The business case for digital transformation

Digital transformation is no longer optional for local government, it’s a necessity.

Old, fragmented legacy systems can no longer offer the solutions and services necessary to keep pace with rapid technological change, or the outcomes executives and planners are setting in stone. Nor can they meet the demands of an increasingly tech-savvy population.

How digital transformation is carried out depends on many factors — including whether a council has decided to replace ageing and disparate technology systems and platforms, develop its own data centre, change its core structure and move into the cloud, adopt a shared services framework, or become a smart city, such as Wollongong Council is planning to do.

The permutations are endless, but at the core of them all is the need for foundational technology.

There is a learning curve attached to this — not just in the general process of digital transformation, but how councils actually approach and think about it.

Councils leading the charge

At the City of Mitcham, in the foothills of southern Adelaide, South Australia, the council’s digital transformation journey began in 2015. Driven by an organisational shift towards customer centricity, the City embarked on a transformational project to consolidate its legacy IT systems into one solution that would simplify council processes and enhance service delivery.

The City of Mitcham’s CEO Matt Pears explains: “To deliver efficiencies and better meet the needs of our customer, we needed a system that would provide a foundation from which we could build from."

The City implemented OneCouncil – a fully integrated enterprise solution from TechnologyOne – to deliver operational efficiencies, drive greater productivity and ultimately improve its customer experience.

Since moving to a single enterprise solution, the council has experienced several key benefits.

“This technological transformation allowed our business to work together to centralise systems, processes and data to improve our key processes across the organisation," Mr Pears said.

The key advantages of SaaS

One of the key advantages of a SaaS offering is that the system is accessible from anywhere, at any time, on any device. This means that field staff can access information via a native web browser on a smart mobile phone or tablet — whether council-deployed or under a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) arrangement.

Users are logging on to the full enterprise solution, not a cut-down version or a standalone mobile app, so the data they see is both current and accurate. Access extends beyond council staff, allowing ratepayers and residents to easily interact and access information, providing a portal on which to build solid community engagement.

Local government services are only as good as residents and ratepayers believe them to be. If the documents and records or property and revenue units of council operate as silos, without connection or visibility into customer and community management, how can you maintain or improve service delivery?

Centralised storage of all document and file types across all council departments helps manage enterprise information and enables improved service delivery for all stakeholders accessing the information.

Why it matters

TechnologyOne Local Government Industry Director, Peter Suchting, said councils were digitally transforming and moving to ERP SaaS solutions after recognising the systems and platforms they were on had become mixed and outdated over the years.

Many councils now recognise that these aren’t necessarily the platforms or systems needed to deliver the outcomes the community are expecting in the future.

“It is almost a redundant process putting a nice new suite of smartphone applications over the top of multiple ageing back office systems,” Suchting said.

“We’re seeing councils recognise the need to renew their application suites, that integrated ERP is an attractive option — because it reduces the number of systems, simplifies the user interface and experience, removes all the different silos of data, and gets rid of all the complex integration that occurs within councils.”

If your business management solution doesn’t offer comprehensive integration across the following key local government functional areas, you probably aren’t realising your full operational potential.

“Integrated ERP lets council IT teams focus on the delivery of better services and outcomes, rather than trying to ensure the data from one system gets transferred to another.”

Peter Suchting, Local Government Industry Director, TechnologyOne