MiLabs System Analysis

Monash Innovation Labs connects companies to Monash's resources and talent to drive innovation and research. It has grown rapidly, with plans projecting more than a 7x increase in the number of companies its IT systems must support.

Because the users are companies, MiLabs sits at a level of separation from the university's IT systems, which has required significant manual effort to grant access to Monash systems. The initial rollout was around three years ago, and many of the manually created automations have since appeared as built-in features amid the rapid rise of AI. The system relies on paid external support when issues arise, due to a lack of documentation and knowledge transfer.

The original plan was to duplicate the system in a sandbox, document it and produce guides for key workflows, so staff could resolve issues that previously went to paid support. As the long-term requirements became clear, the focus shifted from documentation to fundamentally rebuilding the system: removing reliance on manually built automations, cleaning up data structures and improving interoperability with Monash IT.

The analysis found the current system overcomplicated in how data and actions flow, and not scalable to the level required. The team is exploring software stacks that combine current services and add an IAM or identity provider such as Authentik or Okta for automatic account provisioning and SSO across MiLabs and Monash IT.

As part of improving integration with wider Monash, the team also helped the Buildings and Property Department with contract generation. Their process required someone to manually fill in a contract from form inputs. The team prototyped an automated workflow that turns a form into a prefilled contract with annexures, then built it into a re-deployable system that can be reconfigured for other contract templates.