Jayasinha shares the drivers, strategies and technologies behind the Council’s ongoing business and ICT transformation programme.
“We were working in a fragmented information environment with siloed databases. We didn’t have a good understanding of the business processes and how they lined up across the organisation. On top of that, we were running a high-cost ICT environment.”
The approach Jayasinha and his team have taken to plan this transformation is: if Wellington City Council were being built today, what information, data and technology would be needed to run the Council?
Supporting business as usual
There was a significant legacy environment to deal with. The integration of IT systems meant a huge business change to the way the Council worked. Jayasinha needed to make sure that his team supported a business-as-usual environment while they ran through the IT programme. The Council is running a 3-5 year programme of work to manage the business and IT change along with the business and ICT transformation.
In addition to the rationalisation of core council business systems, the Council is deploying a new desktop environment and migrating to a new Electronic Document and Records Management System by Open Text.
To save costs the Council is buying off-the-shelf systems and delivering the functions that business needs through configuration, and not customisation, according to Jayasinha. “We’re not going to do any physical development or customisation of software. This is a significant change to how the organisation has worked in the past and shows a change in people’s mindset.”
Mapping out business processes
The Council’s IT team has also done a current state assessment of all the business processes and created an enterprise architecture portal. On the portal, they’re able to look at the current state of business processes, what data and applications the processes are using, how complex they are and where improvements can be made. This feeds into what the future state will look like and helps the Council map out how to move towards that.
Delivering services on-demand
In terms of revamping its frontline services, the Council wants to deliver services online, on-demand and also through mobile applications. “For this, we need to make sure that we have a well-integrated backend system in place, and high quality data and information that we can use with those systems. We’re looking at a local government ICT platform here,” Jayasinha noted.
One of the first moves was to do a security audit of the environment to make sure that when the new platform is introduced, there is a solid foundation upon which to implement this new system. Jayasinha is also considering cloud-based services including Infrastructure-as-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service.
The streamlining of IT also supports an initiative by the Council to move to a flexible workspace with open plan offices, more space for collaboration, and newer technologies for collaboration and communication.
Jayasinha will be leading an Interactive Discussion Table at the upcoming Cities and Big Data Summit on 16-17 April in Singapore.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Medha Basu
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 06.02.2014
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