South Waikato Council goes electronic

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South Waikato Council goes electronic for document management

11 May 2011

The South Waikato District Council in New Zealand has become the first company to go live on TechnologyOne’s next generation document management product.

The ‘next gen’ product, now running on TechnologyOne’s successful Connected Intelligence (Ci) platform, combines the best of client server and internet technology.

Upwards of 500,000 documents are already stored in Council’s system, with hundreds more going through the system each day as part of the Council’s ordinary business.

According to South Waikato District Council Information Systems Manager, Richard Henderson, it was the mandatory requirements of the Public Records Management Act (PRMA) that led to the implementation of an electronic document management system.

“TechnologyOne’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system is essential to the smooth running of Council and compliance to the PRMA,” Mr Henderson said.

“It allows us to share and retrieve documents rapidly and ultimately, deliver more services more efficiently to our constituents. Allowing rapid access to documents and mass storage capabilities, ECM is now an essential component to our workflow.”

Hailing a ‘willingness to transition’ as one of the key enablers of the implementation, Council had a robust project delivery framework.

“Our ECM implementation definitely went well. We put this down to Council’s willingness to transition to see improvements in how we manage our documents, with everyone aware of their role in the project,” he said.

The go live has even got the Mayor talking, who expressed his enthusiasm for the new system and its instant retrieval of documents.

“This new system is very intuitive and has made it much easier to find documents which is good news for our ratepayers and improves our customer service,” Mayor Neil Sinclair said.

Following the implementation and with Council staff’s willingness to adopt the new system, Council is now looking at the next stage.

“In the longer term, we’d like to roll this system out over the internet,” Mr Henderson said.

“We envisage one touch publishing to allow our constituents rapid access to documents in real time and we’re confident with TechnologyOne as our partner, we can deliver on this vision.”

In late 2010, TechnologyOne announced its Cloud Computing strategy (called TechnologyOne C2), promising to support its customers through the transition to cloud based software solutions. Following the success of the company’s Ci platform, the C2 strategy will officially launch at TechnologyOne’s Evolve User Conference on the Gold Coast, Australia in February 2012.

Dunedin City Council and South Australia’s City of Burnside will soon follow suit, going live with ECM.

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