Christchurch City Council chief information officer Symon McHerron is driving the team at council that takes a holistic approach to ensure successful implementation of its digital strategy. 

“Traditionally IT enablement has been packaged as projects, often disconnected from each other, and seen as IT rather than a business initiative,” says McHerron.  

The team has five core programmes as part of this strategy: Modern Workplace, ERP Improvements, Digital Citizen Experience, Employee Experience, and Cyber Security.

This has included the Digital Unit leading outwards across the organisation, with the programme managers part of the digital team and leading the advancement of change management and service design practices and approaches. 

“We have seen this approach drive greater cohesion across projects, better translation of enablement activities into outcomes and milestones, provided the executive team with greater assurances to support investment decisions, and provided far greater communication across the organisation on the digital strategy and programme vision, ‘what’s in it for me’, and generally built up the pace of the transformation momentum and therefore quicker value delivery,” says McHerron.

Although the core programmes have a primary focus on getting the basics right, standardisation, driving efficiencies, and improving citizen digital engagement, there has been the ability in parallel to deliver innovations to set the scene for broader opportunities, according to McHerron.

 Examples include:

• The implementation of robotic process automation (RPA) to reduce the huge amount of data needing to be processed across council services, such as street numbering, and subdivision requests. This has removed 80% of the manual processing required in some instances and allows the team to focus on higher value and more satisfying work.
• The use of M365 PowerApps to quickly provide proof of concepts at relatively low cost, to support what might be a short-term option until larger more enduring initiatives are delivered or could possibly transition into a longer-term solution in their own right.

• The use of co-design processes by interviewing locals on the street or at council service centres to validate what they actually want improved for better digital interactions with council services. This has supported removing assumptions of what’s wanted and supports a more engaging process with stakeholders to get the right outcomes.

“We have ensured that some funding is ring fenced and allocated to ‘bundles’ of initiatives that are high value / low cost, and can be delivered in agile ways, and often not scope bound. This allows us to be highly responsive to what might be small, however important enablement for our customers, while we also focus on balancing the larger, more complex and multi-year programmes and projects,” says McHerron.