Maintenance on Auckland Council’s computer system has been given the green light after it was announced the country is moving to the COVID-19 Protection Framework, commonly called the traffic light system.
The upgrade will take place during the first weekend of December, from 4am on Saturday 4 December, and finishing 44 hours later at 11.59pm on Sunday 5 December.
The maintenance will mean some council services will be unavailable for the weekend. These include lodging building consents, building inspection and code compliance applications; payments for rates, dog registration and renewals, and cemeteries on-site payments. Reporting a problem will be partially operational.
Although the outage reduces access to some services this weekend, the upgrade will result in a significant improvement across the network, something that Councillor Desley Simpson, Chair of the Council’s Finance and Performance Committee, says will have substantial cost savings.
“This system maintenance is going to allow the council to not just be more cost-effective but will also help the organisation be more responsive to our current and future technology needs.”
“This is also one of the last activities in the programme of work that our technology team have been working on, which will see more than $2 million in cost savings made each year.”
Mark Denvir, Director of Auckland Council’s Information and Computer Technology (ICT) department says it is great to finally get to this point.
“This was originally planned for September, but we were not able to do the work under lockdown. I’m really pleased we can get on with this now. There’s never a perfect time but we’ve chosen a weekend to reduce the impact on Aucklanders as much as possible.”
He says that one of the reasons that the maintenance could not happen during lockdown was the need to move server infrastructure across Tāmaki Makaurau and accessing multiple sites in the weeks prior to the maintenance.
“To move the servers from Albany would have required a number of staff to be working closely together, which would have meant breaching bubbles. The activity was considered non-essential, and we wanted to ensure our staff, contractors and vendors were all safe.”
Councillor Simpson is pleased that the ICT staff can finally get the maintenance done.
“They have had to be so patient over lockdown. It will be good to complete this important work before Christmas.”
The unavailability of the services starts at 4am, Saturday 4 December, and will be completed by 11.59pm, Sunday 5 December.
Services unavailable
Online:
- Lodging applications for building consents, building inspections and code compliance certificates
- Payments for rates, dog registration, renewals and updates, LIM reports and Infringements.
- Report a Problem will be partially operational. Teams will need to be operating on BCP processes during this time
On-site
- On-site payments for venues, libraries, & service centres. Customers will still be able to book council venues and pay online
- Cemeteries on-site payments
