Published on the 24/10/2019 | Written by Infor

AT A GLANCE

• Dunedin City Council

INDUSTRY

• City council

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

• To adopt a ten year plan to renew key infrastructure, revitalise investments, and refresh community connectedness
• To consolidate and integrate a complex, disparate ICT landscape that encompassed 12 specialised business units using over 1,600 applications
• To obtain collective intelligence and integrated, insightful decision-making across the entire organisation
• To free up valuable technical resources from time-consuming development of reports by enabling self-service analytics and customised reporting
• Maximise efficiency of key customer services with improved integration and more online services

SOLUTION

• Integrated BIRST business intelligence suite with Infor Pathway and Infor Public Sector (IPS)
• Provided mobile functionality to field inspectors
• Utilised Infor solutions

BUSINESS BENEFITS

• Achieved 99 percent accuracy of key corporate and customer data across the entire organisation
• Eliminated the burden of business reporting on valuable development resources, freeing up strategic capacity
• Integrated Infor Public Sector with GIS as a customer-friendly visual information tool set for public access
• Provided comprehensive and cohesive transparency for each business unit to power coordinated decision-making
• Accelerated the sharing of insights and generation of efficiencies across the council
• Improved visibility for infrastructure planning and improvement, forecasting and budgeting

FOR MORE INFORMATION

INFOR
W: INFOR
T: +61 2 9021 7100

PARTNER CONTACT

EMDA
W: EMDA
T: +64 9 921 6600 or
T: +64 3 343 0023
E: info@emda.co.nz

Making the future a present priority
Scenic and dynamic Dunedin is a university town with a large student population that makes it the second largest city on New Zealand’s South Island. A tertiary education hub, it hosts thriving research, publishing, manufacturing, and technology industries. Dunedin residents rate their quality of life higher than other New Zealander city-dwellers, and see their home as one of the world’s great small cities.

Dunedin City Council is keenly aware of the challenges involved in realising this vision. After two serious floods in recent years, sustainability and infrastructure are its priorities, along with refreshing the look, feel, and safety of the city. A new city-wide ten year plan is underway with bold and ambitious new projects to attract new investment, foster community connections, and showcase the city’s spectacular environment.

We are changing the way we are thinking about technology

The foundation for this surge of innovation is a ten year digital transformation plan for the council’s own information and communication technologies. The council’s executive leadership has prioritised a future focus for all its internal systems so that they are strategic, innovative efficient, and seamlessly integrated to enable more coordinated decision-making.

As one of New Zealand’s largest councils with over 900 staff, Dunedin City Council has a highly complex ICT landscape. It offers citizens a wide variety of online services, and its internal processes are divided between 12 highly specialised business units that currently use more than 1,600 applications.

“We are changing the way we are thinking about technology by always asking: Is this solution the simplest it can be? Is it efficient? And does it add value at the highest level?”
Tracey Tamakehu Chief Information Officer, Dunedin City Council

Consolidation for collective effort
“There is continuing pressure for local government to maximise efficiency,” said Tracey Tamakehu, Dunedin City Council’s Chief Information Officer. “Doing business better involves transforming the way we interact with customers, stakeholders, and suppliers. Emerging digital opportunities offer huge potential, as long as we leverage them in a strategic way.”

Dunedin’s far-sighted Digital Transformation Strategy is already consolidating and modernising technology across the previously siloed organisation.

As a result, it will enable cross-unit information flow to directly support customer-focused service delivery and bolster the council’s strategic objectives.

Beyond processing, storing, and reporting on data for key activities, the council’s ICT assets will enable intelligent and responsive business with powerful services all connected to a single source of truth. At the centre sits Infor Pathway, Infor Public Sector (IPS), and Infor Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) asset management, which are connected to BIRST business intelligence suite and integrated via Infor ION, Infor’s advanced middleware platform.

“Infor Pathway is the cornerstone of this transformation,” said Tamakehu. “It is a linchpin of our future-focus, because it is through Pathway we can collect, organise, secure, and share vital data in an integrated way. It enables us to augment, streamline, and coordinate all our other systems, and make them more efficient. We have relied on Pathway over the long term and its capabilities advance with our needs.”

Value realised
Digital transformation is moving Dunedin City Council from a complex collection of business units, each with their own processes, databases, and risks, to a collective entity with a cohesive purpose, informed by a secure single source of truth.

This new connectivity is supporting continuous innovation that is single-mindedly value-driven. Employees are enjoying improved efficiency of operations and the elimination of key friction points, and citizens are seeing improved access and more responsive customer service.

Insight to power direction
Analytics at your fingertips
“Because we have total confidence in Pathway’s accuracy and reliability, we are transforming our reporting systems to enable self-service information access for business units,” said Tamakehu. “We audit our data held in Pathway annually and it maintains a 99% accuracy. That means we can rely on it.”

BIRST allows business units to drill down to the specific customer and corporate information they need, drawn from and consolidated across a whole range of applications. Previously, 70% of the ICT development workload was in reporting and analytics—now, these resources are deployed for more productive and strategic functions.

Insight to enable collective effort
With Infor Pathway and Infor Public Sector providing a consolidated platform for all its information assets and processes, Dunedin City Council is realising deep and clear 20:20 vision across its operations. “Our digital transformation will allow the council to act in a connected way,” Tamakehu explained.

“Budgeting, forecasting and long term planning is supported by this improved transparency. New ICT infrastructure projects have total visibility into existing and planned assets. All staff are aware of the big picture, and this will save time and directly drive down costs.”

Meeting future challenges
Dunedin City Council is now working to move its core Infor platforms to the cloud. Although its ICT system is currently comprehensively replicated across two physical sites, being in the cloud will ensure availability of all data in any event, including natural disaster. Infor Pathway will be the council’s first cloud-based platform.

As the council’s key information source, ensuring the system has the maximum protection with guaranteed reliability fulfills an important civic duty. It also means that the council complies fully with all its legislative and regulatory requirements.

“It is absolutely critical to public safety that the information we hold is accessible at all times to the staff who need to work with it, no matter the challenges that may be involved,” said Tamakehu.

Source: This article was originally sourced from Infor

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