Rivals fight for state & local govt CIO of the year

David Carroll - Adelaide City Council

Cloud Migration

Carroll's team realised early on that their move to the cloud represented not only an opportunity to save money and replace legacy applications, but to completely future-proof the organisation for the waves of technological advances to come.

Adelaide City Council has eschewed the “lift and shift” option to completely rearchitect its IT environment so it is tailor made for an as-a-service future, doing a complete sweep of its application set to identify those that needed reconfiguration, those that should be left on-premise, and those that should be dumped altogether.

Already, the council’s payroll, HR services, staff directory, email, data management platform, and terminal services have been successfully migrated to the new infrastructure.

Carroll exploited the opportunity to secure portability between different cloud providers using Equinix’s cloud connect, so the council will be ready to make the switch whenever a new, cost-effective solution emerges in dynamic cloud market. 

The team has also paid careful attention to documenting the whole process so it can share what it has learned with other councils who might benefit from its journey.

Trevor Hill - Department of Education, Tasmania

Edi (EDucation Information System)

Since 2011, Tasmania’s Department of Education has been working to build a central, system-wide data warehouse and user portal that will put data from 24 previously disparate systems at teachers’ and administrators' fingertips.

Edi is a self-service data interface designed to make it as easy as possible for teachers to keep track of every facet of their student’s progress in near-real time.

It currently holds more than 150 million records on the 195 schools and 64,000 students in the state - information that previously would have taken busy teachers hours to find.

While access to student data is now easily available from a PC, tablet or phone, the team has made sure to protect sensitive data through an identity management matrix that ensures only relevant staff can access the information they need.

The department is already fielding interest from other schools systems in the tool.

Dr Steve Hodgkinson - Department of Health and Human Services, Victoria

Victorian Housing Register Application Online

Victoria’s Housing Register Application Online is unique not only because it is the first end-to-end digital social housing form on offer in Australia, but because it is the first state government service to be integrated into the Commonwealth’s MyGov authentication platform.

CIO Hodgkinson and his team kept the customer experience at heart when they designed the service, which replaces irrelevant parts of what was a 200-page paper form with a dynamically presented questionnaire tailored to the user’s circumstances.

DHHS called in usability testers, UX experts and Vision Australia to help optimise the solution for the its customer base, as part of its first fully-agile project implementation.

By leveraging the existing MyGov platform the department has avoided huge upfront and ongoing costs.

It has also laid the foundation for a more joined-up user experience when it comes to government transactions, which hopefully will one day be structured around the customer rather than levels of government.