The Shire of Dardanup in Western Australia is bracing for unprecedented urban and industrial expansion, and is innovating to meet the challenges that come with rapid growth.
Technology emerged as an obvious solution to the problem – but obvious did not necessarily mean easy.
It’s taken two years from concept to implementation, but the Shire of Dardanup has engineered its own unique solution to those anticipated growing pains.
TARDIS (Total Archive and Recall Document Information System) is an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) uniquely suited to the business requirements of Local Governments.
It allows for a whole new level of information sharing and work collaboration, within the organisation and outside (stakeholders, industry, ratepayers, general public).
TARDIS is a highly customised version of SharePoint, widely used in business for online document sharing and collaborative work across remote locations.
And what makes it absolutely niche within a Governance environment is the unique “taxonomy” or business language.
This purposefully designed “taxonomy” in conjunction with workflow features, allows delivery of multiple functions by a single action, enabling significant reduction in unnecessary complexities and business processes.
The specific local government design focus of TARDIS means it can be packaged for other local governments, which will benefit from the work undertaken by the Shire of Dardanup through significant savings in start-up costs and human resources associated with adoption.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Chester said the organisation had faced its future challenges head-on, resulting in an industry-leading solution that changed the way every staff member had traditionally worked.
“With our transition towards WA’s next regional city, this has been one of several necessary changes we’ve had to undergo in preparation for meeting the complexities that are inherent with a future large organisation.
“Our hard work now will enable staff in the future to focus on tasks at hand without unnecessary hindrance from business systems and practices that were viable in a smaller organisation but would have undoubtedly failed us during the inevitable periods of growth ahead.”
In broad terms, TARDIS achieves: reduced human resources and materials costs associated with current paper-based Records Management practices; improved collaboration internally and externally; plus more transparent governance resulting in better public engagement and ultimately, improved service delivery.
Mr Chester said modern governance demanded more transparency and accountability.
TARDIS achieved this while going beyond State Records Office of WA compliance towards international record-keeping standards.
Legislative requirements around document retention were met intuitively by the software while internet search engine capabilities created significant efficiencies for document discovery when compared to previous systems.
“To date, there hasn’t been an EDMS developed which has such a strong Local Government framework,” Mr Chester said.
“TARDIS is therefore unique in providing a technology solution that is designed specifically to meet the business needs of a local government environment and can be easily adopted by the industry.”
