Whangarei District Council: Exec Files

How are you driving digital transformation at Whangarei District Council?

My goal when I came to Whangarei District Council was to transform the back-office operations, create a world of simplicity and become a truly digital council.

In 2012, we established a cross-organisation ICT Think Tank to develop a vision for the way we should do business with our customers. This led to a three-phase project, ‘Trilogy’, being established to digitise our systems and operations, and deliver the foundation to underpin our digital transformation.

Over the last 12 months, we have completed the first phase, which was a massive step forward. This involved moving our local infrastructure to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), implementing enterprise content and search capabilities, upgrading our core enterprise system (TechnologyOne OneCouncil) and moving this to TechnologyOne SaaS.

Moving to SaaS has been a huge win for the council and our people are quite blown away by it. SaaS has provided us with a robust and stable platform, which means we’re in a much better position to run our operations and deliver more effective services to the community.

In the year since going live with OneCouncil SaaS and moving to IaaS, we reduced our total cost of IT ownership by 38 per cent and shaved $428,000 off our bottom line operationally.

These are significant cost savings which are being reinvested back into the organisation.

We’ve also reduced our operational risks significantly, with the tested and verified ability to run our entire operation through a different data centre in the event of a forced fail-over.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve experienced on your digital transformation journey thus far?

When I first entered the local government sector, I was stunned to see how fragmented things were, particularly coming from a private sector background. We had nearly 60 different ICT service providers, resulting in very complicated architecture and software functions.

Opening people’s eyes to the possibilities of digital transformation and allocating adequate resources to intangible benefits is always a tough task. But we overcame these challenges by making a conscious effort to ‘take the organisation with us’, rather than simply implementing new systems and providing training at the end. Our tagline for the project was ‘transforming the way we work’, and we focussed on showing people how things could be done differently and highlighting the end-goal and outcomes for our customers, so that people could relate to what they were working to achieve.

We also established some fundamental principles that we have not wavered from. These include putting the needs of the enterprise over individual functions, using enterprise software rather than best of breed applications which can be configured out of the box, and using software delivered on the cloud. These principles have kept us on track with our vision and made things much simpler and cost-effective to support.