• Home
• Analysis
• Policy
• Central Government
• Local Government
• Healthcare
• Education
• Digital Inclusion
• Technology
• Security

Local Government, Policy

NZ local govt boosts communications

By Jianggan Li | 14 December 2009

The city of Porirua, immediately adjacent to the New Zealand capital Wellington, is home to more than 50,000 residents and 3136 businesses. The city is managed by Porirua City Council (PCC), which is responsible for all the local affairs in relation to the well-being and development of the community.

As the Council’s Manager of Information Systems, Peter van der Burg highlights to FutureGov that limited budget with strict budget constraints is a big challenge they have to overcome to deliver good customer service. In addition, Porirua is ethnically very diverse, with residents belonging to European, Pacific, Maori, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American and African groups.

“We face different expectations from citizens, which are often related to ethnicity,” van der Burg, who manages the information systems at the Council as well as leading specialists which develop and maintain these systems, says. “However they all demand very high standards for services and expect them to be available 24 by seven.”

To meet these challenges, organisational changes have been planned and executed. A roadmap was created and rolled out for investments aimed at creating new platform base, which is used to extend and enhance core applications helping improve citizen service delivery.

For example, communications portals will be integrated into the web site, and further investment in mobile technology is now made possible with enhanced core infrastructure which can support good performance in mobility.

PCC’s web site has been enhanced and redesigned, which now offers GIS, online events calendar, request for service, career opportunities, emergency management notifications, sport field status as well as water disruption notifications.

Online library catalogue is also available through the portal, which offers reservations, renewals, remind emails and text messages. In addition, an ‘A-Z services’ page allows residents to quickly search and locate what they want from the hundreds of services that the council provides.

A call centre is now available 24x7, while kiosks are available for citizen to check land and property rating information as well as property records, which are now all digitally stalled. The specific information available through kiosks, which come from the council’s Electronic Document Management System, offers greater detail than the internet accessible database.

Van der Burg says the result of the changes have been obvious over the last year. “They have resulted in a 2 per cent rise in customer satisfaction last year after many years of static satisfaction,” he says.

Ranging from asset maintenance crews to dog rangers, to staff who telecommute, the council has more than 30 per cent of its employees who are constant mobile workers. A variety of technologies, including radio and mobile phone, keep them connected with each other as well as with the council.

Smart phones have been successfully introduced for dog rangers, who can now access greater detail on their job allocation through email or calendar appointments. And after-office-hour job details are sent directly to them so that they don’t have to go through the office to attend to the job.

The council has a System Support specialist stationed in the South Island, 150 kilometres away from Porirua which is located in the North Island. She is now able to support her colleagues through the unified communications platform.

“The technology we’ve given her helps her to be productive when and where she likes, such as in airport lounges,” van der Burg says, adding that a modification of the UC system is being rolled out to very small offices dotted around the city such as suburban libraries. The modified system would allow staff members working in these offices have full access to the council network resources and communications channels.

In order to better enhance the communication capabilities between the staff, the Council recently overhauled its existing Nortel voice network to provide coverage to additional sites including the newly established Arena and Events Centre - Te Rauparaha Arena.

Inside the council’s network, voice traffic is prioritised through VLANs; and a single mode Gigabit fibre optic connection has extended to all council office locations within the CBD.

New servers are deployed and virtualised to gain electrical efficiency. “We maximise the value of our infrastructure through effective maintenance of the assets, and extending out its productive life,” says van der Burg. “We use our servers for as long as possible rather than replace on a strict three year cycle.”

When a server needs to be retired, it is sent to recyclers for stripping down to bare metal and recycled.

The council also keeps the PCs – it has around 350 now – as long as they can ‘still operate well within the acceptable price/performance envelope’. Older PCs are pushed to perform less demanding tasks such as kiosks. And when they have to retire from the organisation, they are donated to community groups to be deployed as home PCs, as part of the household PC recycling programme happening in the Wellington region.

Another area, which van der Burg believes the council has been very innovative, is the recycling of packaging – cardboards and plastic/polystyrene. Not only are they separated based on different materials, the council uses a polystyrene recycler to create under-floor insulation from the material, which would otherwise be dumped.

---