The award is shared by six regional councils – Southland, Taranaki, Northland, Waikato, Horizons and West Coast – who have worked together to develop and share specialist technical software needed for their core functions.
The Integrated Regional Information System (IRIS) is one of the largest local government shared-services’ projects ever undertaken in New Zealand, and won the ‘Joined Up Local Government’ Excellence Award at this week’s Society of Local Government Managers annual meeting in Wellington.
Environment Southland’s Director of Corporate Services Graham Alsweiler said it was the culmination of a lot of hard work between councils and within Environment Southland. “It’s great to get the recognition, particularly given our focus on shared services as a way to gain efficiencies and save on costs,” he said.
The IRIS software package meets the needs of regional council core functions such as consents, compliance, biosecurity and customer enquiry. Mr Alsweiler said many of the councils’ existing software platforms had been at the end of their lives and there were no existing software packages that met the unique statutory responsibilities of regional councils. “Collaborating to develop a shared system made good economic sense. There’s no way we could afford to do this on our own. It required a substantial investment and by working together we have achieved economies of scale.”
About 200 staff from the six Councils, along with 50 from contractor Datacom, have been involved in the complex project. The database alone is made up of hundreds of thousands of records.
IRIS will go live in Southland on 2 December. It is already live at two other regional councils – Northland and Waikato.
Ownership and management of IRIS is vested in a company, Regional Software Holdings Ltd, which is owned by the six councils, and the way is open for other regional councils to join the project.
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Quelle/Source: Scoop, 07.11.2013
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