current environment
(Appendix A) and of technology trends (Appendix B) that might deliver business value to the department.
The IT strategies are written with long‐
term planning horizon of the
department in mind.
The document operates in conjunction
with the department’s key strategy
and planning processes, with the
DEEWR Strategic Plan as the key input
and business planning, including IT
investment proposals, as key outputs.
The document is version 1.0 and is the
first iteration in an ongoing
conversation between IT and the
business about how IT can best help
the department achieve its strategic
goals. An ongoing business
engagement model is provided at
Appendix C.
Figure 2: Contribution of IT strategies to the
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success of the department
2. Business Requirements
One of the key challenges in creating IT strategy is to connect IT strategy to business strategy. DEEWR’s
Strategic Plan 2008‐2011 sets out five key departmental goals and three approach themes (that describe
how we will achieve these goals). Under each goal and approach theme the Plan outlines a set of
supporting strategies.
Figure 3: IT strategic themes support both dimensions of the DEEWR Strategic Plan
This section of the IT Strategy sets out the business requirements for information technology based on
these goals and strategies. Section 2.1 outlines the role information technology will play in supporting the
five goals. Section 2.2 deals with the role of IT in executing some of the key approach strategies.
2.1 Supporting our goals
This section outlines the potential for IT to contribute to the achievement of the DEEWR Goals.
Supporting our goals
A positive start in life.
• Improve the capture, storage and provision of access to quality data to support the development
of agreed national standards and the implementation of an agreed framework for early childhood
development.
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• Guide the development of an integrated system to support investment in programs and
infrastructure to enhance and expand quality early childhood learning and child care services and
support a workforce strategy.
• Provide user friendly online resources for parents and carers.
A brighter future through education
• Provide schools and parents with online access to learning aids to improve learning outcomes.
• Continue the development of an enhanced integrated program support system to support the
delivery and evaluation of programs to improve school environments and learning outcomes.
• Provide an enhanced integrated system to support the delivery and evaluation of schools and
youth programs.
• Provide online access to resources to schools and communities to promote a culture of aspiration
and an inclusive society.
A highly skilled, educated and productive community
• Continue the implementation of an integrated system to support programs aimed at enabling
people to acquire skills and qualifications and improve the quality of teaching, learning and
infrastructure in the tertiary sector and support the development of specialisation.
• Provide online information resources to students to help them create their own learning
pathways across a connected tertiary sector.
• Provide online access to labour market information to the tertiary sector.
• Provide online information to prospective students and supporting systems that streamline
students’ interactions with institutions and government.
A participative and inclusive society
• Support and enhance systems that help people prepare for and find work. This includes
developing business intelligence systems to track industry and regional employment trends on
behalf of job seekers, employment service providers and employers.
• Engage Centrelink to enhance shared systems and linkages.
• Enhance systems to meet new service requirements and utilise technologies to support the
National Contract Management Framework and better support contract management processes.
A safe, fair, productive and successful workplace
• Enhance systems to meet the requirements of the new workplace relations system.
• Provide user friendly online information to employees and employers.
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Across all goals
• Provide the ability to track the effectiveness of government services for Indigenous Australians
across all DEEWR programs.
• Provide the capability to track and report on the access of disadvantaged and marginalised
Australians to government programs and the outcomes of these programs.
• Develop an agile and responsive business and technical architecture to increase the department’s
ability to respond quickly to crisis driven initiatives in short time frames without compromising on
the compliance requirements.
2.2 Implementing our Approach strategies
This section outlines the important role technology will play in implementing some of the key “Approach”
strategies from the DEEWR Strategic Plan.
Care for Our People
Support people in their work and assist them in achieving their full potential.
• Enhance and integrate systems to automate and simplify administrative workflows and
compliance activities.
• Engage users early during major developments and support the development of user training and
help material for IT systems and tools (especially for new technologies) to improve their adoption
and use to increase productivity.
• Provide capability for quick development of training content creation and roll‐out through the
provision of a departmental eLearning solution.
• Implement and support integrated systems to manage recruitment, induction and workforce skills
planning.
Adopt flexible working arrangements that increase productivity and meet the needs
of individuals.
• Provide staff with straightforward, secure and reliable access to the tools and information they
need to do their job from wherever they need to work.
Connect and Engage
Provide outstanding service to our Ministers, Parliamentary Secretaries, the Parliament and
the public.
• Provide reliable support for new web based ministerial and departmental communication
channels.
• Provide quality information to the department; information must be accurate, relevant and
timely.
• Deliver online information to the public in formats that meet their needs.
• Implement robust and reliable systems and platforms that support workflow and information
provision.
• Improve quality and consistency of service delivery and business engagement.
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Build partnerships and joined‐up approaches to achieve outcomes
• Better support for staff working across geographical and organisational boundaries.
• Support COAG initiatives by collecting, organising and making available information from external
parties (The Australian Bureau of Statistics, State Governments, and Service Providers).
• Share technology services and solutions across government and actively engage in whole of
government initiatives.
• Develop a consistent approach to stakeholder engagement across the IT groups.
Ensure policy narratives are clear and help explain the links individual initiatives have to the
Government’s broader policy agendas
• Support the department’s ability to collect, store and make available information that links the
department’s policy and programs to the Government’s broad policy agendas.
• Improve the department’s ability to track individuals across programs through improved
management of longitudinal information.
Streamline business and organisational processes and systems to improve client
service delivery.
• Provide robust and agile systems to support the flow of information between the department,
program providers, other government agencies and the public.
• Maximise the reuse of program delivery models and support systems to facilitate improved client
service delivery by staff with cross outcome responsibilities (especially State Offices).
• Reduce red tape for people and organisations dealing with government through the
implementation of streamlined data collection systems and integration of systems that collect and
store this information.
Ensure effective communication across DEEWR’s stakeholder network to improve policy and
program development and delivery.
• Adopt and implement collaborative and social technologies to engage stakeholders.
• Improve stakeholder management to ensure effective interaction with all stakeholders.
• Develop standards based user friendly system interfaces.
Find Solutions, Deliver Results
Create stronger capabilities across all policy and business groups to deliver and implement
evidence‐based, strategically oriented policy options and solutions.
• Standardise the collection of indigenous and social inclusion data within departmental systems.
• Improve the department’s capacity to store and use geospatial data.
• Strengthen reporting capabilities and implement business intelligence solutions that provide
federated information views across programs and outcomes.
• Improve the department’s information management through the development of a DEEWR
information architecture and supporting governance arrangements.
• Increase the appropriate sharing of departmental data with other agencies and levels of
government consistent privacy requirements.
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Build processes and systems that support a collaborative and well integrated DEEWR.
• Develop an enterprise architecture that supports the rationalisation and integration of business
processes across the organisation.
• Improve the engagement between policy development and program design areas and program
delivery areas (including IT teams and state office program and relationship managers) to increase
organisational agility.
• Increase the department’s project management maturity by developing stronger linkages
between IT project management and business project management.
• Rationalise to a single IT infrastructure and set of corporate systems.
• Promote the use of new collaboration and knowledge sharing tools.
Invest in efficient systems and infrastructure that support integrated service delivery
• Improve the department’s capability to track and report on service delivery and quality.
• Design systems for high availability and resilience and implement robust disaster recovery and
business continuity planning.
• Implement an integrated change management process.
• Leverage IT infrastructure virtualisation, and security (including identity management) trends and
best practices.
• Develop effective identity management to improve the quality of data holdings and data access,
enhance service delivery and align with the e‐government strategy.
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3. IT Strategies
To efficiently and effectively meet DEEWR’s strategic business requirements there has to be the right mix
of people, process and technology. The IT strategies set out the key areas where opportunities exist to
make positive changes. They are based on the business requirements and an assessment of current IT
environment and technology trends.
Strategy 1: Implement improvements to the management of information and
data in the department to support evidence based policy development.
• Support the establishment of a DEEWR information architecture and supporting governance.
• Strengthen the department’s business intelligence capabilities by defining, leveraging and
improving support for an appropriate standard toolset.
• Develop common information and data standards to facilitate the collection and analysis of
indigenous, social inclusion and longitudinal data to support the understanding of policy outcomes
and their contribution to the broader government agenda.
• Implement new geospatial data management capabilities to support strategic policy development.
• Strengthen reporting capabilities and implementing business intelligence solutions that provide
federated information views (including financial information) across programs and outcomes.
• Support COAG initiatives by collecting, organising and making available information from external
parties (e.g. Centrelink, other policy agencies, The Australian Bureau of Statistics, State
Governments and Service Providers).
Strategy 2: Deliver qualitative improvement in and promote standardisation in
IT support for program implementation and integrated service delivery.
• Develop and enhance a set of program management systems that support integrated service
delivery and the efficient flow of information between the department, program providers, other
government agencies and clients.
• Promote the development of standard program delivery models and maximise the reuse of
support systems to facilitate improved client service delivery by staff with cross outcome
responsibilities – particularly in state and district offices.
Strategy 3: Improve support for communication and collaboration both within
the department and with external stakeholders.
• Implement solutions to support improved stakeholder and client relationship management.
• Improve support for staff working across geographical and organisational boundaries.
• Adopt and provide support with the use of communication and collaborative social networking
technologies within the department in support of improving policy and program development and
delivery.
• Implement and support integrated systems to manage recruitment, induction, workforce skills
planning and eLearning.
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Strategy 4: Participate in and influence whole of government policies and
directions such as Green IT and common approaches to sourcing for IT goods and
services.
• Actively share technology services and solutions across government.
• Critically engage in whole of government initiatives.
Strategy 5: Deliver improvements in services and business engagement through
increasing our adoption of industry better practice, strengthening governance
and focussing on service culture.
• Improve service delivery to staff and system users through increased adoption of industry better
practices in the area of IT service management, including incident, problem, configuration, change
and release management.
• Strengthen the IT and business partnership through the development and implementation of a
formal business engagement model that supports ongoing strategic planning.
• Communicate the business value of, and support the delivery of improved user training and help
material for, new IT systems and tools to improve their adoption and use.
• Strengthen the service culture of IT through an increased use of service level management and
recognising and rewarding better client service.
• Strengthen IT governance.
• Improve the tracking and reporting of costs across IT services including infrastructure and systems
development and support.
• Increase the department’s project management maturity by strengthening the linkages between
project management in IT and the broader department.
Strategy 6: Develop an Enterprise Architecture that guides the delivery of
efficient, agile and scalable infrastructure and business and corporate systems.
• Articulate and promulgate a whole of department set of Enterprise Architecture principles and an
Enterprise Architecture governance model.
• Develop an overall model of the department’s “as is” architecture and define an agreed “future
state” architecture.
• Deliver a detailed plan outlining the changes required to our core infrastructure and systems to
ensure the efficient management of tools and technologies (ie a technology roadmap).
• Support the development of standard business and IT processes
• Improve and link systems to automate and streamline administrative workflows and compliance
activities.
• Rationalise to a single IT infrastructure and a consolidated set of corporate systems.
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Strategy 7: Strengthen our current infrastructure to ensure we continue to
support the department today while implementing improvements and
innovations that deliver business value into the future.
• Strengthen our current infrastructure so that it supports the new department and targets
availability and reliability.
• Implement a new infrastructure, tools and systems that deliver business value and productivity
improvements to the department including within the IT groups.
• Implement common identity and access management across DEEWR infrastructure and systems
to improve access to information and services to departmental staff and users of the
department’s systems.
• Implement “virtualisation1” technologies to strengthen the robustness and resilience of the
department’s infrastructure and systems.
Strategy 8: Build departmental capability through active workforce planning
that develops and uses the skills and experience of our staff.
• Work with the DEEWR’s people management to develop an ICT career structure aligned with
whole of government strategies.
• Conduct a capability assessment of IT staff and contractors including a skills audit to identify
critical skills needed by the department.
• Support skills development in IT staff through participating in departmental staff development
opportunities supplemented by technical training
• Ensure an appropriate balance of staff and contractors to ensure the ongoing support for the
department’s long and shorter term needs
• Maximise the use of the skills of staff and contractors through supporting mobility across the IT
groups.
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Discussed in Appendix B 11
4. Appendix A: Assessment of current IT environment
DEEWR was created on 3 December 2007, bringing together elements of the former Department of
Education, Science and Training, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations and the Youth
and Early Childhood functions from the Department of Family, Housing, Community Services and
Indigenous Affairs. These machinery of government changes, coupled with the new government’s policy
agenda have resulted in a number of challenges for DEEWR IT.
The IT operations of the department are large and complex. These operations support in excess of 10,000
desktops including over 2,500 desktops used by staff employed in portfolio and external agencies. They
also support a large mainframe, an extensive data and voice network, several hundred servers, two high
speed secure internet gateways and four (moving to three) data centres. IT operations are supported by
a workforce of around 1,200 made up of a combination of departmental employees and contractors.
Nearly two thirds of this workforce is engaged in systems development and maintenance. The value of IT
assets managed by the department exceeds $250 million, with a majority of this being internally
developed software.
The department’s IT systems provide essential productivity tools for staff. Through its core business
systems, including the Employment Services System which underpins the operations of Job Services
Australia providers, DEEWR’s IT systems support a workforce of over 90,000 users and typically process
over 5 million transactions per day. In addition the department’s IT systems provide information and
access to services to youth and job seekers, parents and carers, tertiary students, child care centres,
schools, universities and vocational education and training providers.
The department has a mature IT capability that has enabled the successful implementation of
government policies and programs over a number of years across the portfolio as well as supporting the
productivity of its own workforce. The department has an excellent track record of delivering large IT
enabled change and has a strong IT governance framework that ensures IT is closely aligned with business
objectives and departmental strategies. The framework supports robust accountability and the
department’s longer term needs while allowing for agility in the delivery of government policies. The
close alignment of IT with business engendered by this approach drives collaboration in IT enabled
change, substantially reducing the risk of making poor investment decisions or failing to deliver expected
business benefits.
Early on, the department established a set of priorities to guide the establishment of the new
department. Integration initiatives were prioritised according to the following three broad phases:
1. Presentation of the department to external stakeholders (eg the Ministers’ offices and the public);
2. Communication and collaboration enablers within the department; and
3. Internal administrative overlap and back end process rationalisation.
DEEWR IT’s has largely implemented the first two phases and has partially implemented the third
alongside a number of interim solutions in this area. However, there remains considerable work to do in
this third phase where care needs to be taken to avoid impacting the ongoing smooth running of the
department.
The following capability issues were identified through an exercise conducted by external consultants
using a standard capability assessment framework.
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Management and Governance
Governance relates to the overarching guidelines, responsibilities and controls required to manage the IT
function and ensure adherence to the strategic direction. This considers the end to end DEEWR IT
processes required to support and manage the IT function. Key issues are:
• Internal process rationalisation
• Creation of a common, service‐based culture
• Appropriate placement of functions
• Data and information management strategy and governance
• Common policy of ownership and management of IT assets
Enterprise Architecture
This considers the overall design of the infrastructure, systems and business process that support the
department. Key issues are:
• Need to standardise architectures and toolsets
• Increasing agility
• Improving focus on quality
• Availability and reliability of key systems
• System integration
• System rationalisation
Portfolio and Financial
The Portfolio aspect considers how IT initiatives support the IT Strategy, including their prioritisation and
alignment to the business strategy. The Financial aspect considers the investment and financial resources
needed for IT initiatives and ongoing IT support for the business. Key issues are:
• Governance business intelligence toolsets
• Standardisation to a single service management toolset
• Managing business expectation of IT capability and capacity
• Need to rationalise and redevelop infrastructure, corporate systems and business processes
• Managing the business as usual budget
Organisation and Supply
This considers how the IT organisation and capabilities support the business, including the
interrelationship with the business. It considers structure, roles and skills of IT staff, as well as
procurement of external services. Key issues are:
• Need to build organisational capability
• Skills identification and management
• Balancing contractor/permanent staff
• Balancing technical/support staff
• Building career paths and succession planning
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5. Appendix B: Technology trends
Advances in technology provide new opportunities. This section set out some of the key technology
trends expected to deliver business value to the department. A number of these have been included as
part of the IT Strategies based on their current maturity and the value they can deliver to the department.
The IT Groups will continue to monitor other trends that may be less mature or where the business value
is less clear, to determine if and when they might be adopted.
Technology trends and best practices
Business intelligence: Increases in computing power provide the means to expand business intelligence
capabilities, such as applying BI analytics directly into business processes to gain more rapid insight into
current trends and issues.
Geospatial information management: The combination of spatial software and analytical methods with
terrestrial or geographic datasets. This has potential to improve program implementation and monitoring
and the establishment of cross‐program linkages and strategic policy development.
Social software and social networking: These tools offer new channels and tools to help knowledge
workers communicate with emerging demographic groups.
Cloud computing: A style of computing in which computing resources are provided as a service over the
Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in
the "cloud" that supports them.
Unified communications: Provides unified and simplified access to multiple communications channels:
email; phone; video conferencing; facsimile; instant messaging through the convergence of once
disparate technologies.
Ubiquitous computing: Provides information access to the public and DEEWR employees ‘anywhere,
anytime’
Enterprise architecture: Enterprise architecture provides a more formal focus on creating an efficient and
rationalised set infrastructure and systems explicitly linked to the key services required by the business.
Virtualisation: An approach to deploying computing resources that isolates different layers ‐ hardware,
software, data, networks, storage ‐ from each other. It can provide high infrastructure reliability and
availability at a lower cost of ownership, and boost operational efficiency.
Identity Management: Identity management / Single Sign‐on (SSO) improves user experience and
productivity in a secure manner.
Collaborative Web Technologies: SharePoint and other Web 2.0 technologies support rich on line
communication and collaboration
IT Infrastructure Library: The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an increasingly accepted standard for
operating IT services.
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6. Appendix C: Ongoing Business engagement model
6.1 Introduction
The development of this strategy is part of an overall ongoing engagement between IT and business staff
aimed at serving the strategic, tactical and operational needs of the department.
Strategic Demand: Managing total demand whilst they acquire new infrastructure, technology or
skills. This is reflected in DEEWR IT Strategy, IT Investment Portfolio and future state architecture
models.
Tactical Demand: Aligning resources to enhance customer service. This is reflected in the service
catalogues and service level agreements.
Operational Demand: Providing reliable delivery of day to day requirements such as providing a
new employee with their IT equipment, electronic identification, and access to necessary
systems. It includes provisioning new users, IT asset management, and end‐user system
management.
Tactical and operational demands have their own engagement processes which are being reviewed and
improved as part of the overall service improvement strategy.
6.2 Strategic engagement
Up until now engagements dealing with strategic demand have been focussed on the IT Investment
Portfolio. The processes around IT Investment are now reasonably mature and consistent, and will be the
subject of continuous improvement. Future state architecture models arise from Enterprise Architecture
processes. These are less mature and are being improved under the Enterprise Architecture strategy.
The strategy development process itself is undergoing its first iteration, and it is anticipated that a review
of the process will be undertaken following the acceptance of the version 1.0 strategy by the IT
Committee. Following is a high level description of the engagement processes involved in developing and
maintaining the IT Strategy:
Initial business engagement:
1 IT Committee provides support and endorses broad direction.
2 IT Management Committee guides engagement with key governance bodies to elicit strategic
business requirements.
3 IT Committee reviews version 0.9 of the IT Strategy.
4 IT Committee presents approved version 1.0 of the IT Strategy to the Executive.
Ongoing business engagement:
5 Specific implementation plans put in place for initiatives through the IT investment process and
business planning.
6 Monitoring of progress and relevance of initiatives by the IT Committee, Program Boards and the IT
Management Committee.
7 Discussion of strategic demand precedes IT investment decisions at key governance bodies.
8 Regular review and alignment of the IT Strategy with the department’s goals and strategies.
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6.3 Governance bodies consulted for version 1.0
Following committees and boards were consulted in developing version 1.0 of the DEEWR IT Strategy:
• IT Management Committee
• Business Management Committee
• Indigenous Steering Committee
• Strategic Information Management and Research Committee
• DEEWR Implementation Sub Committee
• Corporate Systems and Infrastructure Board
• Employment Systems Board
• Applications Systems Group Executive
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