Brimbank City Council recently took out the Innovative Management Initiative category at the Local Government Professionals (LG Pro) Awards for Excellence.
Located just 20 kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD, Brimbank is Melbourne’s second largest municipality, with more than 170,000 residents.
Council received the award for its innovative Integration of Asset Management Information System and Geographic Information System Project, which brought together ten different applications and ten separate databases into a single integrated portal.
Council staff developed the program inhouse.
Brimbank CEO Nick Foa said the project will not only benefit the Brimbank community, but other communities across Australia.
“By making information available from any Council department that an employee might need to do his/her job efficiently, as well as allowing the user to move seamlessly between the various corporate information systems, Council’s Integration of AMIS (Asset Management Information System) and GIS (Geographic Information System) Asset Services project is facilitating a great improvement in service delivery to the Brimbank community,” Nick Foa said.
“Brimbank’s achievement also has great positive implications for the wider Australian community, as the integration achieved can be repeated in other Local Government areas with minimal setup costs.”
The project features improved sharing of information between all departments, with an inbuilt capacity for users to quickly and accurately develop their own maps and feature reports.
This assists staff to achieve up to 90 per cent time savings on several standard tasks.
Other innovative features of the project include:
• the use of leading edge,
commonplace IT principles
of middleware (computer
software that connects
software components or
applications) and web
services
• integration to external
databases freely available in
the public domain
• inhouse development of
skills, thus reducing
dependency on external
service providers
• overnight running of most
data update processes and
map production for field
officers with no manual
intervention
• unlimited potential for
further enhancement and
ease of integration with other
systems
• possibility for integration
to be repeated in other Local
Government Areas with
minimal setup costs.
The project will continue to be an asset to Council as it provides usability with minimal training. It is also customisable, to ensure a closer fit with the user’s specific requirements.
It also offers almost unlimited future integration with other systems over time and can be further enhanced to suit the growing needs of Council.
For further information contact Deidre Anderson on (03) 9249 4347.
