Infrastructure Control Services (ICS) was founded as a boutique engineering and IT consultancy. Its founder, Tim Murray, had an engineering construction background and saw an opportunity for applying engineering project management disciplines to information technology projects.
1990-1995
ICS was engaged by the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority to "computerise pothole patching" – develop a road asset management system from the ground up to see
if savings could be made in the State's $600 million annual road repair budget. Savings of several hundred million dollars a year were achieved,
freeing up important dollars for the 2000 Olympics road infrastructure projects. ICS were also engaged by CityRail for a similar project on the
Sydney metropolitan rail network. ICS developed a reputation for getting virtually any IT job done on time and on budget through a proprietary
project management methodology called SMARTpro®.
1996-1999
ICS's engineering and IT expertise saw us engaged to check for any Year 2000 date problems ("Y2K bug") in virtually every different type of
infrastructure and equipment. ICS grew rapidly to become ICS Group with over 200 consultants working out of offices in London, Hong Kong,
Singapore and most Australian capital cities. Annual revenue reached $20 million, completing projects in 33 countries for a
global client list.
1999
ICS Group listed on the Australian Stock Exchange on 23 December as ICSGlobal Limited [ASX: ICS] as an "eCommerce enabler".
2000
In 1999, one of ICSGlobal's Y2K customers, a hospital, asked us "whether this dotcom stuff could get rid of the paperwork that is strangling hospitals".
After a senior executive workshop with the client, ICSGlobal focused on making the Australian healthcare industry more efficient, building and operating an
Internet-based clearinghouse called Thelma (Transactional Health Exchange Linking Multiple Applications),
which replaces manual administration processes (phone, fax, post) with electronic financial and clinical transactions over the Internet.
Thelma went live in 2000 (see www.thelma.com.au) and Australian volume has continued to
grow at over 50% per annum since.
2007
The Thelma clearinghouse service was expanded to an even more comprehensive healthcare offering which we called "medical banking": combining internet
technologies and outsourced "accounts receivable" services to shift healthcare into the realm of online banking.
In November 2007 ICSGlobal acquired The London Patient Billing Service (LPBS), the UK's leading company in the outsourced patient billing services sector,
which has since been renamed Medical Billing & Collection (MBC, see www.medbc.co.uk).
2008
In December we acquired our first US medical billing company, Medical Recovery Services, Inc. (MRS, see www.medrs.com). This was sold in April 2010.
2009
In November we returned to our consulting roots with the launch of a new consultancy division, Cybrand. Cybrand offers the web skills sets and technologies that
grew out of the Thelma project to help businesses make the best use of the web and its vast array of media to achieve specific business outcomes
(see www.cybrand.com.au).