Putting systems into order

By ADAM GIFFORD

The Manukau City Council has selected Teradata division of NCR to install a $2 million data warehousing project aimed at bringing order to more than 100 information systems.

Information and technology manager Denis Price said the project would make significant savings for the council.

Manukau has a reputation among vendors as an IT nightmare where projects risk failing. Mr Price said the reputation was not undeserved, but the data warehouse was a foundation for rationalisation and, eventually, electronic government.

"Because a lot of our systems support business processes in only one part of the business, no one took the time to look at the total process from go to whoa, so there are some convoluted information flows."

The systems were not linked.

"It was fine when it worked from a departmental perspective - here's the rates database, here's the list of dog owners and so on," Mr Price said.

"But over the last couple of years we have concentrated on lifting our game to serve the community and to move from being departmental to being more customer-centric.

"If we want to treat customers and community as individuals, we need to understand their total relationship with council, so we need to pull in the data to a single platform.

"The Teradata data warehouse is a mechanism to achieve that in a reasonable time."

Replacing all systems would have been expensive and time-consuming.

Databases so far loaded into the warehouse include the core financials, a separate invoicing system and the building and resource consents unit. Processing resource consents would be faster and the data warehouse would give the council an improved view of all consent-related operations.