Efficiencies, cost savings and customer convenience are at the heart of recent achievements made by Bundaberg Regional Council’s Information Services (IS) team.
During the past three years, the team has worked together to improve business processes and are continuing to focus on their strategy of being a cloud-first enterprise.
Cloud development platforms provide the opportunity to quickly prototype, test concepts and rapidly assemble new innovative business applications that respond to internal and community needs.
In recent months, Bundaberg Regional Council has introduced Civica’s Authority Altitude, a SaaS (Software as a Service) cloud solution that was developed in Australia in collaboration with local councils.
Chief information officer Mitch Miller said Altitude was the first of council’s major platforms to transition to a software as a service model.
“The idea was to drive efficiencies and get more value from our vendor by moving to a rapid development platform,” he said.
“By realising the major parts of our strategy developed in 2019, we’ve freed ourselves to continually improve business processes because we no longer need to do traditional back-of-house IT work.
“Our operating costs have also been overhauled – no more asking council for significant funding every two to three years.
“We now have a flat operating expense from year-to-year with zero capital expense.”
Further efficiencies achieved by the team and featured in a Microsoft case study is the successful implementation of automated online dog registrations.
Mitch said the IS team developed the online application to make life simpler for customers when needing to provide proof of vet certificates to obtain a discount for microchipped and de-sexed pets.
“We really needed a way to avoid having to reactively contact customers for correct documentation or additional registration fees as this would negate the reason for making it available online,” he said
“Having the documents verified on upload meant we could have confidence we were charging the appropriate amount.
“Leveraging the cloud with the idea of eliminating things we don’t have to do – like server rooms, email servers, website hosting, was the critical piece for transitioning to a continuous improvement model.”
Mitch said he and his team had achieved a long list of innovations and cost-effective practices and were looking forward to adding more in the future.
