Tackling a solution to get Information Technology (IT) systems talking to one another is an issue that is common for councils and IT teams across New South Wales.
Lake Macquarie City Council has been exploring the integration space since 2018, when the organisation was undergoing significant IT change with the implementation of an entirely new application stack and operational support approach.
Council’s Chief Information Officer, Alexis Hill, said, “During the review process in 2018, we identified that the existing point to point integration that we had available was sub optimal. This provided justification for Council for the deployment of an integration platform as a service (iPaaS).”
The key driver for an integration project for Council was to ultimately create a single source of truth to deliver a more personalised customer experience for local residents and businesses.
In developing a future integration strategy for the organisation, the iPaaS team identified two core principles, including implementing integrated best of breed systems, and mobility enablement.
Lake Macquarie Council’s Executive team gave the green light for the iPaaS project at the end of 2018 and identified Boomi, a Dell Technologies business, as the organisation’s preferred option.
Since then the organisation has witnessed some significant change and improvements to its IT network, including the launch last year of Council’s new website built on the OpenCities CMS.
“We have seen a lot of positive change to our network recently. We’ve now completed stage one of four stages of the iPaaS implementation, completing the initial deployment and configuration of the platform.”
The next two stages of iPaaS are underway and once complete will provide Council with improved efficiency, better data governance and synchronisation, real time integration and access to data and the enablement of a single view of the customer.
“We’ve got a long way to go on our integration journey, but we’re tackling the challenge head on. I’m confident that we can improve the experience for our customers.
“We will also be happy to share some of our learnings from the integration project with other councils if they are interested.”
