An archive solution is an appropriate legacy as Hornsby Council moves to the cloud.
Hornsby Shire Council on Sydney’s northern outskirts has found a ready solution to the challenge of what to do with important historical data when retiring legacy systems ahead of a move to the cloud.
The challenge of council amalgamations in New South Wales created even more of a dilemma for Hornsby when it decided after 15 years, to move from the Councils Online Managed Service to a new solution based largely ‘in the cloud’.
Hornsby’s Manager Information, Communication and Technology, Craig Munns, explained that the Council’s decision to move off the service was aimed at reducing costs, as well as having a solution which more effectively met its business requirements, priorities and management needs.
The question facing Hornsby was should it convert all historical information to the new system, or archive it? While the first strategy implied a substantial systems conversion project, the latter raised the question of whether the Council could store and access historical data, independent of an application to support that data.
And further influencing Hornsby, the more applications in the cloud, the higher the financial premium for data storage.
Mr Munns said Hornsby had two years previously deployed iFerret as a corporate search tool to quickly retrieve information from across multiple information systems. At that time they commissioned iPlatinum to develop an archiving solution to enable querying and reporting on the Stowe TCS system from which the Council had upgraded more than a decade earlier.
The success of that initial archive project dictated a strategy that has since seen iPlatinum build archives using iFerret to access the Council’s Business Paper system, the Oracle eBusiness suite (finance, human resources, payroll assets and customer relations management) and the Kronos Time and Attendance system.
“As part of continuous strategic improvements in our information systems, our archive development project aimed to ensure less risk of missing data, with easy, read only access,” Mr Munns said.
About iArchive.
The iPlatinum iArchive solution accommodates any council’s historical data that no longer has a place in current transaction systems. It provides the capability to query and report on historical data in legacy systems such as GenaCIS, Stowe TCS, Practical, Fujitsu, PeopleSoft Financials Oracle Financials, JDE Financials, Chris HR/Payroll, Business Paper systems, Asset Management systems, Time and Attendance systems, Records solutions and more, without the need for a supporting application.
The solution provides a means of handling legacy historic information and ensuring ongoing seamless access without the need to maintain or know how to navigate around redundant historical business systems.
*Copy supplied by iPlatinum
