A series of issues arising simultaneously led to Western Australia’s City of Melville taking the plunge with new technology. This has resulted in new services and cost savings, as well as happy residents and ratepayers. Staff in Library Services were fed up with having to apologise to their customers for poor internet access on the publicly available computers. Melville has five libraries with over 100 public access PCs previously linked by multiple 64k modem ISDN lines to Council’s internet provider.
The City also has ten ‘remote’ sites: the five libraries, four recreation centres/swimming pools and an operations centre.
All sites had independent ISDN telephone lines and so communication internally was always at a cost dependent on line rental and call charges. These costs were substantial and there were no new opportunities to trim them. The third factor was the intended ISDN changes by Telstra to the European standard ETSI. The problem for Council was that it had a perfectly serviceable PABX, but it was obsolete and could not be upgraded to accommodate the ETSI standard.
“We were fairly certain that it would be better and cheaper to have a converged infrastructure (Voice over Internet Protocol –VOIP) rather than two infrastructures (voice and data separate),” said Malcolm Jenkinson, Manager Corporate Support. “However, proof of the concept was required.”
At the time, Council’s IT Officer responsible for WAN and internet issues, Sunsern Limwiriykul, was completing an IP module at Murdoch University as part of his Masters in Telecommunications. He produced a university assignment on the practical solutions facing Melville, including the probable costs and the impact of the associated technologies. He then collaborated with other IT staff to produce a proposal which covered more than the pure technology issues. It explored the business cases for the recommendation, refined the likely up front and ongoing costs plus projected future uses. This proposal identified ‘hard’ savings, like the removal of some 70 individual telephone lines at remote sites and at the Civic Centre, and ‘soft’ savings like travel time and time wasted waiting for courier services to deliver copies of correspondence.
During the roll out, intensive training sessions were conducted for all staff on the new phones. A test environment was built into Council’s training room to give staff theoretical and hands on experience before starting to use the phones. In addition, a full virtual training program was included on Council’s intranet site, which is now used by new staff and for ‘refresher’ purposes.
“The change to the organisation has been exceptional,” Malcolm Jenkinson said. “Firstly, it caused a huge review of how we use the phone for business purposes. Secondly, because all our staff now have access to core applications, such as Finance/Purchasing, Document Management/CRM, GIS, Land Information Systems, at any desk top, they can all work at any time and place. This has delivered the planned productivity gains. In addition, all calls within the network are free and we have calculated over $70,000 savings in telephony related costs in the first year. We have also delighted library users because they can now access the web in milliseconds and surf to their heart’s content!”
For further information contact Malcolm Jenkinson, telephone (08) 9364 0616 or email mjenkinson@melville.wa.gov.au
