Nathan Heazlewood, Programme Manager for Auckland Council’s Geospatial Future Mode of Operations Programme explains the hard work and challenges behind three impressive team awards in 2015.
It's not every year that a team collects three major project awards. 2015 was a highly successful time for Auckland Council’s geospatial team.
The Geospatial Future Mode of Operations (GFMO) is one of the largest geospatial technology initiatives ever undertaken in New Zealand, so it is particularly pleasing that we have been so successful.
Unless there is another 'supercity' merger in other regions, it is likely to be the largest geographic information system (GIS) initiative in New Zealand local government that will take place, ever.
Auckland Council received:
• The Association of Local Government Information Managers GIS Project of the Year Award 2015
• The Esri Special Achievement in GIS Award 2015, and
• Public Sector Project of the Year Award 2015 from the Project Management Institute (PMI)
What were the problems GFMO was set up to resolve?
1. Multiple ways of doing the same thing
In 2010 Auckland Council was formed from the merger of eight previous local government authorities.
This has been one of the largest organisational restructures that has ever occurred in New Zealand and resulted in a new organisation with more than 10,000 personnel (including a family of council-controlled organisations), which serves 1.5 million people (nearly a third of the population of New Zealand).
Although there was one new organisation, there were still a multitude of different software platforms, systems, databases, processes and people required to carry out common activities (e.g. searching for property information in the main central business district used very different processes and systems to searching for a property in the rural Rodney region).
Many professional people are aware of the difficulties that arise when merging the systems, data, teams and cultures of two different organisations that each has thousands of staff: imagine the challenges involving eight.
Left to Right: Nathan Heazlewood, Ian Smith, Auckland Mayor Len Brown, Mike Brothers, Hon. Louise Upston (Minister for Land Information), Tony Elson, Janif Mohammed and Michael Gin
2. Inherited practices and poorly organised data
One particular challenge the GFMO had to deal with was a massive ocean of inherited data, much of which had been created years or even decades before. Due to the responsibilities of local government, there are often requirements to retain any data that has been used for any 'official' purpose (in case decisions need to be reviewed at a later date).
This left GFMO with literally hundreds of thousands of data items that were had to be carefully organised, rationalised and catalogued, all without losing the ability to trace information back to its original purpose and related information.
To give some indication of the success of rationalising all of the historic data at the outset of GFMO, a total of 8470 geographic datasets were reduced to just 2056.
Rationalising the District Plan was another huge feat, requiring 697 different geographic datasets to be replaced with just 25 new geographic datasets.
Ian Smith, Nathan Heazlewood and Michael Gin accepting the ALGIM award.
3. Make a 'fresh start' and do things properly
In parallel with sorting out all of these inherited data issues, GFMO also replaced several legacy software platforms/applications/integrations and versions.
The management and strategists at Auckland Council recognised that while all of this work to merge legacy systems had to be done, this challenge also presented a golden opportunity to review the way things were done and to adopt new best practices.
One tangible benefit was a 25 per cent reduction in personnel required to carry out the previous work. This figure, along with savings through such things as decommissioning older systems and saving space, will save the Auckland ratepayers millions of dollars over the coming years.
For more details from a technical and project management perspective please see Nathan Heazlewood’s blog post.
