Queenstown council seeks clearer view

Key Business Insights:
A structured scoping process can help contain projects that might otherwise run out of control, says Queenstown Lakes District Council CIO Kirsty Martin, as she embarks on a programme to centralise council information.

"It's been really good to provide a framework to move forward without diving straight into a technical solution, which is always a mistake.

"You've got to make sure you've got the business sorted first so it drives your technical response."

Involving staff in the process ensures their "pain-points" are understood and gets project buy-in.

Key Innovation
Queenstown Lakes District Council uses IBM's Component Business Model to map relationships internally and between its various agencies to improve information flow.

Breakout Quote
"It's been really good to provide a framework to move forward without diving straight into a technical solution, which is always a mistake."
Queenstown Lakes District Council CIO Kirsty Martin

Queenstown Lakes District Council in Brief

• Administers an area of 8467 square kilometres
• Covers 18,388 rateable properties
• Resident population 23,000 and daily visitors 13,000
• Annual rate take $42 million
• 102 staff

Queenstown Lakes District Council administers what is arguably the most scenic part of the country with magnificent vistas in whatever direction you look. But in July last year its chief executive realised there was one view the council was missing out on.

QLDC wasn't getting a clear picture of all the corporate information important to its diverse activities. It wasn't that the district's natural beauty was distracting council officers from their duties.

But the pulling power of mountains, lakes and rivers means so many people visit and want to settle in the district that the council is much busier than most local authorities of a comparable size. The solution had been to contract out various council functions in a bid for greater efficiency.

That was fine for a while, says CIO Kirsty Martin, but lately it has been seen to have had undesirable consequences. One was the erroneous perception that Lakes Environmental, the agency contracted to handle consents and licensing issues, was out to make a profit. Another was that the council had lost control of some of the information flow.

"The agency was focused on processing consents, doing that as fast as it could, whereas the council needed to be collecting some of that information to be doing monitoring and checking that the district plan was right.

"So there was a bit of a disconnect between the service we were delivering and some of the non-profit drivers of the council."

The district, with the resort of Queenstown at its heart and Wanaka to the northeast, has only about 20,000 ratepayers. But it has to support as many as three times that number of visitors. And development is happening at such a pace that the council receives as many resource and building consent applications as the much larger North Shore City.

It was to gain better visibility of that activity that CEO Duncan Field proposed a programme called One View — designed to centralise information being collected by key agencies Lakes Environmental and Lakes Engineering, and a handful of others. The idea immediately chimed with Martin.

"I thought, 'fantastic — executive input'," says Martin, who was conscious of the increasing spread of information throughout council "silos". However, she was also wary of embarking on a project of potentially enormous scope.

"I agreed with the idea but at that point I realised that, as a project, it could get bigger than Ben Hur. What were going to be the boundaries, what would the scale of it be, were we looking at a whole process re-engineering?"

At the recommendation of Focus Consultants, which does work for accounting firm WHK Cook Adam Ward Wilson, she approached IBM® Business Consulting Services to scope the project, a task it had successfully carried out for WHK.

"IBM business consultants came and said, 'yes, we can do this'," Martin says, applying its Component Business Model to the question of how the council's various agencies fitted together and how information should pass between them.

"It was quite an interesting process because people started off thinking it was an IT project but once they got talking about the difficulties they face day-to-day just finding information, and we'd moved it to a business process discussion, it became quite fruitful."

Focusing on the council's regulatory and engineering functions, staff "pain-points" were identified and solutions sought in a series of workshops.

"We drew together a one-page map of what the council looked like and from there, for each of the components of the council, asked what were the inputs and outputs and where did they need to get information from."

The upshot is that Martin now has a list of 14 initiatives to prioritise and construct business cases around.

"The major one is probably going to be sorting out the file classification structure — a common taxonomy — across the whole organisation so we can start hanging information in the right places."

Her goal is to attach a web-based front-end to the council's geographic information system that will reveal all relevant information about any point on a map of the district.

"With that as the starting point — a logical one for a council that is concerned with land — you'd then be able to view all the related information, regardless of where it lives in the various other council systems.

"You'd click on a particular point on the map and from there drill down to zone, records of noise complaints, say, what sewerage pipes are there and whether any activities are planned for the location."

Not just council staff, but ratepayers too, would have improved access to the information.

"The more self-sufficient we can make people the better, the more information we can get out there the better. People feel empowered if they can look at their own information, and that's always a good thing."

Chief executive Duncan Field sees the project taking a number of years. And Martin admits that her aim of putting all council information no further than a mouse click away is "aspirational".

But the IBM scoping exercise has set the scene for the council's One View dream.

Key Benefits

The council now has a list of 14 initiatives around which to construct business cases

All information relating to any location in the district will be streamlined into one easy-to-access system

Eventually both council staff and ratepayers will have access to all the information collected from different agencies

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