Birds of a feather
Birds of a feather
What began as an experiment in local government teamwork has turned into a major driver for change for five NSW councils that have successfully moved core business systems to a shared, hosted model that could be replicated in councils nationwide. By David Braue.
Put to tender in 2002, the Councils Online initiative bonded Hornsby Shire Council, Wyong Shire Council, Lake Macquarie City Council, Parramatta City Council, and Randwick City Council into a pooled effort to implement the high-end Oracle Financials system.
Run from an HP data centre, the environment also features local government applications including Geac Pathway, Amlib Library Management System, Tower Software's TRIM records management system, Kronos for time and attendance, and systems covering areas such as occupational health and safety and asset management.
The project involved developing procedural consensus, migrating legacy data from various property rating and administrative systems, and shifting more than 2500 users to the hosted Oracle Financials environment. Despite its broad scope and massive change, a shared will to succeed helped the project-managed by Cap Gemini with HP as hardware supplier-beat the odds.
"It's enabled councils to be able to implement a major ERP system," says Greg Ashe, manager of IT and business with Wyong Shire Council, which ditched its green-screen Geac TCS environment for the hosted Oracle system. "If we had gone for a single solution for only one council by itself, there is no way in the world we'd have had the resources to do it. Working with the other councils has worked out a lot better than most people thought it would."
Delivering success required careful management. Each council appointed a project manager as a first point of contact, while general managers managed high-level interactions and met fortnightly to ensure the project stayed on track. The councils focused heavily on user requirements, involving dozens of individual users in acceptance testing to ensure it met their needs.
"It's been a huge change management process," says Craig Munns, IT manager with Hornsby Shire Council.
"The organisation has been turned on its head, and we've implemented many more systems than what we had before. The whole organisation has been involved in one way or another, and while no one generally likes change, generally people have been very helpful and have gotten involved because they see the benefits we're working toward."Standardisation required changes in councils' underlying business processes, with commonalities of function and process heavily debated amongst participants. Payroll, says Lake Macquarie Council group manager of operations Ron Posselt, was particularly tricky because each council had to accommodate its individual enterprise agreements. "Right from the start, we sought to leverage off of our similarities, and not to leverage our differences," he says.
Ultimately, the five councils reached a common understanding that guided the project to its successful completion. It is now in phase two, which will extend the Oracle environment with nearly 30 different e-business functions by year's end. For councils that have had minimal or no online services in the past, this phase will enable e-business through ratepayer self-service, online payments, requests for council documentation, library catalogue searches, customer relationship management, and the like. Many of these features were originally planned for phase one but were pushed back to minimise complexity.
Because the environment is hosted, it could eventually be packaged and resold to other councils as a sort of council in a box' solution. Cap Gemini is currently fielding commercial enquiries from interested councils, and developing marketing and business cases to support potential expansion of the system's reach.
More than two years down the track, Councils Online has delivered a world-leading model of shared services and business consistency. And that, for Posselt, has made the project more than worth the effort.
"We now have a level of knowledge about where work comes from and goes to, and how it's managed in the organisation, that we never had before," he says. "That presents some challenges to areas that may not have managed the flow of their work before, and it challenges organisations to utilise these tools to fine-tune themselves over time. We are looking to restructure our whole organisation over the next twelve months as we implement phase two and beyond."
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