THE AUCKLAND COUNCIL continues to enable new service models as it moves towards becoming a digital government.

The 600-member ICT team is immersed in a raft of programs involving new digital and collaboration technologies.

Mark Denvir, director of ICT, says in the coming year, the Council will be working on a new e-commerce platform and the first phase of the consolidation of the regulatory mobile consenting system.

There will be a number of initiatives that will be driven by the new platform. These include bookings for facilities and events and online resource and building consents.

“We are also implementing a new Stormwater Asset Management system which is linked to GIS capability and maintenance management,” he states.

Denvir is enterprise services manager at the Council, and took over the information services chief role in an acting capacity following the resignation of Mike Foley in November 2015. He was appointed director of ICT in June.

The Auckland Council is the largest council in Australasia, formed more than six years ago from the merger of the Auckland regional council and seven city and district councils.

Denvir says in the past year, the ICT team delivered significant improvements through the Transition Programme that merged the council’s legacy networks, data centres and telephony.

This programme, he says, included the merger of seven data centres/computer rooms into one provided through IaaS, and replacement of 83 PABX systems with one call manager solution, and eight call centres with a strategic call centre.

The ICT team also worked on the replacement of eight legacy networks that were of variable quality and significant redundancy, with one core network and rollout of the new wide area network to around 300 satellite council sites.

Over the coming months, Denvir says the technology initiatives that will drive the biggest investments for the council will be on application modernisation, customer experience, infrastructure consolidation, collaboration and digital.

There will be variable changes in the budgets, staff and projects for the next 12 months.