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CIO50 2021 #26-50: Mark Denvir, Auckland Council

  • Name Mark Denvir
  • Title Director, ICT
  • Company Auckland Council
  • Commenced role 2016
  • Reporting Line Deputy Chief Executive
  • Member of the Executive Team No
  • Technology Function 370 staff, nine direct reports
  • Driven by a need to respond to industry demand and improve citizen experience with Auckland Council saw the implementation of an innovative and new way of working and methodology for the organisation. The organisation’s strategy has a focus on digitalising its services and making it easier for Aucklanders to connect with Council.

    Director of ICT Mark Denvir implemented his initiative of embedding ICT within the Regulatory Services directorate by establishing a ‘UX Delivery Centre’ to accelerate and respond to the emerging needs of Tāmaki Makaurau at pace, including the demands of the building industry, the need for communities to become better connected with Council and ensuring Council is technologically equipped for the future needs of the region, today.

    The UX delivery centre enabled people from across the business to form hybrid teams to:

    ·       Design, investigate, test and deliver innovative solutions to support and respond to the demands of the building industry as it faced an unprecedented surge in demand.

    ·       Embed emerging technologies, innovations and design solutions which optimised citizen engagement experience with Auckland Council, accelerating delivery of requests online, accelerate our customer service representatives time to respond to our citizens and enable the organisation to become more adaptable and agile.

    ·       Accelerate processing volume for building consents, resource consents, regulatory engineering and property data reduced constraints operationally within the organisation, increasing productivity and administration capability whilst driving operational costs down with the implementation of bot processing automation seeing savings of over 20,000 hours year on per annum. 

    New way of working for council customer services

    With over 1.5 million customers, Auckland Council’s customer contact teams service over 4000 people daily. This innovative approach saw the team deliver Auckland Councils “iConnect customer contact” platform in May 2021. This has enabled a significant business transformation for both the organisation (teams using the technology daily) and the people of Auckland.

    Early benefits realised include a radical reduction in calls not answered from 14.1% to 5.2% to the time taken to onboard new teams to the platform decreasing from 3 months to 3 weeks. This has had an immediate positive impact for staff morale and wellbeing, whilst ensuring Auckland Councils’ key capabilities in digital responsivity, adaptability, and resilience for Tāmaki Makaurau have been established.

    iConnect is an innovative, omnichannel solution which meets the needs of both front-line and support teams and the people of Auckland resulting in an optimised, effective, and efficient digitalised experience with Auckland Council.

    Leveraging cloud technology and design thinking has enabled the future needs of Tāmaki Makaurau to be embedded into the design of the solution, delivering a contact centre which is entirely digitalised - an innovative and entirely new approach for a local government organisation, resulting in a comprehensive, adaptive, and smart customer contact centre.

    This has resulted in a transformative, innovative shift in Council’s way of working smashing silos and enabling ICT To embed in emerging tech solutions delivering a responsive, adaptable and agile local government which can scale and respond to the emerging needs of the region at pace. 

    Influencing across the organisation

    The most significant way Denvir influences people is through his ability to tell the ICT story in terms of how this impacts the wider organisation. He communicates regularly with the other C-suite and uses both simple diagrams and analogy’s to assist them understand the role ICT plays or could play in achieving the desired outcomes.

    Denvir gives regular briefings to both the executive team and the governing board on various topics, from key project updates through to security briefings in light of the significant risk this poses to the organisation.

    Denvir has built significant relationships across the organisation and is seen as a trusted partner and as he communicates in the same language as those he deals with he has been able to gain support for his team and the direction he is leading them and the organisation. 

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