GTR June 2013

GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

THE ART OF SOCIAL ETIQUETTE

JUNE 2013 • ISSUE 18

e-gov 2.0 It’s all about the service UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS: REWRITING BOUNDARIES

EMERGENCY SERVICES ROUNDTABLE

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REINVENTING CLIENT CARE WITH VIDEO ASSET MANAGERS LEARNING IT’S VALUE STATE ICT POLICIES

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COVER STORY: E-GOV 2.0: IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SERVICE Online-enabled e-government offers unprecedented interaction with citizens and unparalleled new ways of improving efficiencies – but without the right customerservice culture, it’s only going to go so far. We look at the challenges governments are facing in transitioning to a customerservice mentality, and how online tools are facilitating the change.

SPECIAL FEATURES

10

20

52

REGULARS 2 Editor’s letter 4 News 41 Opinion: Esri, Nuance, Motorola Solutions 62 NBN Update

FEATURES 17 State ICT policies are the new black Long reviews and collaboration are driving state governments’ ambitious ICT-reform agendas – but how do state ICT policies compare?

26 RDNS: Reinventing client care with video Videoconferencing offers great promise for customer service – but healthcare giant RDNS is already using it. GTR goes onsite to find out how.

30 UC: redrawing government boundaries Unified communications (UC) is about much more than a PABX upgrade: we find out how UC is driving services change for government service.

35 Asset management stalwarts learning the value of IT Asset management’s tangible nature has perpetuated philosophical differences between the people on the ground, and those in IT. Can they bridge the gap?

38 Federal Budget 2013-14 roundup In a time of austerity, the Gillard government’s latest budget was eagerly awaited. Here’s a rundown of the IT-related measures.

CASE STUDIES 25 City of South Perth The City of South Perth is expanding its CRM system to mobile-wielding users.

32 Fair Work Ombudsman The FWO’s overhauled communications systems promise new customer-service options.

46 Australian Maritime Safety Authority How peak water-management authority navigated a fierce squall during its move to the cloud.

48 ACT Emergency Services A rapid-response team of geospatial experts is supporting flood and other relief efforts nationwide.

LEARNING THE ART OF SOCIAL ETIQUETTE

ROUNDTABLE: EMERGENCY SERVICES

Simply signing up to Twitter doesn’t mean you’re a social-media genius. Government organisations are warming to social media’s possibilities, but many are still struggling with how to integrate and manage it alongside other customer-service channels.

The federal government’s recent 4G spectrum auction has revived debate over the most appropriate technological strategy as Australia’s emergency-services organisations rapidly embrace new technologies. This GTR roundtable unites industry experts to share their thoughts.

50 City of Bunbury A data centre upgrade at the City of Bunbury, WA promises an innovative service-delivery model.

62 Kiama Municipal Council Regional-NSW NBN first-release site is tapping into the network to boost citizen interactivity.

GTR JUNE 2013 | 1

It may seem like semantic nitpicking to contrast the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘customer’ but – as government bodies tap into ICT to modernise their operations and organisational philosophies – the schism between the two philosophies often proves to be very real. While some organisations bound ahead with their customer focus, others struggle to find the right balance of government authority and private sector-like service.

In the private sector, improved customer service is generally linked with reduced operating costs and increased revenues – both strongly desirable for profitbased organisations. In the governance-obsessed public sector, however, those ideals are masked by the omnipresent layer of governance and legislative requirements.

This inevitably leads to organisational inertia – or, in worst-case scenarios, paralysis. But as we push towards social media and open data-enabled e-government 2.0, it is becoming harder for government bodies to ignore the proactivity and efficiency that modern customer-service technologies provide.

Our cover feature this issue looks into the evolution of the customerservice imperative from several angles. As well as exploring the potential for customer-service reinvention, we find out how social media continues to challenge many organisations – and, in a separate feature, explore the latest in unified communications technologies that continue to help them.

GTR’s site visit to the RDNS, where videoconferencing has enabled a new level of efficiency and customer service, may provide inspiration for government organisations in similar situations. Importantly, the governmentbacked RDNS trial has adopted wireless broadband to circumvent fixed-line connectivity issues for chronic and rehabilitative-care patients.

Elsewhere in the issue, we look at the recent release of three states’ comprehensive ICT policies, and talk with Grantly Mailes – the man responsible for delivering on Victoria’s highly ambitious ICT reform agenda. We run through the ICT-related initiatives in the federal government’s 2013-14 Budget, and look at how the continuing divide between asset-management ground staff and supporting ICT organisations continues to challenge government organisations.

There’s also a bumper crop of case studies – six different government organisations are profiled throughout the issue – and the regular range of expert opinion, the latest on the NBN, and an extensive roundtable in which we talk over the latest in emergency-services technology with the experts that are implementing it.

No matter what group of Australians your organisation looks after, the need to deal with them as honestly, efficiently and effectively will continue to drive the need to think more like a profit-minded customer-service organisation. By the time you reach the last page of this issue, hopefully you will have had some new ideas about how you can kick-start the revolution in your own organisation.

We’d love to hear them. Drop me a line at the below email address to share your thoughts on these topics, or anything that’s on your radar.

EDITOR David Braue e: editor@govtechreview.com.au NATIONAL SALES MANAGER Yuri Mamistvalov e: yuri@commstrat.com.au Tel: 03 8534 5008

ART DIRECTOR Annette Epifanidis e: annette@commstrat.com.au Tel: 03 8534 5030 DESIGN & PRODUCTION Nicholas Thorne CONTRIBUTORS Kevin Noonan, Brad Howarth, Kelly Mills MELBOURNE OFFICE Level 8, 574 St Kilda Rd. Melbourne Vic 3004 PO Box 6137, St Kilda Rd Central 8008 Phone: 03 8534 5000 Fax: 03 9530 8911

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Misperceptions wrongly keeping government CIOs from cloud A surfeit of often unclear or incorrect information about cloud computing is driving many government CIOs to unnecessarily tilt the playing field against the adoption of cloud services, an Ovum analyst has warned.

Arguing that risk-averse government cloud policies tend to make government bodies so nervous about buying a ‘bad’ cloud service that they buy none at all, research director Steve Hodgkinson warned that many organisations are instead ending up with an even worse outcome: sticking with existing, inadequate and outdated systems that impede opportunities to revisit business processes and improve overall productivity.

“The logic of government cloud computing policy usually starts with the implicit assumption that cloud services are risky, illdefined and unproven,” he said in a statement.

“Cloud services adoption in government faces resistance caused by procedural, organisational and cultural inertia.”

Even confusion about the correct terminology is diluting the effectiveness of the cloud message, Hodgkinson warned.

For example, many executives persist in speaking about ‘the cloud’ as though it were some massive, nebulous, omnipresent thing.

But policy should, he explained, refer to a ‘cloud service’ – ‘a tangible service delivered on a professional basis by a trustworthy external service provider’.

“Cloud services are just shared services that work,” Hodgkinson said.

Another important distinction to make is between ‘cloud computing’ – the suite of infrastructure, virtualisation, automation, selfservice portals and multi-tenant architectures used to deliver a cloud service – and a ‘cloud service’, which is a specific combination of processes, people, organisation and technology designed and delivered as a specific service.

If government executives learn the differences between these concepts and subsequently get a better grasp of the relevant concepts, they can avoid the mistakes that have plagued many agencies as they considered early adoption of cloud solutions.

Recognition of not only the risk inherent in adopting a cloud solution, but of the risk inherent in not adopting a cloud solution, must be compared in business cases to help organisations make rational, well-informed decisions as to the best way to proceed.

“The risk of procuring a ‘bad’ cloud service is relatively low and can be contained by well-established risk-management mechanisms and shorter contract terms,” Hodgkinson writes, noting that deferring a potentially-useful cloud service runs the risk of “a deferred or missed opportunity for productivity improvement and innovation in policy and service delivery.”

Government must meet high-cost ‘new normal’ by fostering ICT innovation: AIIA Regardless of whichever government is elected on September 14, Australia’s ICT policy makers will need to engage better with Asian peers and stimulate local innovation, Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) chairman Kee Wong has warned.

Speaking at the launch of the AIIA’s SmartICT Election Platform, Wong – a selfprofessed “serial entrepreneur” who is also managing director of technology consulting firm e-Centric Innovations – said it was incumbent on government bodies to stimulate Australia’s entrepreneurs, and to keep them innovating through their careers rather than simply cashing out of their first big success story.

“We have great entrepreneurs that may have created one or two businesses in their lifetime, and they retire to savour the fruits of their labour,” Wong said. “When surrounded by highly ambitious, hungry and capable populous neighbouring countries in Asia, we cannot rely on this model in the future; we need our 35

4 | GTR JUNE 2013

year olds to be starting their fourth or fifth business.”

“By the time they are done, they will have started another five or ten – and even when they hang up their boots, they will continue to foster and help other entrepreneurs that come behind them.”

Building this culture will not only help promote the spirit of innovation in Australia, but will help the government build up a domestic capability that is going to become increasingly important in helping Australia fight off competition from lower-cost companies like Malaysia, which he said has a skilled workforce and costs around one-third as high as in Australia.

“Malaysia and Australia form a synergy that is pretty obvious,” Wong said. “We need each other because we have no scale in our own right. It’s a no-brainer for Australian companies, if they want to look at the Australian market, to look at how we can partner with Malaysia for market access to Asia.”

Such partnerships will help Australian companies build out their capabilities and add value that will make up for Australia’s higher price structures, which can make local companies uncompetitive if they’re left unaddressed.

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/12DDqgp.

Kee Wong

Budget boosts local-government NBN initiatives Local government bodies will see an uptick in federal support around a number of ICT-related initiatives, particularly related to funding to encourage councils to make the most of the national broadband network (NBN).

The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) will receive $5.7m in funding over the next two years to help local government organisations improve what the budget papers called “the efficiency and effectiveness of their service delivery by taking advantage of the bandwidth and high data capacity of the NBN”.

The current funding expands the existing Digital Local Government program from the current roster of 40 councils, to an additional 15 local councils into which the NBN is currently slated to be delivered.

A number of local government programs are already underway to support the establishment of NBN education and serviceenablement programs within local councils touched by the NBN.

Barring any changes to the rollout in the event of a Coalition government, the network’s footprint is slated to grow steadily in coming years, with NBN Co recently announcing the addition of over 1.35m premises to the network’s three-year rollout plan.

That announcement added nearly 190 new towns and groups of suburbs to the network’s schedule, bringing to 4.85m the total number of properties expected to be connected to the NBN by mid 2016.

The budget also included a $55.6m allocation, over two years, to conduct a referendum on the financial recognition of local government bodies in the Australian Constitution. That referendum will be held simultaneously with the September 14 federal election.

AGIMO, CeBIT awards recognise government ICT innovation Sunshine Coast Council, DMITRE, Adelaide City Council and other government bodies were popping the champagne last night as Kate Lundy announced the winners of the Australian Government ICT Awards at a gala dinner during CeBIT last night.

The awards, which are run annually by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), recognise ICT best practice at all levels of government and were highlighted by the naming of the Department of Human Services as the Overall

Excellence in eGovernment (and Service Delivery category award winner) for their Express Plus mobile app.

Queensland’s Sunshine Coast Council won in the Applications Development Category for an eBusiness platform providing a single window to online services, while the South Australian Resources Information Geoserver (SARIG) 2020 project – which integrates over 400 spatial data sets from across government and the private sector – was named the best geospatial project.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Census Spotlight project took out the prize in the Government 2.0 category, while Adelaide City Council’s Microsoft Lync-based unified communications implementation was awarded in the Project and Program Management category.

A number of individuals were also recognised in the awards, with Pia Waugh of the Department of Finance taking home the Government 2.0 Innovator Award and Kiama Municipal Council’s John Holland and the Wollondilly Shire Council IT team receiving the ICT Professional of the Year Awards.

Also announced on the night were the winners of the CeBIT.AU Business Awards, which were run in conjunction with the massive ICT conference held in Sydney recently.

MyNetFone took out one of the four awards, in the Outstanding Project category, for its work implementing Voice over IP services to the Tasmanian government. The project, according to the judges, “delivered a financial and technical outcome which allowed seamless migration to the next-generation technologies in the future.”

GTR JUNE 2013 | 5

Fast-tracked open data projects boost Transport for NSW app cred Government organisations considering how to engage with developers wanting real-time data sets may find inspiration in the example of Transport for NSW (TfNSW), which has directly addressed complaints over past limited data access by fast-tracking six train-related application development projects through its App Hot House project.

Held over the weekend of 16-17 February, the App Hot House brought together TfNSW developers and a number of eager app developers, which were whittled from an initial shortlist of 20 to just six developers through an intensive process of brainstorming and pitching.

Two months later, the resulting apps have already gone live – and Rupert Hanson, one of the six developers to make the final list, couldn’t be happier with both the final result and the process by which it was built.

“It has been an absolutely fabulous process,” he told GTR, “and a fast track to market. It’s a real credit to the government people involved, and the technical strength of the people the government chose to work with, that we managed to get it done as quickly as we did.”

By encouraging and facilitating participation by six keen transport-app makers, App Hot House created “a very collegial atmosphere among the developers,” Hanson added.

“You could talk to the engineers at Railcorp that run the system, and get a deeper understanding of what’s going on – and that access has remained open ever since. It’s really good to be able to have that dialogue with key people in government, to effect change with the systems and to gain access to get such a depth of knowledge.”

The data sets provided for the six applications – which include Hanson’s Triptastic as well as SkedGo’s TripGo, Grofsoft’s TripView, Riverstone Labs’ Arrivo Sydney, Small Potion’s Hidden City and Quentin Zervaas’ TransitTimes+ – have been long sought-after by developers, many of whom have chafed at the government’s past efforts to limit third-party application development.

Three years ago, Grofsoft principal Nick Maher was nearly sued for copyright infringement by RailCorp after building an app that gave commuters real-time train info.

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/16BMcAW.

6 | GTR JUNE 2013

Councils big on geospatial systems but some still struggling with business links Nearly one-third of local governments are still struggling to understand the value of geographical information system (GIS) investments and half have no plans to increase their investment in GIS technology, an extensive survey of localgovernment attitudes has found.

The 2013 GIS in Local Government Benchmark Study, a joint project of Esri Australia and the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute (SSSI), surveyed 150 representatives of local governments nationwide– ranging in size from four employees to 7000 – about their use and perceptions of geospatial systems.

Its findings painted a picture of current attitudes and investments in geospatial technology, as well as gauging its increasing integration with other business systems and usage outside of traditional silos.

Fully 68% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the value of GIS is “widely understood within my council”, with 85% indicating that all departments in the council were accessing the GIS systems and the others indicating that use was focused on engineering, GIS or IT departments.

The median investment in GIS systems was between $50,000 and $100,000 per year, although 29% said they were investing more than $100,000 annually and just 11% were investing less than $20,000 per year. However, only 38% of

Information Communicated Publicly via GIS 25%

Key areas of use for GIS Technology

EMERGENCY RESPONSE/SERVICES

25%

FLOOD MODELLING

8%

GOVERNMENT BUDGETRY SPENDING LAND USE PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT

56%

LOCATION OF COUNCIL SERVICES

58% 55%

PROPERTY INFORMATION

8%

NONE OF THE ABOVE

20

40

60

80

100

97%

ASSET MANAGEMENT

89%

CUSTOMER SERVICE

71%

EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT FIELD FORCE ENABLEMENT OR MOBILE OPERATIONAL AWARENESS

54% 57% 94%

PLANNING AND ANALYSIS

OTHER

3% 0

respondents were planning to increase their investment in GIS technologies.

“There is still a limited understanding of how GIS really creates business advantages,” said SSSI president Gary Maguire, who sees a “vibrant future for the profession.”

“The study highlights the importance of geospatial professionals and their knowledge, experience and understanding of emerging trends for locationbased technology. Local government administrators understand the power of location, but many still cannot put an enterprise location-based solution together as part of a total business platform.”

That lack of complete integration was not hindering usage of the systems for specific business purposes, however: 97% of respondents were using GIS systems for asset management, 94% for planning and analysis, 89% for customer service, and 71% for emergency management.

As with many other parts of the IT industry, mobile and cloud technologies had expanded the ways that users were accessing GIS systems: 12% said they were already utilising cloud-based GIS systems and 54% were accessing GIS data via mobile – creating significant new access channels for technology that had long been constrained to desktop and server deployments inside the organisation.

8% OTHER 0

20

40

60

80

100

GIS technology is widely used in local governments for specific tasks, but many councils are still working on bridging the IT-business divide. Source: SSSI/Esri Australia

Labor won’t stuff NBN pipeline as election poison pill: Conroy Labor will not take a poison-pill approach by pushing NBN Co to artificially accelerate the awarding of construction contracts in the leadup to the September 14 election, communications minister Stephen Conroy has pledged.

Speaking with GTR on the NBN’s status and the party’s evolving e-government platform, Conroy dismissed suggestions that, fearing a widely-tipped Coalition election win, Labor would award larger and longer construction contracts to ensure as much of its fibre-to-thepremise (FttP) network would be deployed even well into any Coalition government’s term.

“NBN Co have taken a very responsible, business-like approach to the NBN, and have behaved properly when it comes to contracts,” Conroy told GTR. “There could be no business justification for having contracts that lock you in for ten or even five years in the construction industry.”

Malcolm Turnbull, opposition spokesperson on broadband and communications, has committed the incoming Coalition to honouring NBN contracts that are already in place, should the party be elected in September. Turnbull launched his party’s long-awaited alternative NBN policy this week, advocating for a $29.5 billion project that would primarily capitalise upon existing infrastructure.

NBN Co’s contract management practices came under fire recently after NBN Co was recently forced to revise downward its projections on network completion, from 286,000 premises to around 155,000 premises, in the wake of revelations that subcontractors had been unable or unwilling to invest in training enough staff to complete the work.

Investigations by the Australian Financial Review revealed an “increasingly bitter relationship between NBN Co and its contractors, amid rising concerns about labour and skills shortages.”

Issues with all of NBN Co’s major contractors were arising because they were paying low rates to workers that were reluctant to commit to piecemeal work; at the same time, the reports suggest, contractors were reluctant to commit to extensive training investments for short-term contracts.

Although he conceded that it would not be “appropriate” for NBN Co to sign major new contracts during the caretaker period – between when Parliament is dissolved and the election happens – Conroy remained adamant that NBN Co would continue to focus on commercially sensible terms of engagement during months of business-as-usual in the leadup to the election.

Stephen Conroy

“These are serious and credible business people on the NBN Co board,” he told GTR. “They have not and will not engage in [poison-pill] behaviour. They’ll continue their build because that’s what their mandate is, until they’re given an alternate instruction by a government – whether it’s a successfully elected [Labor] government or a newly elected [Coalition] government.”

Despite cloud hype, most CIOs still doing IT inhouse For all the discussion about new technologies and the way cloud-delivered services will revolutionise businesses and government agencies, most companies are still pursuing “prosaic” in-house IT strategies, an Ovum government analyst has advised.

Polling of 63 CIOs, all of whom attended Ovum’s recent CIO Strategy Summit, found that 74% of ICT activities are currently provided primarily by an inhouse ICT department.

Shared-services arrangements accounted for around 9% of ICT activities, while outsourced arrangements comprised 13% of activities.

Only 4% of ICT activities were being sourced as cloud services – primarily softwareas-a-service (SaaS) applications.

The findings were surprising given the level of attention given to cloud services in recent years, but reflect the very different reality that many CIOs are still living every day, Ovum Asia-Pacific IT research director Steve Hodgkinson said in a statement.

“These results reveal a rather prosaic focus on traditional in-house IT operations,” he explained.

“ICThe reality for this group of CIOs is that ICT management is still about managing the people, processes, and technologies of the in-house ICT department. It is therefore not surprising that a shortage of people and skills was regarded by CIOs as one of their major challenges.”

There were indications the cloud model will start to ramp up more in the near future, however: outsouring and cloud services were

projected to account for one-third of overall ICT activities in the next year or two, while cloudbased data centre and application services will increase to account for more than 15% of the ICT mix within a few years.

To accommodate this change, Hodgkinson recommends that those CIOs still relying primarily on in-house ICT should already be looking for skilled staff to support an expansion of cloud-computing capabilities into the future.

“New mindsets and skills are required, particularly for counterparty risk management and systems integration,” he explained, “and these skills can only be learned with hands-on experience. It’s really all about organisational learning and agile thinking.”

GTR JUNE 2013 | 7

Regional IT execs anticipate APAC data centre expansion Consolidation of IT infrastructure may be allowing data centre tenants to get by with less floor space, but growing overall demand for data centre floor space will continue to drive Australian companies’ data centre investments across the Asia-Pacific region, a new survey has found.

Fully 83% of respondents to Digital Realty’s latest Asia Pacific Data Centre Demand Survey said they would expand their data centres this year or in 2014, with increased security most commonly named as the reason for the expansion.

The need for greater security outpaced disaster recovery, which was the second mostfrequently named reason for data centre expansion.

Accessibility was also seen as important, with two-thirds of respondents preferring a data centre located in the country where they work.

Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney were the most commonly named cities for

data-centre location, which reflects the broad makeup of the survey – conducted for Digital Realty in January by Campos Research & Analysis, and including 401 IT decision makers across the four countries.

Respondents suggested that while their power needs remained constant – an average of 5.0 kW per rack compared with 5.1 kW per rack a year ago – they were requiring approximately 10% less floor space on average: 13,300 ft2 (1235 m2) on average this year, compared with 14800 ft2 (1375 m2) last year.

These figures confirm a trend towards higher-density computing power, with moreefficient systems able to support increased computing loads at similar power draws.

The Australian results of the survey suggested a local market that in which consolidation was ahead of the average, with 68% of companies having built a new data

centre in the past 24 months, 78% planning to expand their facilities in 2013 and 29% planning to expand in 2014. Of those, 58% will expand in more than one location.

Average raised floor space in Australia was 12,300 square feet, with 68% of respondents reporting average raised floor space greater than 10,000 ft2 and an average target of 12,900 ft2 among those wanting to expand their data centres.

To read the rest of this story, visit bit.ly/11Hcnp1.

ICT inaction risks e-government disaster: AIIA The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) must take a proactive role in monitoring government bodies’ use of technology in order to stimulate the innovative, value-added government ICT initiatives that are currently failing to take hold in Australia, Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) deputy chair Andrew Stevens said in helping launch the organisation’s SmartICT Election Platform.

Noting that ABS statistics on the use of technology were lacking, Stevens said the need to more actively benchmark Australian government institutions had grown from a lack of innovation around the use of ICT in government, which had contributed to Australia’s steady fall down the World Economic Forum’s ICTadoption leaderboard in comparison to its major economic and regional peers.

“Finland, Singapore, Sweden… the United States, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong all rank higher than us for their readiness for the digital economy,” said Stevens, who is also managing director for IBM Australia & New Zealand. “If we are to pull ahead as a digital nation, then we need solid data to inform our decisions.

8 | GTR JUNE 2013

“We need to retool our economy, root and branch – and we must face the fact that we’re punching below our weight in the digital arena. If Australia wants to maintain its relative prosperity to the world, then it’s time for government and business to act. There is no time to lose.”

The AIIA’s push for better data is one of six key elements in its SmartICT Election Policy, which represents the peak ICT industry body’s wish list for whichever government should come to power after the September 14 election. These include: 1. Shifting the focus to driving take up and use of our national broadband infrastructure, with a particular focus on Government use of SmartICT; 2. Stimulating growth and innovation by ICT start-ups and small business; 3. Motivating small and medium sized enterprises to improve their productivity by ‘getting online’ and becoming digitally capable; 4. Addressing the ICT skills shortage; 5. Growing our ICT capability through improved research and development (R&D)

capability and capacity and forging better links between research and industry; and 6. Acknowledging the ‘value’ of the digital economy by tracking and measuring its performance.

“The economic impact of digitisation accelerates as countries move to more advanced stages of digitisation,” AIIA CEO Suzanne Campbell, who was also flanked

by AIIA chair and entrepreneur Kee Wong, said at the launch. “Those countries that are digitally constrained, even with the presence of broadband infrastructure, receive less benefit.”

“The reason for this is largely because they have yet to establish the ecosystem to capitalise on the benefits of smart ICT,” Campbell added, “and it’s exactly this point that underpins the SmartICT Election Platform. If we’re really, genuinely serious about building the ICT capability and capacity to be relevant and competitive in a global digital world, then the ecosystem that supports that outcome must be in place.”

“It’s time the government – and, indeed, all of us – took ICT seriously.”

s ocial media

Learning the art of social etiquette SOMETIMES IT TAKES A MAJOR EVENT TO DRIVE A SHIFT IN AN ORGANISATION’S BEHAVIOUR. FOR TOWNSVILLE CITY COUNCIL, THAT EVENT WAS A CATEGORY 5 CYCLONE, AND THE RESULT WAS A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY THAT IS THE ENVY OF MANY COUNCILS AROUND AUSTRALIA. Story by BRAD HOWARTH

10 | GTR JUNE 2013

T

ownsville’s web content officer Bree Milkovic wasn’t working for the council at the time Cyclone Yasi made landfall in early February 2011. But like many residents she kept a close eye on the social media updates that the council was issuing.

Council had only adopted social media in the days leading up to the event, spurred by success in Brisbane and other locations in using that medium to update the public. She says Townsville’s goal was to ensure that residents could access to and spread accurate information “There were a lot of problems with misinformation,” Milkovic says. “We had images circulated of The Strand that were Photoshopped, and people who were making incorrect statements. Council was able to come in, set the scene and myth-bust, and make sure

the community was able to remain calm and not reacting to any of the very explosive comments that were out there.�

While councils and emergency organisations alike have learned the power or Facebook and Twitter for disseminating the truth in a crisis, Townsville City Council went on to embed social media into its overall communications strategy.

Realising that people wanted to engage through those channels, it created social media accounts for different functions such as events, libraries, galleries, and of course, disaster management.

One of its greatest successes was a Twitterbased promotional campaign called Townsville Shines, which ran in conjunction with the annual V8 Supercar races in 2012. Council recruited residents, racing drivers and celebrities and encouraged them to tweet using the hashtag

#townsvilleshines. The hashtag was used more than 1 million times by 250,000 people over the three weeks of the campaign. “It was a really great way for us to create a mini sales force for Townsville, but also a way for our residents and community to blow their own horn and talk about why they love our city,�

Milkovic says.

Different governments and government agencies are finding different reasons to embrace social media, but slowly and surely they are doing so. While some Federal politicians have gone mad for Twitter, it has actually been local government that has embraced it, Facebook and other tools most openly.

According to an Australian Centre of Excellence for Local Government national online survey undertaken during October 2011, 68.6

GTR JUNE 2013 | 11

s ocial media

CURRENT USE OF WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGIES 10%

BLOGS

Local governments are using a variety

32%

INTELLIGENT MAPS

of social-media channels to improve communications with citizens.

9%

RSS FEEDS

Source: The 2013 Esri GIS in Local

28%

SMART PHONE APPS

Government Benchmark Study.

17%

SMS

53%

SOCIAL MEDIA

14%

NONE OF THE ABOVE

3%

OTHER 0

20

per cent of the 235 respondents reported using some kind of social media tool, with the highest percentage (41.2 per cent) using Twitter.

That Twitter had only been launched five years earlier points to a very rapid uptake and the possibility of a much higher usage amongst councils today, especially as a 2012 UK survey of 78 councils found that 97 per cent were using Twitter (further information can be found in Anne Howard’s ground-breaking report Connecting with Communities, published in August 2012 and available at bit.ly/POOJh6).

Their path to embracing social media can vary widely, however. One of the key motivations is to align social media with councils’ prerogative to consult with its constituencies – but, according to the International Association for Public Participation’s executive director for Australasia, Michelle Blicavs, many are not sure how to best make use of it.

40

60

“They are struggling to understand what it all means and how they should react, what they should post and what they should respond to,” Blicavs says. “If someone tweets ‘this is terrible’ does that constitute a submission? And because they could get hundreds of those, how does that contribute?”

Social-media champions Often she says it comes down to having the right person in the right place for social media to catch on.

For the City of Marion in South Australia, that right person was Councillor David Speirs. As the City’s youngest councillor, Speirs had grown up as part of the Facebook generation. While he concedes social media did little to get him elected in 2010, since then he has worked hard to create a presence across Twitter and Facebook, posting three to four times a day. He was also a driving force behind

80

Marion’s social media strategy, which was enacted a year ago.

Speirs believes he has dispelled some of the fears regarding social media, and has even run training for other councillors.

“A lot of the risk that people talk about is not founded on anything other than rumour and perception,” he says. “But to overcome that initial hurdle that the world’s going to fall apart as we go on to social media in a political environment, you do need to have someone who is part of that political executive driving it.”

While it is early days for Marion, other councils have strongly embraced social media from an engagement perspective. Victoria’s Frankston City Council, for one, began its social media journey two years ago.

“Our community engagement was already quite robust,” says Emma Smith, Council’s media and communications coordinator,

While some Federal politicians have gone mad for Twitter, it has actually been local government that has embraced it, Facebook and other tools most openly.

12 | GTR JUNE 2013

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s ocial media

Social media…. is where people are. And what’s constraining [councils] right now is Draconian social media policies, a limited understanding from the top, and not enough budget to build in the capabilities in-house to harness and really use what’s already there.

“but we realised that there was this untapped demographic that might have been time poor, working outside of the municipality, and wanting to engage with us using social media.”

Strategies were developed for departments such as the Frankston Arts Centre, the visitor information centre and the libraries, but it was soon apparent that residents wanted similar engagement around topics such as roads, rates and rubbish.

Smith says Council conducted a comprehensive consultation with staff, executives and councillors, which led to the creation of a corporate Facebook and Twitter account, as well as the creation of Frankston TV to promote the region on YouTube. She says the whole process has been handled with great professionalism.

14 | GTR JUNE 2013

“Over the last 12 months we’ve made sure that our back end is in order by putting some robust social media guidelines together that have been legally checked off, and put together a staff toolkit,” Smith says. “Council is a big organisation so we have to make sure that there is a corporate way off doing things, but that each area of Council has a social media feed that best suits its audience.”

Social media has also been embraced at a HR level, with requirements embedded it into Council’s induction process and code of conduct, along with training and even some personal development programs.

And, Smith says, it is being led from the top: “Our CEO is leading the charge in communicating with staff on a regular basis and saying that social media is an official extension of our communications and an official way of communicating with our residents and businesses.”

Smith says customer service staff that normally engage through a front desk, telephone or via email can also respond to queries fielded through social media, which has also been used to extend the reach of council activities, such as live-tweeting of events including a review of the vision for the community.

“We were able to in real time communicate with residents that couldn’t physically attend by connecting with us on Facebook and Twitter that day, and found that it was such a comprehensive, robust way to communicate,” she says.

Social media ROI As with most social media implementations, the economic justification supporting social media at Frankston remains elusive, particularly given the investment of time that it requires. Smith says that one of social media’s benefits, however, is that it is highly measurable – enabling her to provide reports back to councillors on metrics such as likes, followers and reach.

“We think that is working very well,” Smith says. “Versus the cost of an ad in the paper, versus the cost of a PR campaign, you can justify the spend that way.”

The desire for governments of all shapes and sizes to engage through social media has created an opportunity for service providers. For example, Wholesome Media’s co-founder Keren Flavell says her company’s TownHall product is designed to increase the quality and quantity of engagement through Facebook, with features

David Speirs

Frankston foreshore

such as a voting application that can record a voter’s age, sex and location.

“The communications teams and the planning teams are starting to realise that social media permeates everything they do,” Flavell says. “It is where people are. And what’s constraining them right now is Draconian social media policies, a limited understanding from the top, and not enough budget to build in the capabilities in-house to harness and really use what’s already there.”

Flavell says there is a very big difference in social media between being liked by a constituency and being engaged with it. She cites the City of San Francisco, which has more than 267,000 likes on Facebook. However, when last investigated by Flavell, there were only three people talking about it.

“So there was no engagement,” Flavell says. “The Facebook page was set up by the IT department, and not the engagement team.”

TownHall has been implemented by Moreland City Council in Victoria. Flavell says it has lifted engagement on Moreland’s Facebook page by 2000 per cent, but it is not the only tool that Moreland is using to improve engagement.

Six months ago it hired former ABC news and current affairs head Marco Bass as manager of marketing and communications. Bass immediately kitted the City out with $20,000 in video equipment and began creating content for YouTube.

Moreland’s YouTube channel now features 36 videos, which Bass says have been exceptional for driving engagement, including a recent video relating to consultation over use of CCTV in the community. The campaign directed citizens to a voting page, which attracted a statisticallysignificant 550 votes, and has encouraged Bass not to hold back in using social tools.

“The community that is only communicating and interacting in social media is growing rapidly,” Bass says. “No government organisation can afford not to be there in an effective and compelling way.”

As the first rollout site for the NBN on mainland Australia, Moreland has also received assistance from the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy to implement video as a customer service tool. Bass says this fits well with Council’s YouTube strategy.

“Video is the preferred medium for this age,” Bass says. “People don’t want to read documents.

They want to be given a digestible message that

they can sit and watch for about 5 minutes. Go any longer than that and you’ve probably lost them. And if you can’t make it, you’ve got to learn how to.”

But of course it is not just local governments that are jumping on to social media. Almost any government agency that is tasked with engaging with an audience seems to be at least considering it.

The Parliament of Victoria, for instance, has a mission to support the operations of the Parliament, and as such has investigated how to use social media to that end.

Clerk of the Parliament and of the Legislative Assembly Ray Purdey says that with the help of Wholesome Media, that has translated into the creation of three YouTube videos and two Twitter feeds to alert followers of key events and happenings in both houses.

“This isn’t involving ourselves in politics, this is just about providing the public with information about what is happening in and around Parliament,” Purdey says. “And our feedback so far has been good.”

That feedback has come from journalists and parliamentarians to the general public, and has encouraged the Parliament to look at setting up its own Facebook presence.

GTR JUNE 2013 | 15

s ocial media

“The community that is only communicating and interacting in social media is growing rapidly.

No government organisation can afford not to be there in an effective and compelling way.”

16 | GTR JUNE 2013

gov.au website hosts a range of social media tools for two-way engagement with business owners and operators, and is witnessing a steady increase in interaction.

“One of the ways social media is proving to be effective is by assisting business to find compliance information and interpreting how it relates to their business,” the spokesperson said, adding that in the last month Business Victoria has tweeted information 101 times, received 685 click-throughs and 118 re-tweets.

Ultimately, however, the effectiveness of social media as a mechanism for engagement will always be constrained by a government’s willingness to actually engage in consultation.

The director for coordination and Web 2.0 within the Federal Department of Finance and Deregulation, Pia Waugh, has had extensive experience with online consultative projects through the various PublicSphere events conducted in recent years, which were intended as a way of Australians to contribute to policy development.

Waugh says such online engagement can bring a number of new elements to policy development, such as peer review. “As ideas come up you have a community of people, who can give you feedback on those ideas in an open and transparent way,” she says. “And by having that feedback happen openly in the public, you can have a slightly more rational debate, as you don’t just have the people who are most motivated to get involved.”

But she says a ‘build it and they will come’ approach is not enough to ensure the best outcomes.

“The core thing is to identify where those people are, where the communications and conversations are already happening, and tap into those,” Waugh says. “Any government

communication really needs to have a community manager role as part of their planning so they ensure they get that kind of engagement and outreach.”

For local government however, the path to online social engagement continues to be walked one step at a time. In Townsville, success across various departments means that next step will be the creation of a Council-wide Facebook page.

“We have been really looking at engaging people in our programs and events, and getting them involved in what Council does,” says Milkovic. “We are really conscious that we need to be playing in the space where our residents and primary customers already are, and expecting them to come to a website and fill out a survey is [unproductive] when you can go to them.”

“It is a competitive environment now to get your message out – so if we can get people engaging with us on Facebook in conjunction with the rest of our marketing channels, then it’s been a big success.”

Michelle Blicavs

At a State level, enthusiasm for social media is very much centred on those portfolios where the desire for engagement is highest. Often that is in Planning.

In NSW, for instance, the Department of Planning and Infrastructure has employed the use of various social media tools including Twitter, YouTube and online discussion forums to explain, promote and seek feedback on the Government’s Planning White Paper.

While uptake is modest, with 50 planningrelated tweets issued since April 16 with 100 re-tweets, it has also had more than 1000 views of its two YouTube videos.

According to Trish Oakley, the department’s executive director for community and stakeholder engagement, social mediums by their nature foster a feeling of collaboration, openness and transparency, which reflects the Department’s own communication and engagement aims.

“While the public is not able to make formal submissions on the White Paper through Twitter and the Have Your Say website, comments expressed on the sites will be considered by the Department when finalising the report,” Oakley says.

Along with the promotion of the White Paper, the Department also uses its @NSWPlanning Twitter account to promote media releases, events and department news.

Separately, it operates the Twitter profile @PlanSydney to support the Government’s Metropolitan Strategy.

In Victoria, the Department of State Development, Business and Innovation is driving change and use of new digital channels across the Victorian Government. A departmental spokesperson for the Strategic Communications Branch says the business.vic.

s tate ICT

STATE ICT POLICIES ARE THE NEW BLACK Story by DAVID BRAUE

R

ecent changes of government in many Australian states have, naturally, driven reviews of spend and strategy around state-level ICT. With the release in recent months of written ICT strategies in three different states, however, the impetus for strategic reform has gained real ground – but will it deliver?

That’s the question on the lips of state ICT ministers in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria, all of which have developed and launched ICT action plans within the past year.

All three policies are replete with motherhood statements about driving ICT-enabled change through government, and lay out a vision for how the respective governments envision the use of ICT will transform lives in their states.

All have a number of common themes.

“Whether it’s improving services, focusing more online, or mobile services, or making data

open, or sharing or leveraging infrastructure, or collaboration across departments – there are a lot of common themes across those three strategies,” says Suzanne Campbell, CEO of peak ICT industry group the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).

“Their alignment is about the quite compelling need to improve services to citizens, and to deliver with more efficiency and effectiveness, and high levels of transparency.

External data tell us there’s a real urgent need to get on with this, so the common themes across those three strategies are really good.”

Common themes The AIIA – which recently launched its own SmartICT Election Platform (bit.ly/YfZXAc) with a call for government consensus around broadband, growth stimulus, skills and other areas – has worked in close consultation with

several state governments to nut out the details of their plans, which were launched to packed houses at AIIA functions around the country.

The SA policy, called SA Connected (bit.ly/10149C4), was launched for public consultation in March after extensive consultation and highlights the opportunities for ICT-enabled programs to improve the lives of South Australians.

SA Connected’s tenets are aligned along five main goals: serving people, securing resilience, improving delivery, working together, and innovating now.

Broad objectives outlined in the SA policy include a transition to a ‘digital by default’ posture; custodianship rather than ownership of information; creation of resilient communities with perimeter protections and security as a profession; integrated governance; a shift from big ICT projects to “big plans, small projects”;

GTR JUNE 2013 | 17

state ICT

a move from buying hardware or software to buying services; and procedural changes such as a move from big monolithic projects to rapid prototyping, and a posture in which agencies share first rather than competing for resources.

Victoria’s strategy (www.vic.gov.au/ ictstrategy) sets out eight key principles to guide ICT decision-making: the use of popular digital channels; sharing of open information; co-design and co-production of policy and service delivery programs; staging of ICT projects, with a focus on risk management and business benefits delivery; promotion of competition to boost efficiency and innovation; leveraging of industry capabilities; design of interoperable, modular and reusable ICT systems; and the trialling and adoption of technology to promote better outcomes.

a similar approach by outlining priority actions including the ‘one-stop shop’ Service NSW; open government and open data initiatives; infrastructure and managed services; procurement reform; managing information for better services; and ICT skills and innovation.

The strategy “sets out the first steps in bringing the NSW government up to date in how it uses ICT in order to enable the public service to deliver better services to the people of NSW,” NSW government CIO Michael Coutts-Trotter wrote in the policy’s introduction.

Many of its goals could deliver significant change: Campbell highlighted the value of ambitious early NSW deliverables including the Service NSW model and a simplified procurement model for SMEs, both major

be seen in terms of the people that launched the policies, Campbell pointed out. In NSW, the policy was launched by Greg Pearce, Minister for Finance and Services, while in Victoria it was launched by Gordon-Phillips, who is also the state’s Assistant Treasurer; in SA, however, the policy was launched by Premier Jay Weatherill.

The choice of the premier to launch the policy confirms a “hands-on approach from the Premier, and that gives them the chance to drive a whole of government outcome,” Campbell said. “Because the change in South Australia is genuinely transformational, you really have to have that level of authority – and the confidence that what you’re doing is correct.”

AGIMO maintains a range of whole-ofgovernment ICT policies (bit.ly/12qGFaA), but

Notable stragglers in the ICT-policy stakes include Queensland – which is still working through the myriad implications of its Queensland Health payroll-systems disaster – and Western Australia, which not only doesn’t have an ICT strategy but doesn’t even have a minister with explicit ICT responsibilities.

The strategy also outlines 50 key deliverables, which are to be implemented by December 2014 under the guidance of Grantly Mailes, who was recently appointed as Victoria’s chief technology advocate (see interview, p19) with a remit to deliver on the strategy.

The NSW government previously set out four key principles around its ICT execution: senior leadership support, through the establishment of a multi-departmental ICT Board; strategic industry engagement, with an ICT Advisory Panel uniting industry leaders from the private sector and research communities; service delivery, with collaborative industry and government Working Groups set up to prioritise goals; and a portfolio management approach, which is designed to reduce duplication and improve productivity.

Launched last year, the NSW Government ICT Strategy 2012 (bit.ly/10gUUgI) takes

18 | GTR JUNE 2013

initiatives that reflects the growing momentum in that state’s ICT execution.

SA’s “digital by default” posture was also appealing, Campbell says, because “it puts digital right there at the front of the process”.

In Victoria, on the other hand, “the language is about co-production of public services, which I think is really interesting language,” she says. “It underscores [ICT minister Gordon Rich-Phillips] commitment to working with industry.”

“Their public-facing project status dashboard, which they’ve committed to launching by the end of the year, is another really good example of the commitment to doing things differently. It’s not completely new from a global perspective, but it’s a new and exciting development here in Australia.”

Another important aspect of the momentum behind the ICT policy pronouncements could

other jurisdictions have yet to get onboard with formal ICT strategies.

Notable stragglers in the ICT-policy stakes include Queensland – which is still working through the myriad implications of its Queensland Health payroll-systems disaster – and Western Australia, which not only doesn’t have an ICT strategy but doesn’t even have a minister with explicit ICT responsibilities.

Whether those states will be spurred to action by the recent policy releases, Campbell won’t say. “I don’t get a strong sense people are doing things just because they see other people doing it,” she offers.

“They will do things because they see a genuine need. Yet in many places, we as an industry haven’t been clear enough in communicating that [key economic drivers] are actually powered by ICT – so there is an opportunity for us to do better.”

i nternet

GRANTLY MAILES: TURNING AROUND VICTORIA’S ICT environment. We have a quite different set of circumstances and opportunities to improve.”

Those opportunities are emerging as Mailes helps direct the state’s ICT specialists through the state government’s wish-list of ICT priorities. The recent launch of an overhauled vic.gov.au whole-of-government portal reflected one significant step forward, while a review of the state’s decade-old telecommunications procurement practices will fuel development of the VicConnect strategy.

Improved efficiencies in service delivery will be a key part of Mailes’ tenure, he suggested, noting that governments already spend far too much effort collecting data from citizens on paper forms, then transferring it into digital systems. A better-integrated system would collect online information, then automatically move it through various government agencies based on the outcome desired.

“We’re trying to use the disruptive capabilities of new technologies to look at our problems differently,” he explains. “Collecting information from forms is an expensive process, and we’re thinking through this – not just so much as how do we get a key performance platform, but what are the better ways we can

I want to look at the strategy in two years’ time and see some important changes to the way ICT projects are run. I see us, as a government, improving the capability of our own ICT workforce….[and] in a position to deliver services better to citizens.

capture data from citizens? We’re on that journey and I don’t know where that’s taking us.”

He’ll have plenty of chances to find out: as if to show how deadly serious the state government is about its strategy, the Napthine government’s recent state budget allocated an additional $19m over four years towards the implementation of the state strategy, including efforts to grow Victorian companies and improve ICT project management.

That Mailes will have strong top-down support for his efforts is reflected in the nature of his title: even though he has worn the ‘CIO’ hat before, Mailes’ appointment as chief technology advocate reflects a new way of thinking about ICT within the current government.

“It’s an important distinction,” Mailes explains. “CIOs almost have a connotation of intervention, but the Westminster system of government means they can’t intervene.

‘Advocate’ implies the use of technology as an enabler for change and technology improvement.

I’ve found in my career that it’s better to create policy that is easier to follow than to reject.”

Grantly Mailes

G

rantly Mailes’ March appointment as Victoria’s first Chief Technology Advocates isn’t the first time he’s been charged with driving massive change across an entire government: as CIO of the state of South Australia from 2005-2008, he’s been there and done that.

This time around, however, Mailes, who is also deputy secretary at Victoria’s Department of State Development, Business and Innovation and chaired the Victorian ICT Advisory Committee (VICTAC) that led the development of the ICT strategy, believes the broader range of technology options available to governments will make his overriding mission – to implement the 50 action points of the Victorian Government ICT Strategy by the end of 2014 – a completely different kind of exercise.

“South Australia has its own distinct challenges, and those were different to what we have in Victoria,” he told GTR. “The ICT direction talks to governance, project management, and different ways of delivering these projects using delivery possibilities like the cloud and things-as-a-service. Those possibilities weren’t open to us in South Australia; we were still in the traditional software-ownership hosting

GTR JUNE 2013 | 19

c ustomer Service

e-gov 2.0

It’s all about the service T hey may talk in broad tones about improving service to citizens – but behind the scenes, all three levels of government in Australia are working hard to instil a customer centric model and replace an organisation-wide mentality that

20 | GTR JUNE 2013

the people accessing their services are not just constituents, but customers.

It’s not always easy: “Staff would often say they had to ‘deal’ with a customer,” City of South Perth financial and information services director Michael Kent recalls. “They were uncomfortable.”

Government agencies in Australia are facing the challenge of providing multichannel strategic e-services for citizens whilst grappling with disparate technology systems.

Story by KELLY MILLS

Support from the executive group, he adds, was vital in moving the whole organisation, not just front counter staff, towards a customer service objective.

Hobsons Bay Council customer service manager Suzanne Patterson believes while local government is more customer focused and customer centric than other levels of government, the shift in mindset to viewing constituents as customers was still in flux.

“I think we have been moving towards being more customer focused in recent years,” she says. “For example, staff in the customer service area used to be called residence service

“Local government is traditionally quite good at following up requests but poor at giving information to customers about what happens next. We will be able to intervene on issues before they get toxic.”

Michael Kent

officers, but now they are called customer service officers.”

Dr Catriona Wallace, director at research group Fifth Quadrant, believes government’s interaction with customers is more “tactical than strategic”.

“They lack the knowledge and do not have a true customer strategy,” she explains. “Their existing systems are antiquated; to obtain a single view of customers is increasingly difficult to do.”

She says Australian government agencies have been slow at looking at international best practice due to the large amount of money needed to invest in customer relationship management (CRM) platforms.

“They need to spend millions or billions on technology investment to move forward: if you look at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, they have spent around $1.5 billion on their customer service strategy.”

Wallace believes rather than spending money on reengineering CRM systems, government agencies should be investing in data analytics.

“Traditionally it takes a lot of work to standardise CRM systems,” she says. “This is a big technology consideration for government.

Government is best suited to using analytics as they have massive amounts of unstructured data, so would benefit from the approach.”

– Michael Kent, City of South Perth Wallace says investing in the new world of analytics would give government a step change to understanding customer services.

Opening new channels Nevertheless, despite the major technology challenges of integrating core technology systems, some government agencies are successfully moving towards customer centric models and investing in CRM systems that are starting to deliver massive benefits to voters.

City of South Perth’s Kent says CRM has been used in local government for many years, but have not been able to deliver until recently: “Vendor solutions simply weren’t sophisticated enough to do that.”

Following the deployment of Kana’s Lagan CRM software (see case study), Kent says his agency is now able to look at the digital citizen opportunity.

The implementation of the next phase – web and mobile apps – will enhance City of South Perth’s multi-channel customer service approach, streamline workflow and provide residents with greater levels of service. The new mobile application for managing enquiries allows local residents to report and track issues anywhere, 24x7.

Over at Hobsons Bay City Council, Patterson is hoping to use its deployment of

Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Centre contact centre software to utilise webbased communication channels such as web chat.

“It is all set to go, and we are waiting to launch,” Patterson says.

Video conferencing with customers is also on the agenda, possibly utilising the Council’s five libraries: “If it is not convenient for staff to come to our office maybe they could go to a library and use video conferencing to talk to customer service.”

Expanded channels According to a Fifth Quadrant study ‘Emerging Consumer Channels: Social Media, Web Chat and Smartphone Apps’, published in April 2013, the use of contact channels such as social media, web chat and smartphone apps are expected to increase over the next 12 months.

Web chat is anticipated to have the highest usage increase overall (43 percent), Fifth Quadrant found.

“There is an impression that a faster response can be achieved by using this channel and it offers ease, convenience and effective resolution of queries,” the report says.

Software company Kana uncovered similar findings in a study of 34 local governments in Australia.

HOW GOVERNMENT CONNECTS WITH CUSTOMERS Surveys suggest that 67 percent of Australian government agencies have implemented CRM technologies (compared to 80 per cent of organisations in the wider Australian industry) The majority of CRM using Australian government agencies have implemented CRM technology on-premise, with uptake of hosted (4 per cent) or cloud (4 per cent) solution at about half the rate seen in the wider industry (11 per cent and 8 per cent respectively)

One third of Australian government agencies have implemented social media as a customer service channel (compared to 31 percent of organisations in the wider Australian industry) Seventeen percent of Australian government agencies have implemented social media monitoring technology (compared to 28 percent of organisations in the wider Australian industry) (Source: Fifth Quadrant 2013 Australian Customer Service Industry Benchmarking Report, April 2013)

Suzanne Patterson

c ustomer Service [Government agencies] lack the knowledge and do not have a true customer strategy.

Their existing systems are antiquated; to obtain a single view of customers is increasingly difficult to do…There is poor effort by many general agencies, in part as they have a major issue in resourcing the channel. It can take them an hour of work to answer each query.

Catriona Wallace

The Trends in Resident Communication in Australia’s Local Government study, conducted in March of this year, identified the key platforms being used to deliver services to citizens.

Fifty-three per cent of respondents believe that improving customer service through multi channel delivery capabilities is the top priority over the next 18 months.

Nevertheless the study found 66 per cent of respondents still use traditional methods to deliver services to customers. Facebook is utilised by 12 per cent of respondents, mobile 8 per cent and Twitter just 5 per cent.

According to study participants, the technologies most likely to change the game in the year ahead will be online self-service (48 per cent), social media (26 per cent) and mobile apps (22 per cent).

Choose the right staff Hobsons Bay City Council’s Patterson says the agency’s foray into e-services has been driven by customer need.

“In the customer service area, we have dedicated online staff,” she says. “It makes sense as many people don’t have the time to pick up the phone.”

She says the same business rules apply for inbox communications as over the phone.

– Catriona Wallace, Fifth Quadrant

“We have business rules but it is really about selecting the right staff with the right mindset.

We have young women in our online customer service team who understand the urgency of those communications.”

She adds that the Council’s various Facebook pages “created themselves”.

“There are problems if people decide to use it for a public debate, but it is a public forum.

People are able to get on and have a whinge, we try not to monitor the dialogue.”

Fifth Quadrant’s Wallace believes government agencies in Australia lack the “awareness and knowledge” to operate high-risk strategic channels such as Facebook.

“Social media needs to be part of a broader multi-channel strategy,” she explains. “Every new channel opened results in a 10 percent increase in calls to the call centre.”

Wallace believes this is the heart of the problem of government’s venture into social media.

“There is poor effort by many general agencies, in part as they have a major issue in resourcing the channel,” she explains. “It can take them an hour of work to answer each query.”

“There have been pockets of good and poor implementations, but government has not

City of South Perth financial and information services director Michael Kent highlights several hurdles to a successful CRM deployment: • Good staff buy-in – be aware that the project requires a significant communications effort • Roll out the system with someone who understands the business processes you are trying to automate • Do not over complicate things • CRM projects are a big commitment and need to be viewed as that. Good resourcing and communications with staff and executive and a collaborative partnership with the vendor is essential.

22 | GTR JUNE 2013

well understood the implementation of social media which has mainly been around Twitter and Facebook.”

Government agencies often make the mistake of providing a platform with the aim of controlling it and communicating the way they want to – however, Wallace adds, customers want to communicate however they want to.

Government can make CRM work Despite the issue of legacy systems, Wallace still believes government organisations can make CRM work and are at a distinct advantage if they can get social media, mobility and digital right.

“But first government agencies need to get their websites sorted out so they advantage citizens,” she says. “They need to be easy to navigate, and can use social media and mobility to support this.”

Wallace cites work done by the Queensland State Government, the Australian Taxation Office and the Department of Human Services as being leading edge in the customer service area.

Also outstanding are emergency services such as Rural Fire, Queensland Police and the Northern Territory Police, she adds, “as they are focused on the need for good communication.”

On the other hand, the NSW and Victorian State Governments are very much in catch up mode.

For its part, the NSW state government, through its Services NSW agency, is looking to rationalise thousands of contact points customers reach out to government through, and to update the way in which citizens access services.

“Looking forward the big goal of government is around mobility,” Wallace says. “There has been a reasonable investment in social media in the last two to three years – and now there is a three-fold interest in using mobile apps.”

REINVENTING GOVERNMENT CUSTOMER SERVICE Conference 2013 June 25 & 26

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PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS FOR TRANSFORMING GOVERNMENT CUSTOMER SERVICE PROCESSES AND PERFORMANCE The conference will provide the three tiers of government with practical information on key themes including: BEST PRACTICE: Gain insights into best practice in customer service and client relations, including policies and procedures NEW TECHNOLOGIES: Reinvent customer service by using technologies such as social media, CRM software and mobile CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: Manage customer expectations and complaints, and optimise the customer experience DOING MORE WITH LESS: How to improve customer service on a budget

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case Study

MULTI-CHANNEL CUSTOMER SERVICE DRIVES FAIR WORK OMBUDSMAN EFFICIENCY

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mnipresent budget restrictions are forcing government agencies at every level to do more with less.

For the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), the result of those pressures has been to overhaul its contact-centre platform with a multi-channel solution that has modernised its capabilities and improved its employees’ ability to efficiently manage customer enquiries.

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The City of South Perth are tackling the digital citizen opportunity by rolling out mobile solutions that will enable anywhere, anytime access to local government services.

Serving around 45,000 residents, City of South Perth receives over 100,000 customer requests each year.

Prior to the deployment of Kana’s Lagan customer relationship management (CRM) software, the call centre dealt with contact centre or email correspondence through several technology systems.

“We marked up our customer service strategy several years ago, however we didn’t know the solution we would deploy,” City of South Perth financial and information services director Michael Kent says.

“We wanted an integrated system but the technology at the time was not at a usable stage.”

Since the strategy was written in 2006 it has been deployed over a number of phases, including physically changing the structure of the building to accommodate the model.

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After years in which FWO was “really just rolling over and extending contracts rather than looking at the best use of technology going forward,” in 2011 the organisation took the opportunity to revisit its highly siloed customerservice organisation, says Michael Clark, executive director of the Fair Work Infoline within the FWO’s Dispute Resolution and Compliance Group.

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Kent believes while CRM software has been used in local government for many years, it has not been able to deliver until recently.

In August last year the council rolled out its CRM project at a cost of $370,000.

Datacom was the implementation partner. At the centre of the project was the Kana software.

More recently, City of South Perth rolled out the first iteration of its mobile applications.

Since August last year, the system has been operational internally, and staff able to log calls.

Sice February, City of South Perth residents have been able to log their own requests, such as about waste, street trees, signs, roads, graffiti and building maintenance, via a mobile app. “They can see the progress of their request, and that the workflow is working correctly,” Kent adds.

Other capabilities soon to come online include rangers, environmental health and planning.

A MODERNISED, UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONSENABLED CONTACT CENTRE HAS HELPED AUSTRALIA’S PEAK WORKPLACE-RELATIONS AUTHORITY INTEGRATE SOCIAL MEDIA AND OTHER CHANNELS INTO ITS CUSTOMER-SERVICE ENVIRONMENT.

The FWO contact centre handles around 3000 calls per day, with around 800 of those handled through self-service options and the remainder – Web chats, emails, and phone calls – each being handled by different staff. Non-phone contacts comprise around 15% of the call volume, and this percentage has increased steadily over time.

Contact-centre staff were typically trained in managing those specific channels using different

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Kent says the Council’s customer service strategy will reduce follow-up calls from customers and give them greater capacity to view their interaction.

“Local government is traditionally quite good at following up requests but poor at giving information to customers about what happens next,” he says. “We will also be able to intervene on issues before they get toxic.”

Traceability, and giving customers the ability to interact at the time and place of their choosing, were the major deciding factors for the rollout of the mobile app, Kent adds: “It also helps us build our knowledge of our customers, gives us the ability to identify hot topics and resource planning.”

Kent says even in the few short weeks the app has been available there have has been several hundreds of downloads and the number of follow up calls has decreased. “This has given an opportunity for staff to do other value add.”

All hands on deck FWO ultimately decided to transition to a unified customer-service platform from Avaya, which would allow it to manage all of its existing channels and add new ones – in particular, the “significant social media space”, which has become increasingly important as FWO expands across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube channels.

The new platform would integrate these channels with conventional contact-centre capabilities such as call and session recording, quality management, top-down and bottom-up reporting, and integrated workplace planning capabilities.

“It was a real step up for us to be able to improve our efficiency while meeting the needs of customers,” Clark says. “We needed to make sure we were spending the dollars we had wisely, and we expected to not only see real financial savings through the cost of a new solution – but to gain greater efficiencies in the way we were using our most expensive resource: our people.”

By early 2012, FWO had signed with Avaya, and Optus as its implementation partner, to get up and running on the new platform. And while the technology platform was well established, bringing the organisation’s people along for the ride turned out to require particular attention.

Right from the start of the project, the implementation team began running a formal change program that included design workshops that included all involved parties. The goal of those workshops was to work through the new system’s design, understand how it would be implemented, and try to address any issues up front.

“We knew there would be a significant change for our staff,” Clark explains. “We were replacing almost everything they had dealt with within the contact centre: we changed everything from the handsets on their desks, through to the system that provided them with schedules, and their quality and reporting access. It was quite a significant change.”

By involving users throughout the project’s design, implementation and testing,

We were replacing almost everything [staff] had dealt with within the contact centre: we changed everything from the handsets on their desks, through to the system that provided them with schedules, and their quality and reporting access. It was quite a significant change.

expectations were carefully managed and staff were unfazed when the inevitable hiccups saw a few months’ delay in the go-live date for the new contact centre.

Users did run into logistical issues when starting to work across the new multi-channel platform, such as the controls for handling calls on the new phones, but those issues were worked out within a few weeks of go-live and staff were handling customer contacts at full productivity.

Clark was quick to laud the benefits of working with AGIMO through the process: although it originally intended to go to the open market with an RFT, FWO found out about AGIMO’s new Telecommunications Management Panel and realised that focusing its efforts on the panel’s 26 registered suppliers could save it time and energy in evaluating tenders.

The panel “allowed us to target a number of providers who had already signed head agreements with the Australian government, to ensure that we were getting an apples for apples arrangement in terms of cost assessment,” Clark says. “It allowed us to leverage the hard work AGIMO had done to set the panels up, and meant that we went to market with a fairly narrow field that we knew could meet our requirements.”

helps FWO in its staff planning and paves the way for reductions in staffing expenses because it’s no longer necessary to staff each siloed skill set separately.

Better visibility of the organisation’s operations, across all of its channels, has also proven invaluable in helping the organisation understand and plan for client requirements.

“It allows us to get a better view of how our customers are interacting with us, and that has already allowed us to start identifying repeat customers and people who might have different needs,” Clark explains.

“It is helping us think more broadly about how we should differentiate our services, and whether we should differentiate our services to different customers. And, as we start identifying those repeat customers, they’re a target market for us in moving down towards online selfservice functionality. If we can better met their needs in providing better access to content in their own time, that’s beneficial for them and for us.” – David Braue

The benefits of a better view With the new platform in place, FWO has found its contact-centre employees are able to work more efficiently than in the past: “by blending those channels, we’re handling an extra few hundred calls and enquiries a day with no significant change in resourcing.”

More importantly, FWO have been able to expand their skill sets, breaking down the one-channel silos so each employee can handle a broader range of responsibilities. This, in turn,

Michael Clark

applications and procedures, but couldn’t be readily switched between channels. “Previously, we had to quarantine people to phone, chat, or email,” Clark explains, “and we had progressively bolted on different technology for each.”

“That’s useful when you’re starting up and can grow quickly, but it does mean a lot of challenges in the way you operate, forecast, and schedule in the customer-service environment.”

GTR JUNE 2013 | 25

customer service

RDNS: REINVENTING CLIENT CARE WITH VIDEO RDNS HAS BEEN PROVIDING NURSING SERVICES TO HOMEBOUND AUSTRALIANS IN THEIR HOMES FOR YEARS, BUT A NEW CUSTOMERSERVICE INITIATIVE WILL SAVE UNTOLD THOUSANDS OF PHYSICAL TRIPS PER YEAR THANKS TO THE USE OF BROADBAND VIDEO FOR ONGOING CARE. Story by DAVID BRAUE

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here has been so much discussion in recent years about the potential benefits of telehealth that it has become something of an abstraction for most people – a possible, future benefit that might be achieved through the right combination of private investment and government facilitation.

For the Royal District Nursing Service (RDNS), however, telehealth is a here-and-now customer-service reality that is dramatically improving the organisation’s ability to deliver ongoing, daily care to homebound residents – without having to fight traffic to do so.

A number of nurses, working from the 24x7 RDNS customer service centre (CSC) in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell, have for months been supplementing their normal phone support and physical visits with a videoconferencing solution that links them directly with people in their homes.

The trial – called Happy, Healthy and At Home and supported by funding from the Victorian Department of State Development, Business and Innovation’s Broadband Enabled Innovation Program (BEIP) – recently won the Outstanding ICT Innovation award in the Asia Pacific Eldercare Innovation Awards 2013 in Singapore.

Its model, says Stelvio Vido, executive general manager of projects and business development

with RDNS, reflects growing demand for inhome care and a need to improve the support mechanisms available to provide this care.

“Demand is growing and will continue to grow for the next several decades,” he told GTR during a visit to the facility, which is housed in a clean, nondescript office building in Melbourne’s inner east.

“The aging population is driving the demand and, complementary to that, is the prevalence of chronic disease. Even though a lot of our health indicators are improving, chronic conditions – especially related to obesity – are creating demand for community based healthcare.”

Under pressure RDNS currently employs 2500 staff at 16 centres across Australia and New Zealand, who look after around 45,000 clients by making what is around 8000 to 9000 visits to client homes per day. This adds up to two million home visits per year – and the numbers are continuing to increase at a rate of knots.

With 20% to 25% of nurses’ time taken up by travel, RDNS has been looking for ingenious ways of improving their efficiency – particularly as growing numbers of patients put additional pressure on RDNS and similar organisations.

“It’s placing pressure on the hospital system, and government can see that just providing all of

this healthcare is not sustainable,” Vido says. “A lot of it can be done in the home setting and with monitoring, coaching and regular interaction and nursing you can manage conditions and keep people out of the hospital.”

Video is a natural complement to traditional customer-service methods, Vido said, but it’s also a key support for recent efforts to expand the coverage of RDNS’ services outside of the Melbourne area where it has its genesis. Most recently, RDNS extended its services to New Zealand – which is also supported from the Camberwell CSC. Because many of RDNS’ clients required long drives and daily home visits for tasks as simple as checking post-surgical wound recovery or ensuring that patients are taking the right medication, video offers an alternative that is just as effective but far less expensive and time-consuming.

Friendly faces When GTR visited the RDNS CSC, the setup for the BEIP trial, which initially includes 58 RDNS clients, had been installed behind three screens in a dedicated corner of the facility (these were slated to be replaced in the near future with custom-built ‘pods’ to further improve patient privacy, and to contain each nurse and their telehealth equipment).

Specialised nurses, each sitting with their backs to the screens to protect patient privacy, were talking into headsets and watching video from the clients that was playing in a window in the centre of their screens.

“Yes, you can have your breakfast now,” one nurse was telling the onscreen patient in response to her unheard query. “The one thing you haven’t done is to record your blood glucose.” While they talk, nurses are presented with other information about the client from

“We can get a client up and running the next day, even in those areas that for whatever reason don’t have broadband. And in our testing, the technology is just as good as landline broadband: it’s very pleasing from a quality perspective, both visual and audio.”

RDNS back-end systems, and displayed onscreen for the nurses’ use and notes.

On screen, another patient seemed to be well into the routine, holding up each bottle for the nurse to read its label and then taking the required dose. Such patients – often post-operative, or those with diabetes or other chronic conditions requiring regular review or self-injection – typically take up 13 different medications, some at different times of day, so it’s important that doses are correct and taken at the right time.

“The nurse-client relationship is much more ongoing and frequent than the doctor-patient relationship,” Vido says. “Our nurses not only observe the clients taking their medicine, but also look at their well-being – how they’re interacting and looking. The visual aspect is very important, and that became apparent quite early on with respect to the difference between picking up the phone and seeing them onscreen.”

Mat Tyler

– Mat Tyler, RDNS GTR JUNE 2013 | 27

customer service

Each patient has installed an Intel Home Guide, a standalone device created by Intel and GE that combines a video camera with an interface that allows the connection of external devices such as blood pressure cuffs, ECGs, weight scales, heart monitors and so on.

RDNS has only recently received approval to add such accessories to the mix, promising even more comprehensive remote care for patients with specialised requirements. It’s also integrating the video services with its extensive roster of processes and procedures, and sees potential for using it to further the RDNS’ secondary goal – and considerable success – in developing and sharing nursing best-practice research in areas such as wound care, dementia, and medicines management.

Patients have proven to be willing and eager participants in the BEIP program. The devices

Stelvio Vido

cannot be turned off, and have nothing more than volume up and volume down buttons to ensure that they’re as simple as possible for patients to use. Patients simply accept incoming calls by pressing on the screen when the nurse calls.

“A lot of our clients just leave it on and don’t touch it,” says BEIP project manager Mat Tyler, noting that many have set up a “sacred space” for the device in a corner of a room.

“The most technological that they’ve been in their lifetimes is operating the television or microwave or toaster.”

RDNS’ primary telehealth team operates from 8am until around 1pm, but an afternoon shift from 4pm to 8pm has recently been added to cater for clients that needed twice-daily followups. This has helped RDNS tailor the video calls

– which are still supported by regular home visits – to each patient’s individual requirements.

The ability to engage clients using videoconferencing has not only helped RDNS: patients feel more empowered because they don’t have to wait for visits from nurses that may be delayed as they fight through Melbourne’s everdenser inner-city traffic.

“We have one fellow in his mid-40s,” recalls client services manager Maureen Wilkinson, who has been involved in the BEIP project as part of her work overseeing the 150-staff CSC. “He resented the fact that he had to stay home and wait for the nurse. Now he’s on the BEIP program and he’s a new person: he’s got control back in his life. He’s caring for himself, and the nurses that visit him once a week have never seen him so animated.”

“Once you’ve established a telehealth hub, most of the geographic and physical boundaries that limited the organisation, start to wash away, if not completely disappear. The nurses feel their connection with the clients is just as real as with face-to-face contact. In 20 years, people are going to be saying ‘this is all so routine’.”

– Stelvio Vido, RDNS

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The connectivity challenge With the patients as old as 94 successfully participating, early days have shown the telehealth program to be a manageable, efficient form of customer service. However, Tyler says, the units’ reliance on strong broadband services has presented a challenge for RDNS in implementing them: most patients have phones but many don’t have Internet services connected.

Fixing this situation has often proved harder than would be expected – so in many cases, the answer has been wireless.

“One of the biggest learnings we’ve had to date, and one of the biggest challenges, is ensuring we have our clients connected to either a broadband or mobile 3G/4G connection in a timely manner,” Tyler explains. “We’ve

noticed that with other competing issues, there has been a shortage of technicians for broadband to be installed, and this has created considerable delays.”

As an alternative, around 15% of the trial participants have been set up using wireless broadband services that connect to 3G/4G services and set up a WiFi hotspot within the home to which the Home Guide connects.

“We can get a client up and running the next day, even in those areas that for whatever reason don’t have broadband,” Tyler says. “And in our testing, the technology is just as good as landline broadband: it’s very pleasing from a quality perspective, both visual and audio.”

The cost of wireless data, however, runs at different economies of scale to those on

RDNS received the Outstanding ICT Innovation award in the Asia Pacific Eldercare Innovation Awards 2013, in Singapore.

fixed wireless broadband. To keep costs down, RDNS has negotiated a capped-price service contract with its wireless-broadband service provider.

“They can see the value of being involved in this sort of service delivery,” Vido says.

“Community based healthcare is going to increasingly rely on service delivery through technology and telecommunications.”

“Once you’ve established a telehealth hub, most of the geographic and physical boundaries that limited the organisation, start to wash away, if not completely disappear. The nurses feel their connection with the clients is just as real as with face-to-face contact. In 20 years, people are going to be saying ‘this is all so routine’.”

communications

Polycom’s HDX 4500 is among the UCC devices the company has been working to certify to Microsoft’s Lync Server 2013 platform, which has become a de facto convergence point for many corporate UCC efforts.

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS: REDRAWING GOVERNMENT BOUNDARIES Story by DAVID BRAUE

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n infrastructure-sharing deal between three regional South Australian councils may have cut the costs of desktop computing, but the implementation of a shared unified communications (UC) system is delivering even more significant change by redefining the way those councils collaborate.

UC was a long-term goal when Alexandrina Council, a regional area southwest of Adelaide, recently began bulking up its IT infrastructure to service neighbouring Yankallilla Council and Kangaroo Island Council.

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Centralising the three councils’ IT requirements to would allow all three to leverage economies of scale in software licensing and IT service delivery, which had become particularly difficult for the two smaller councils – each over 100km away from Alexandrina. The three councils now have 10Mbps Telstra services linking their sites, and are linked to each other using dedicated 200Mbps microwave links.

The network has driven major change by allowing Alexandrina to use virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) servers to deliver managed

desktops to the other two councils – replacing 45 standalone PCs at Yankallilla and 50 at Kangaroo Island. However, as that technology was bedded down, Alexandrina also began evaluating IP-based UC solutions to give the councils’ communications environments the same treatment.

Alexandrina ultimately adopted a UC solution from Mitel that will soon allow Alexandrina’s IT team to manage a UC service that spans all three councils’ IT environments, says Colin Shackleford, Alexandrina’s manager of information technology services.

“We originally had the connections put in between the three councils with a view to fully centralising the computer systems,” he explains, “but we’ll also be able to communicate between councils as if we were on the same system.”

Consolidating the data network has let the councils scale back their phone services: each site now has just one fax line and one backup voice line, although the latter hasn’t been needed yet.

“We’ve pulled so many landlines out of our buildings, it isn’t funny,” Shackleford says, “and will have saved around $20,000 in phone line costs over the first couple of years. There’s no cost for internal calls, and we will have four-digit dialling between any of our phones.”

The UC platform will support establishment of a shared contact centre to handle incoming calls for all three areas. That’s a big change from the previous situation, which in Yankallilla was a four-phone hunt group through which callers would be shunted from one phone to another in the hopes that someone would pick up.

The councils are exploring the options to improve communications by installing desktop videoconferencing cameras at users’ PCs. This would not only improve collaboration between council employees, but would facilitate improved access to video-based training with the state local government authority – crucial for bridging the large distances involved.

“Travelling into the city is quite prohibitive for people that live in regional areas, so videoconferencing with the LGA is a big deal,” Shackleford explains. “It’s great that we are implementing technology that will allow us to do that. Collaboration is the key for regional councils to maintain that equitable service to their communities – by sharing resources and working together – and unified communications is a major part of that.”

The UCC imperative Government bodies at every level have followed the UC wave from its early days as a disruptive technology, to its current state

as an unremarkable but incredibly valuable addition to nearly any network; indeed, the growing emphasis on UC as a facilitator for IP-enabled collaboration solutions has seen new nomenclature – unified communications and collaboration (UCC) – adopted to describe the market and its solutions.

UCC’s ability to not only obviate the need for dedicated landlines, but to facilitate the delivery of new communications services and process improvements due to integration with other data sources, has made it an increasingly appealing investment target for all manner of organisations.

Whereas many organisations have held off on UC because they lacked the internal skill sets to manage it, the rise of cloud-based UC solutions seems to be both convincing many others to take the plunge, and to look far beyond simple telephony services when they do so.

Modern UC solutions take oncerevolutionary voice over IP (VoIP) for granted, and now focus on driving collaboration

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GTR JUNE 2013 | 31

communications

Neil Campbell

“There are some very clever things you can do around call routing in business processes to reduce cost and boost productivity.” through the use of high-definition (HD) videoconferencing, online chats, smartphone and tablet endpoints, and cloud-hosted applications; in many cases, the entire UC solution may be hosted in the cloud.

“Telephony is a fairly basic function and once you have it in place there isn’t a high cost of maintenance,” says Neil Campbell, director of solutions with systems integrator and UC specialist Dimension Data.

“Increased expenditure in this area speaks to an increased awareness of the value of a richer communications experience within and outside the organisation. There are some very clever things you can do around call routing in business processes to reduce cost and boost productivity.”

Dimension Data recently enlisted research group Ovum to survey the state of the global UC market. Its report, The Future of Unified Communications & Collaboration, that 78% of

LifeSize’s UVC ClearSea extends UCC capabilities to more than 50 mobile devices, with centralised user directories, multipoint communications and availability as optimised hardware appliance or virtualised software.

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Australian businesses have a strategic plan and budget for at least some of the components of full UCC environments, extending well beyond simple PABX to VoIP replacement.

Interestingly, only 20% of respondents believe that users are consulted about UCC strategies in any significant way, even though decision-makers said line of business managers, local managers and users are frequently consulted. This may indicate disconnect between

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communications

Nick Hawkins

“By providing our own app we can provide a certain amount of functionality, and then provide appropriate [UCC] infrastructure to take it to the next level.” manager perception and user understanding – which could itself be a recipe for trouble since, as Alexandrina Council found, user buy-in is crucial to the success of any UCC initiative.

Other survey results confirmed that many UCC-adopting organisations are taking a lot on faith: while 75% of decision makers believe users are familiar with business social tools and 85% believe users are at least somewhat familiar with mobile unified-communications clients. However, just 42% of surveyed users had even heard of UC clients, much less become familiar with them.

“Those implementing UC solutions had very specific use cases, and didn’t see the need to broadly consult the user community as part of their deployment,” Campbell explains. “More and more, that will be an inhibitor to broader uptake of the technology – and may mean you acquire the wrong solution.”

Engage users on their terms The lessons from these results are clear: successful UCC adoption requires executive outreach and regular communication with users about the specific technologies, and broader strategic goals, involved with the technology.

This will be particularly important as users are charged with taking more control of their UC experience as many organisations begin to leverage bring your own device (BYOD) strategies and replace dedicated VoIP handsets

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with soft-phone clients running on users’ personal smartphones or tablets.

Given that every major UCC vendor already offers soft-phone capabilities, the growing primacy of BYOD within most organisations offers a way of delivering the same capabilities to users without the capital expense that used to be associated with UCC rollouts. It also offers the potential for better management of contactcentre peaks, by allowing users to be brought online to handle customer queries – even when home – through their home WiFi connections.

Fully 22% of respondents to the Dimension Data survey said they are planning such a rollout within the next year – equal to the percentage planning to roll out standard unified communications. This suggests that mobile UC is now seen as something that should be routinely done as part of any broader UCC implementation.

“It’s important to understand what would be culturally advantageous about throwing BYOD into that mix,” Campbell says. “Think of people using their own video and collaboration technologies, rather than taking the old-school approach of taking technologies and pushing them onto users.”

UCC vendors have been responding in kind, with most working to ensure interoperability between their solutions and Microsoft’s new Lync Server 2013. Since its release, Lync has become a de facto centre of gravity for corporate

UCC efforts, and certification to its requirements delivers the kind of interoperability that makes UCC work at its best.

Yet even that interoperability is being revisited as once-closed and proprietary technologies now establishing themselves as managed cloud services. CSC, for one, recently debuted a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) offering that delivers a full UCC suite as a cloud service based on Cisco Systems’ Hosted Collaboration Solution.

Polycom, for its part, offers mobile UC apps and recently launched its RealPresence CloudAXIS suite, which extends the corporate UCC environment to Web browsers so that additional users can join video calls by clicking on a hyperlink.

“For so long it has been a dedicated device required within a conference or executive room to provide video collaboration,” says Nick Hawkins, Asia-Pacific director of technology consulting with Polycom.

“Over the last few years we’ve seen a trend towards being able to deploy that in a managed fashion. By providing our own app we can provide a certain amount of functionality, and then provide appropriate [UCC] infrastructure to take it to the next level. Now that the technical issues of interoperability have been solved and standards for video collaboration defined, it is becoming easier and easier to collaborate across boundaries.”

a sset management

ASSET MANAGERS LEARNING THE VALUE OF IT PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY OTHER LAYER OF GOVERNMENT, LOCAL COUNCILS WEAR THE WORST ASSET-MANAGEMENT BURDEN BECAUSE THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ASSETS THAT ARE IN FRONT OF CITIZENS ALL DAY, EVERY DAY – AND WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG, THEY’RE THE FIRST TO FIELD COMPLAINTS. Story by DAVID BRAUE

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anaging this burden has never been easy, but it has gotten easier for the City of Yarra, which about four years ago switched from an ad hoc, poorly-supported enterprise asset management (EAM) system to the TechnologyOne Asset Management platform.

That migration has not only led to happier employees, but paved the way for making them even happier with the recent introduction of a mobile EAM solution that is saving them time and effort while managing the council’s pit, pipe, road, drainage and other infrastructure.

“We’ve really been able to apply some commonality of process, and commonality of approach and support across the different asset classes,” says Graham Davis, senior information systems project manager with the innerMelbourne council, who helped implement the project that equipped council workers

with ruggedised Motion Computing F5v tablet computers.

“By using a mobile in the field, we’re achieving better data accuracy by having the facts about work put in at the job site,” Davis says. The workers currently use the tablets for horticultural work, monitoring the growth of council plants and putting in work requests for changes, although this is soon to expand to other asset classes.

The large screen of the tablet computer made it preferable to a smartphone solution, while Davis says the simple interface means “it’s fairly clear about what they need to capture. We’re not expecting them to spend a lot of time on the computer; we’re expecting them to be able to spend the time maintaining the assets.”

“We’re achieving better efficiency by not having stuff re-entered first on a piece of paper in the field, then re-entered into a computer

system later in the day,” he continues, noting the importance of tightly-integrated geospatial capabilities that automatically tie records to physical locations within the council.

“Users can do admin and then forget about it. Now we’re interested in taking it from being a simple register of assets, to also being able to support and drive our processes.”

Extending EAM The addition of mobile computing to EAM platforms has empowered council workers – at the City of Yarra and elsewhere – to complete more work in the field than ever before.

Yet it’s not the only innovation driving change through the EAM market: as cloudbased information systems, massive geospatial databases and enabling GPS technology are thrown into the mix, government agencies at all levels are being empowered to not only track

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asset management

their massive base of assets – but to proactively manage, maintain and improve them.

By monitoring performance data over time, and correlating it with real-time information about the status of a mechanical asset, for example, modern EAM systems can project an imminent failure with far greater accuracy than previous methods based on occasional manual inspection.

Creation of ever-expanding sensor networks is helping this trend along, with live sensors contributing to a flood of data that EAM systems pick through to extract meaningful information.

“In the past, some engineer would monitor equipment for telltale signs of impending failure, but because it wasn’t integrated back into the EAM system you didn’t have a plan or trigger event to deal with that impending failure in a proactive way,” says Gartner research fellow Kristian Steenstrup, who has watched EAM systems evolve from being glorified asset registers to being proactive preventive-maintenance tools.

Key to that transition is the ever-improving linkages between operational technology (OT) systems that have long monitored equipment status, and the information technology systems that previously relied on manual data entry to store and manage their information.

Gartner’s latest ERP Software Market Snapshot noted a “highly stable” EAM market, with annual growth of 2.3% in 2012 and total sales of US$1.386 billion. “This is due to the intense industry-specific needs with the product and for implementation experience and quality,” the report’s authors noted, adding that the relatively slow growth had shifted the industry balance of power from vendors to buyers.

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Bridging the gaps The EAM market is set to surge forward on the back of new innovations, Steenstrup says, with winners set to be those who can innovate in a way that adds value to their customers. In particular, bridging the facilities-IT gap remains a common vendor goal – but it may be elusive for customers hoping to capitalise upon.

While modern EAM systems can quite effectively bridge this gap, Steenstrup warns that persisting cultural differences often make the necessary information sharing more difficult than it should be.

“From a technical perspective it’s much more plausible and deliverable than ever before, however the obstacle is often organisational and cultural,” he explains. “The capture of information is usually sitting with engineers and operational departments, who have as their mission to make sure the machines are physical working.”

“Meanwhile, the IT people are sitting back and looking at the EAM system and how they connect. IT people and engineers don’t always get along well – and because they’re coming at it from their respective perspectives, there is a tug of war around the systems and the possession of the data. The rosy future we can see still has some work to do.”

Vendors have been working hard to bridge the gap between IT and facilities-management capabilities has been in the data centres industry, where data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) systems are incorporating ever more-powerful EAM capabilities that bring facilities-based maintenance equipment into

IT-run EAM systems from the likes of IBM, SAP, Infor, Ventyx, Oracle, Technology One and others.

Generating actionable information from data-centre monitoring systems is critical to making this transition effective, says Soeren Brogaard Jensen, vice president of enterprise management and software with data-centre infrastructure provider Schneider Electric, which has been working to improve DCIM through its Struxureware resource-monitoring platform.

“We as technology vendors tend to throw all this technology into the market, and there are endless promises around capex, opex and energy-efficiency type improvements,” he says. “However, very few people are actually taking the time to help customers adopt this technology in a meaningful way so they can get a fast result.”

“The important thing is in translating this information into not just business information and how we can help the business understand the impact of facility breakdowns m M a or potential an how IT issues,” he continues, “but these tools r agtemuch can help the organisation become e mial more ent the IT effective and efficient. We’re helping bring and facilities cultural frameworks together, for that one single source of truth around how the data centre is operating.”

In many ways, the asset-management challenges facing local governments aren’t far removed: rather than trying to maintain corporate assets through a loosely affiliated network of engineers, efforts to standardise EAM capabilities – and extend them out to field workers and even smartphone-wielding citizens who can submit maintenance alerts with the tap of an app – are rapidly expanding the resources that can be applied to this fundamental task.

With basic EAM improvements already stitched up and new capabilities coming online all the time, the City of Yarra, for one, is exploring ways to improve subcontractors’ ability to access council EAM systems – and, potentially, to be able to offer its EAM capabilities to neighbouring councils on an outsourced basis.

“We’re looking for an efficient way to get information back from those subcontractors,” Davis says. “There are a lot of things happening in asset management that are starting to drive it towards more standardised processes, and that raises questions of economies of scale that could be achieved by doing things in a common way across organisations.”

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We as technology vendors tend to throw all this technology into the market, and there are endless promises around capex, opex and energyefficiency type improvements. However, very few people are actually taking the time to help customers adopt this technology in a meaningful way so they can get a fast result.

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The Federal Budget promised to be a Budget like no other

and it did not disappoint

By KEVIN NOONAN, PUBLIC SECTOR RESEARCH DIRECTOR, OVUM

TYPICALLY GOVERNMENTS BEHAVE VERY PREDICTABLY, ACCORDING TO ELECTORAL CYCLES. BUT THESE ARE NOT NORMAL TIMES, AND THIS WAS NOT A NORMAL BUDGET.

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s a government coming to the end of its second term, by this stage the government should have been wrapping up the hard yards laid down in earlier Budgets and rewarding the electorate for their patience and support. But these are not normal times and this was not a normal Budget.

From an ICT perspective, the big surprise was the amount of strategy and detail. There was a lot of meat on the bones. Many of the initiatives are long term and will require ongoing attention from the government of the day. However, the Government is in trouble in the polls and may not be around to see through many of the long running ICT initiatives it announced.

Cross-Portfolio initiatives At a cross-Portfolio level there are some big cuts. $226.8 million will be removed from the public sector through efficiency cuts. We have seen this

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The Government will: • allocate $9.1 million for the establishment of an Australian Ballistics Identification Network (ABIN) to provide law enforcement agencies with advanced technology to undertake ballistics analysis of firearms.

CrimTrac will establish a national IT network that will allow police from every jurisdiction to access a database of all weapons used in crimes recovered by police in each state and territory.

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approach a number of times before with this government, where the efficiency dividend was raised to cover Budget shortfall. It has been an efficiency dividend in name only, as no overarching plan was spelt out to achieve those efficiencies.

This time, there is a clear plan and a reasonable amount of detail. $148.4 million will be saved by flattening out already bloated middle and senior management structures. $63.8 million will be saved through buildings and fit out by increasing the occupancy density in government buildings (it’s time to get a little closer to your work mates!). A further $14.6 million will be saved by introducing shared services for all corporate functions for the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.

These changes are very much in line with industry best practice. Mobile technology, in particular is fast changing the way people work.

It is enabling greater adoption of teleworking and more flexible structures. In such situations,

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• provide $30.2 million to establish a National Border Targeting Centre that will enhance risk assessments of international passengers and cargo. The Centre will improve access to analysis, coordination and sharing of border-related data and aims to improve interoperability and collaboration among Australia’s border protection agencies. Funding will be provided for the upgrade of facilities and IT equipment to increase the volume and speed of data analysed.

Given the budget shortfall, it is not surprising that systems for revenue raising received a big boost.

The big winners were the service delivery agencies.

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• establish a multi-agency Australian Cyber Security Centre. The Centre will co-locate existing capabilities for cyber defence and facilitate improved industry access to Australia’s cyber security practitioners. The Centre will bring together capabilities from across the Department of Defence, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Federal Police, the AttorneyGeneral’s Department and the Australian Crime Commission.

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The government will: • provide $154 million to Geoscience Australia to support priority activities.

• provide $6.8 million for a consumer energy data system to help consumers better manage their energy usage and costs, including by comparing different retail supply offers.

• provide $3.6 million over four years to introduce mandatory petroleum statistics reporting by industry in order to provide more accurate information on domestic oil stockholdings

staff work more autonomously and have less requirement for complex management layers.

The Budget also announced $64.4 million in savings through initiatives to drive greater efficiency in procurement. This will be achieved by expanding the government’s procurement system, AusTender, through the increased use of panels and multi-use lists, including cooperative arrangements. This initiative is likely to receive a mixed reaction. Improvements to the government tendering process will be very welcome, however commodity cost-cutting is likely to be seen as an overused approach to just cutting vendor margins.

The announcement of investigations into a whole-of-government Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system will raise some eyebrows.

The potential value of such a system is clear, but the delivery of such a system can be surprisingly difficult. This comes in the wake of ongoing problems and a government enquiry into the Queensland Health ERP system.

The Federal Government is rightly stepping very carefully with $2.8 million in funding allocated to undertake a detailed study of the costs and benefits of rationalising the number and type of ERP systems used in the Australian Public Service. This project will require careful government oversight. $2.2 million was also allocated for the development of a business case for the use of ERP to improve information management in AusAID. The Government will provide $9.1 million to implement a web-based whole-of-government electronic grants advertising, application and reporting system for use by agencies and grant applicants as a single point of reference (Australian Government Grants System). The AGGS will

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• provide $5.2 million to the Australian Bureau of Statistics for the continued production of input-output data as part of the Australian national accounts.

• provide $7.8 million over two years to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) to improve ASIC’s client contact centre service levels to support the introduction of the online National Business Names registration system. This funding includes $1.6 million in capital in 2013-14 to upgrade ASIC’s call centre infrastructure. The Government will also provide $2.1 million to the Australian Bureau of Statistics to develop

interface with agency grants management and payments systems to provide for the transfer of application information to, and reporting information from, agency systems. It will be the central interface for the non-government sector with the Government for grants.

The government’s international communications network (ICN) will be upgraded at a cost of $215 million. The ICN is managed by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and supports the transmission and exchange of unclassified through to top secret information to over 140 sites in Australia and around the globe, operating 24 hours a day.

The upgraded ICN will strengthen classified connectivity and information sharing, increase protection against cyber threats, strengthen

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a second pass business case for a major statistical infrastructure and business process reengineering project. This could develop into a very significant project.

• provide $14.2 million over four years from 2013-14 to allow the Australian Research Council (ARC) to improve and upgrade its Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems. The new system will replace the current manual processes with automated systems, implement a new electronic document records management system and integrate separate computer systems across the agency.

coordination and decision-making through improved connectivity, and improve productivity by addressing limitations of the current system.

Rewards for successful initiatives The successful Broadband for Seniors program received an $9.9 million boost. This program delivers internet kiosks to encourage a greater use of online technology by older Australians.

This will be supplemented by $5.0 million in funding to community organisations to provide education and training.

The MyChild website received a boost from within the agency’s existing budget.

The More Support for Students with a Disabilities National Partnership received a funding boost of $14.4 million to support the

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The Government will: • provide $16.1 million over four years (including $8.2 million in capital funding in 2013-14) to the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) for the establishment of a new data centre to house AUSTRAC computer systems and electronic records. AUSTRAC’s existing facility will be maintained for testing and development purposes and will also be used as a disaster recovery facility.

• provide $8.4 million over 2013-14 and 2014-15 (including $4.5 million in capital funding) to trial automated border

processing technology and procedures for departures from Australian airports.

• provide $2.2 million over four years to strengthen the integrity of the secure areas of ports and airports. CrimTrac will allocate funding of $1.5 million (including $0.6 million in capital funding in 2013-14) from its existing budget to upgrade the National Police Reference System.

• provide $4.0 million in 2012-13 to support Vodafone Hutchinson Australia to expand its call centre operations at Kingston in Tasmania, creating 750 new customer service jobs.

GTR JUNE 2013 | 39

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The government will:

The Government will:

The government will:

• provide $3.0 million over two years to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) to develop, revise and measure several key performance indicators.

• provide $42,500 in 2013-14 to examine potential reforms and hosting arrangements for the Child Care Management System (CCMS). This information will be used to determine the need for a substantial CCMS upgrade. Child care services lodge child enrolment and attendance data in the CCMS, which is then used to calculate Child Care Benefit and Child Care Rebate payments.

• provide $7.2 million over three years to help small businesses and not-forprofit organisations engage in the digital economy and take advantage of the National Broadband Network (NBN), expanding the Digital Enterprise program from the existing 40 locations to an additional 20 regional sites.

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• provide $12.1 million over four years to establish a national patient contact register for implantable devices, and two clinical quality registers for breast implants and cardiac devices.

• provide $10.0 million over two years to deliver a national communications campaign to inform Australians about the benefits of Medicare and health-related services.

• save $31.2 million over two years by ceasing funding for the National Health Information Network (NHIN) from 1 July 2015. The NHIN was established in 2004 and preceded the implementation of the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system. Functions of the NHIN, such as creation and storage of electronic health records and other health information, are now being managed through the PCEHR as part of the National e-Health Program.

Human Services received $30 million to improve its waiting times for its call centres and will redevelop the Child Support system CUBA from within its own resources. implementation of a nationally consistent data collection model for school students with disability.

The National TelePresence system has been very successful and receives a boost of $19.3 million boost to enable a greater number of concurrent meetings The long running argument about the government’s plans for mandatory internet filtering has finally been settled: it’s dead and

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• improve the quality, responsiveness, and relevance of child care information available to families through an enhancement of the MyChild website that will make it easier for families to access relevant information, and better align desktop and mobile site functionality.

• provide $5.7 million over two years to expand local government support for developing online services to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their service delivery by taking advantage of the bandwidth and high data capacity of the NBN. This measure expands the Digital Local Government program from 40 to 55 local councils.

• provide $6.5 million over three years from 2013-14 to continue the provision of access to internet services and computer training for remote Indigenous communities.

• provide $4.9 million (including $0.3 million in capital funding) to improve public understanding and provide updated information about the NBN.

buried. The government announced the program will not be proceeding, and $4.5 million in funding has been handed back.

Revenue and compliance systems Given the budget shortfall, is not surprising that systems for revenue raising received a big boost.

The big winners were the service delivery agencies.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) will receive $77.8 million to enhance its data matching capabilities using third party information.

The Government will provide $1.4 million to provide for a single, online registration for financial advisors registered with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission that also need to be registered with the ATO as tax advisors from 30 June 2013. This follows the end of the exemption of financial advisors from the tax agent services licensing regime.

The Government will establish a Tax System Advisory Board within the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to advise the Commissioner of Taxation and the ATO Executive Committee on the strategic direction, culture, organisation,

management, compliance planning, staff profile and information technology plans at the ATO. Human Services received $30 million to improve its waiting times for its call centres and will redevelop the Child Support system CUBA from within its own resources. Fraud prevention received a boost with $1.8 million to improve the Medicare Benefits billing scheme and $8.9 million to increase the number of DHS compliance reviews. $4.9 million will also be provided to implement a range of efficiency measures including the greater use of electronic funds transfer, risk based real estate valuations, and increasing the rate of online transactions undertaken by Youth Allowance Student Austudy recipients. DHS will also undertake greater compliance work for customers with earned income. This will be funded from within existing resources.

In what is likely to be a future big ticket item, DHS will begin a first pass business case to identify options for the upgrade or replacement of its core business system ISIS. The business case is set for completion in 2015.

Spotlight Changing the way Australia’s

government works GTR editor David Braue talks to Derek Austin, Asia-Pacific director for Dragon Desktop Solutions with Nuance

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nyone who has ever worked in government knows old habits die hard, but Nuance Communications’ entire business is built around making sure that happens regardless of institutional inertia.

With a range of technologies including its Dragon speech-recognition software, Swype intelligent data-entry smartphone and tablet software, and well-embraced document management systems like OmniPage and PaperPort, Nuance remains a significant player in the business process automation market.

But with mobile devices so quickly boosting power and organisational importance, a significant focus for the company is the integration of its core Dragon engine into mobile environments: its Dragon Search tool, for example, runs on the Dragon technology, as do the Dragon Go tool for Android devices, Dragon Dictation and Apple’s Siri personal assistant, which is built into the iOS software powering that company’s iPhone and iPad devices.

The explosion of voice-controlled mobiles has been designed to complement the everstronger capabilities of its desktop dictation platform, which has gained a strong following in many government departments at all levels.

“We’re all about changing the way people work with technology,” says Derek Austin, AsiaPacific director for Dragon Desktop Solutions with Nuance.

“Speech is a big part of this, but we’re also working in the back end of intelligence, trying to integrate the back and the front and making the user experience better. That spans everything from mobile devices through to enterprise systems and call centre applications.”

Dragon NaturallySpeaking allows users of Windows or Mac desktop PCs control their systems, and work with documents, using nothing more than their voice. Straight transcription, system commands, editing and other functions can all be managed using the speaker’s voice, which is used to refine and improve the accuracy of Dragon over time.

Custom vocabularies can be created to cater for niche applications or jargon-rich fields, with the voice models for those words able to be transferred to other computers.

“Anyone who is doing document preparation can get extremely good accuracy using Dragon on their desktop system,” Austin says. “Even if you’re in a social-services department with a fair number of Acts of Parliament and processes you have to go through, all that can be encapsulated into a vocabulary so new users can get going quickly when they come into the department.”

The addition of voice-recognition capabilities can be a particular boon for disabled employees, who may struggle to work efficiently on manual keyboards because they lack the necessary range of motion or motor skills. Nuance also offers a range of software development kits (SDKs) allowing independent software developers to integrate its voice recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities into their own applications – which is proving invaluable for developers of contact-centre software that benefits from a natural-language recognition capability for callers.

Desktop voice recognition continues to improve as more samples are gained, but cloud computing is beginning to accelerate this process by enabling the collection of even larger amounts of speech data from mobile devices,

which send voice transcriptions to the Nuance cloud for analysis.

This data is then used to refine the speech models used across the Dragon products. Nuance has also been working with IBM to apply the technologies behind that company’s Watson analytics system to natural-language speech recognition engines.

This type of analysis is important to continue Dragon’s history of recognising regional dialects, where local nuances of speech and inflection often challenge voice-recognition engines.

“We’ve built an Australian voice model and improve it by having a general statistical model of how we speak and what we say,” Austin says. “But just saying that you’ve got an Australian accent doesn’t really cover the basis. It could be anything from a Chinese to a cockney British accent.”

“Having more and more data makes it possible to get more accurate speech recognition, and having some of that in the cloud does make it easier. It’s all about adapting hardware and software, and now the cloud as well, to make sure it all fits together and brings the best combination of the Nuance engine, innovative user interfaces and the high-tech gadgetry that’s coming onto the market.”

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case study

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MAINE OFFICE OF CHILD AND FAMILY SERVICES BOOSTS CASEWORKER PRODUCTIVITY Case study provided by NUANCE

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he Maine Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Child and Family Services (OCFS), serves children and their families across eight county-based districts in one of America’s most rural, least populated states.

This state-administered public child welfare agency, which received more than 17,000 new reports of child abuse or neglect last year, investigates reported incidents on behalf of Maine communities, working to protect children and to guide families in creating safe homes. If the agency is unable to mitigate family problems that put children at risk, its professional staff explore options for kinship care or evaluates suitable foster and adoptive homes.

OCFS caseworkers find social work to be a rewarding, but demanding profession. In addition to the valuable services they provide within their communities, these caseworkers are confronted with significant documentation requirements,

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which add even more stress to an already taxing job. Ever-increasing documentation demands mean that these professionals are spending more time in the office typing up notes and less time in the field ensuring child safety and helping families in crisis.

could use it successfully,” explains Ellen Beerits, Child Welfare Program Administrator in OCFS District 5. “Then the decision would be made whether we would deploy Dragon state wide.”

The pilot and the training Staff at OCFS’s central office in Augusta, Maine, needed a way to help caseworkers and their supervisors keep up with escalating documentation requirements. After evaluating the latest version of Dragon speech recognition software, OCFS decided to conduct a Dragon pilot with approximately 45 employees—caseworkers, licensing professionals, and supervisors — in District 5, which services Kennebec and Somerset counties in central Maine.

“The pilot was intended to test out Dragon and see whether there would be general worker acceptance of the software and whether they

CC BY-SA 3.0 Terry Ross Augusta, Maine

After the OCFS IT department had installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional on the pilot participants’ laptops, Nuance held an initial two-day training session at the Augusta district office. Participants were divided into four groups, each of which attended a half day of training.

“This provided an excellent introduction to using Dragon, including how to dictate documentation and emails, navigate applications, use voice shortcuts, customize vocabulary, and even create macros,” explained Beerits.

The OCFS users started realizing productivity gains almost immediately. Dragon turns voice into text three times faster than most people type with up to 99% accuracy right out of the gate. The software learns to recognize the user’s voice instantly and becomes even more accurate with continued use.

“I was a bit sceptical about using Dragon at first,” said OCFS caseworker Ryanne Letourneau, who had experienced previous versions of speech recognition with mixed results. “But after only five minutes in the initial Dragon training, I was amazed at how much you can get done in such a short period of time.”

After the introductory training, Nuance account management and training staff were available by phone or email to answer users’ questions, provide guidance, and troubleshoot issues. “From the beginning, the Nuance team was very accessible and helpful,” commented Beerits. “Our people would contact them with questions and they were very responsive.”

Nuance returned to OCFS one month after the initial training to conduct a second Dragon training session. The trainers met with pilot participants in small groups to review the software’s features and to provide more advanced instruction, including how to use Dragon with an approved digital voice recorder. This capability allows caseworkers to dictate their notes in between appointments in the field and use Dragon to automatically transcribe the audio files when they connect the recorder to their laptops.

OCFS staff came away from this second training session even more proficient and confident Dragon users. “In my opinion, this was the best introduction and training of any software or computer-related solution I’ve ever done,” said OCFS caseworker Amy Cobb. ”I thought it was amazing.”

Now caseworkers spend less time at their desks producing narratives and more time returning calls, making referrals, and meeting with clients. Without the stress of paperwork piling up back at the office, caseworkers can focus more on helping clients.

The training prepared OCFS District 5 users to use Dragon to create case narrative logs, email, and other documentation such as assessments, treatment plans, legal paperwork, and reports.

Now caseworkers spend less time at their desks producing narratives and more time returning calls, making referrals, and meeting with clients. Without the stress of paperwork piling up back at the office, caseworkers can focus more on helping clients.

Realising dramatic results Dragon allows caseworkers to get more done faster by streamlining the documentation process, particularly narrative text.

OCFS users have created macros that enable them to insert dictated text into specific document templates within the Maine Automated Child Welfare Information System (MACWIS), a sophisticated, custom electronic records system built for the agency by Unisys.

“Narrative logs are the number one cause of our documentation distress,” explained Cobb.

“The logs are where we input every single thing we do and every contact we have whether it’s face to face or over the phone. Now I use Dragon to dictate all the contents of my yellow notebook — which I take to homes, schools, hospitals, prisons, and everywhere else — into MACWIS.” The users dictate their notes onto the screen and say a simple command, such as, “Insert parent interview,” to automatically place the text into the proper MACWIS template.

Entering information into the case management system is now completed faster than ever before. In a survey of pilot participants, nearly 70 percent of respondents stated that Dragon saved them at least 30 minutes or more per day, and 80 percent said that Dragon enables them to work more efficiently.

In fact, several participants commented that documentation took only half as long with

Dragon when compared to traditional manual data entry. A full 100 percent of the pilot survey participants stated that they would recommend Dragon to co-workers and peers.

Dragon is not only helping caseworkers complete documentation more quickly with few keystrokes, but it is improving the quality of their narratives, too. As a result, when the office receives a call related to a case, any staff member can instantly find detailed documentation in MACWIS. With easy access to more complete case records, the agency is able to serve children and their families faster and more effectively.

“I’m so much more effective with Dragon than I am without it,” said Letourneau. “I’m thinking more about what I’m putting in my narrative and I’m adding more detail because I actually have the time to do it. With Dragon, I can make sure that everything that needs to be in there is in there, and I can do it in a fraction of the time compared to typing.”

Dragon has also increased job satisfaction for many OCFS District 5 workers by enabling them to better manage their documentation workload and spend more time out in their communities.

“Dragon has resulted in improved morale among some staff by providing a tool to make their jobs more doable,” said Beerits.

Moving forward Based on the success of the District 5 pilot, OCFS has decided to deploy Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional state-wide, rolling out the software on a district-by-district basis using the same proven training and support model.

“The pilot feedback validated that Dragon can significantly improve caseworker productivity,” concluded Beerits. “The Dragon rollout process, incorporating multiple training sessions and ongoing support, greatly facilitated user adoption and helped ensure the pilot’s success.”

GTR JUNE 2013 | 43

Saving valuable minutes

with integrated sat nav

FOR AN AMBULANCE TO PROVIDE THE BEST OUTCOMES FOR THE MOST URGENT PATIENTS, A FAST AND SAFE RESPONSE IS CRITICAL. THE INTEGRATED SATELLITE NAVIGATION SOLUTION WAS DEVELOPED FOR AMBULANCE VICTORIA TO HELP IMPROVE RESPONSE TIMES AND BENEFIT CLINICAL OUTCOMES FOR PATIENTS.

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n 2012, Ambulance Victoria started the rollout of satellite navigation equipment linked to its Computer Aided Dispatch system into all ambulances in the Melbourne metropolitan area, following a successful pilot project that showed the technology was accurate and fast in emergency responses.

In a recent interview with Motorola Solutions, Brett Drummond, acting group manager, said “the most important factors for crews in terms of getting to a patient is about making sure they get there as quickly as possible and as safely as possible.”

When paramedics are dispatched to a case, information about the event, including the address, comes through electronically on their pager.

Paramedics acknowledge with a hard button on the vehicle that they are en route to the event, and previously used a street directory to plan their route from their current location.

With Motorola’s new integrated satellite navigation solution, the destination – and a clear route towards it – are automatically mapped for paramedics.

Michelle Murphy, clinical support officer for Ambulance Victoria, said finding the way to a call-out address can be one of the most difficult aspects of responding as a paramedic.

“One of the biggest anxieties always for paramedics is being able to find the patient and get there as expediently as possible,” she said. “I usually work as a single responder which means I don’t have a colleague beside me to help navigate to the event address.”

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“The new navigation integrated system is easier than previous systems twofold. One is that you don’t need to enter the location information into a computer before you can take off on your journey. And secondly, you don’t need to look up a map to work out where you are and to plan your own trip.”

The patient location details are populated automatically into the navigation system based on the information given at the point of call.

“This has certainly saved us minutes on responding and having to look up where we are going to and then having to work out the quickest way to get there,” Murphy said. “The

integrated sat-nav system is benefitting clinical outcomes for Ambulance Victoria, particularly in those events where time is of the essence.”

“The quicker that we can get there, the quicker that we can defibrillate the patient and provide advanced life support, then the better the outcome for the patient. The new integrated navigation system gives paramedics confidence knowing that they’re going to the right location and that the route that they have been given is the shortest, most direct route. This means we get to hospital as quickly as possible, and we have ambulances available for when patients need them.”

The countdown begins for the biggest

GIS event of the year

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ast year’s event saw a high-tech laser show; an ex-FBI agent reveal how GIS has solved some of the world’s most grisly crimes; and an army of 500 GIS professionals in the audience.

This year, Ozri 2013 – the Asia Pacific’s premier GIS conference and networking event – is set to raise the bar once again, when it takes place at Brisbane’s newly refurbished Convention and Exhibition Centre from 4-6 September.

Hosted by Esri Australia – the market leader in Australia’s spatial industry – Ozri 2013 is a chance for GIS professionals to gather, collaborate and share their knowledge of intelligent mapping and technological advancements.

The event is expected to attract GIS users from across the Asia Pacific – and features a range of presentations, training courses and workshops that will inspire and inform.

Ozri 2013 Manager Josie Sinni said this year’s conference would include more than 40 presentations from leading government agencies, councils and commercial organisations – focusing on the latest industry developments and some of the most compelling GIS case studies to date.

“This year’s Ozri theme ‘A Spatial Odyssey’, aims to reflect and celebrate the GIS industry’s

constant growth – as a sector, it is now worth an estimated $2.1 billion,” Ms Sinni said.

“Yet again, Ozri 2013 will showcase the latest developments across the Esri software suite, highlighting that GIS is more accessible than ever and now applicable to almost all businesses and government agencies.”

Ozri traditionally attracts a large contingency of government delegates from all levels of the public service – with previous highprofile presenters including the ex-head of the Queensland Reconstruction Authority (QRA) Major General Dick Wilson, and organisations such as Brisbane City Council, the Bureau of Meteorology and Department of Defence.

Following the release of the 2013 GIS in Local Government Benchmark Study – an independent research initiative supported by SSSI and Esri Australia – use of GIS technology in the local government sector will also be under the spotlight.

Ms Sinni said many of Australia’s councils had recently embarked on some ‘world-first’ uses of GIS technology – and delegates at Ozri could expect to see some of these innovations revealed.

“The 2013 GIS in Local Government Benchmark Study certainly highlighted the

growing demand for GIS capabilities in local government, and showed the sector is an early adopter and a driving force within the spatial sphere,” Ms Sinni said.

“We’ve already confirmed several councils from around the country will be presenting on their pioneering use of technology in areas such as 3D and open data access.”

A new fun element has also been added to this year’s conference with the introduction of Speed Geeking – a session giving delegates the chance to wow an audience on a range of spatial topics in less than five minutes.

“Our Speed Geeks will be asked to give a short, sharp and snappy presentation on anything spatial with the aim being able to beat the bell,” Ms Sinni said.

“It’s an opportunity for anyone – regardless of their presentation experience – to get up on stage and get involved.

“We wanted to bring a fresh element to the conference, and Speed Geeking will give delegates access to more GIS tips and tricks – but in bite size pieces.”

Other highlights of the conference include the GeoLounge hub and the Charge Bar, offering delegates the chance to meet, relax and reflect on new GIS learning.

The Gala Dinner is another key feature of Ozri – one of the most popular social networking functions of the whole conference.

“Whether it’s at the Gala Dinner or between sessions, Ozri is a chance for companies to build relationships with their peers within the GIS community – sharing their knowledge and learning about new advancements,” Ms Sinni said.

“It’s an opportunity for us all to gather together to reflect on the growth of the industry and discuss how GIS technology will continue to evolve in the future.”

Registrations for Ozri 2013 are now open at esriaustralia.com.au/ozri. Register before 14 June and save $200 with the Early Bird Special.

GTR JUNE 2013 | 45

CC BY-SA 3.0, Clipper

Case Study

AMSA FINDS SMOOTH SAILING AFTER CHOPPY CLOUD START

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he Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) may have started its voyage into the cloud with the highest of aspirations, but cultural differences led it and cloud supplier SalesForce.com through rough seas before they finally got a critical AMSA system moved onto that cloud platform.

AMSA – a federal statutory authority responsible for the management of large shipping traffic, search and rescue, marine environment protection and other maritime responsibilities – began considering its

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architectural options in response to an expansion of its remit, through which it would become the single regulator of all commercial shipping activity in Australian waters.

Given Australia’s international obligations under its International Safety Management (ISM) program, AMSA needed to improve the administration of its ISM data – previously entered into Excel spreadsheets from handwritten forms by a single data-entry clerk – and improve external access to key AMSA systems and information.

“It was a very manual process with a lot of duplication, and a lot of scope for error,” AMSA CIO Ewan Perrin told attendees at the Cloud Computing Forum 2013. “We had a lot of quality issues as well, and wanted an application that would let people get the information themselves rather than relying on this transcription.”

“It was not big enough to be an industrial strength operation, but it was too big to be done on spreadsheets. We were looking for an innovative way to solve the problem, without spending a lot of money.”

This led the organisation to consider ways it could implement a customer-relationship management (CRM) platform to improve data quality and access into the future. And that discussion quickly led AMSA to consider cloudbased CRM systems, which it saw as offering faster speed to delivery, lower price, better accessibility and quality, and more efficient staff performance.

ponderous, complex language around intellectual property ownership, dispute resolution, and so on. Salesforce.com’s contract, by contrast, weighed in at three pages: a scope of work page, a few conditions on the second page, and the signature page as the third.

“We’ve never had commercial arrangements with an organisation that were so light,” Perrin said.

“The cloud is no longer what we saw in the magazines in the airport lounge; it’s something that’s tangible. Offerings are maturing, and there’s a better understanding of what the cloud is. We know that mobile is one of the great benefactors of cloud – and yet the future is no longer about the technology, but about business innovation.”

A number of risks were identified early onwards – including commercial, data security and privacy, support, and the challenges of disengaging if necessary in the future – but the overall proposition from SalesForce.com proved irresistible for AMSA. “We had gotten an estimate from a company that had worked with us in the past for doing a more conventional approach,” Perrin said.

“They said it would take $300,000 to $400,000 and six to nine months’ development. The cloud-based proposal was around one-eighth of that price and would be delivered in around five to six weeks.”

Contractual differences Those kinds of numbers are hard for any organisation to avoid, and with the strong reassurances of SalesForce.com AMSA began to work to scope out the new cloud-based environment.

One of the most commonly-cited issues with government cloud engagements – concerns about the sovereignty of overseas-hosted data – was considered but the risk of the solution, and the non-personal nature of the data, were held to be acceptable.

Yet in a sign of things to come, Perrin recalled, the contracts presented by both parties showed just how far apart their thinking was.

Structured around the government’s ICT procurement guidelines, AMSA’s contract was around 100 pages and included the usual

“We would slap a few set heads of agreement on the table and say ‘this is what we want you to sign’. And they had never actually dealt with all of this, so that was an issue. But we looked back at the attractiveness of the proposal and decided to go for it.”

The cloud and the storm The project proceeded apace, and the SalesForce. com implementation progressed well. True to the company’s word, after four weeks, AMSA was testing a beta version of its new platform – but soon realised that it hadn’t been designed to meet all of the specifications in AMSA’s 100page document.

“Like any typical requirement, it looked trivial on the surface,” Perrin said, “but the way they had designed the application meant that, to resolve it, we would probably have had to go back and start again. We had quite a torrid time for a while and all went back to our houses to cool down.”

Ultimately, after backing off and watching the initial six-week deadline pass by, the two organisations sat down to try again.

SalesForce.com’s team sat down and reviewed the complete specification, “understood the design a bit better, came back, and actually delivered,” Perrin said.

“It was three months later than we had expected, but still within the timeframe predicted by the [conventional development] guys. And they delivered to budget.”

Lessons learned The system ultimately went live and has been delivering the automation benefits AMSA initially required. However, the challenges involved in the project, and the method of their resolution, have occupied numerous strategy review meetings since its completion – and taught some harsh realities to teams on both sides.

As a supplier to government, Perrin said, SalesForce.com “needed to understand what is special about us as an organisation, and what is special about government in general. Coming into a relationship with government is very different to the relationship they have with some of their CRM clients; they really needed to understand what was non-negotiable for us.

When they came back [after the cooling-off period] they had much more understanding.”

That said, it also became clear that AMSA, and indeed any government organisation, needed to review its way of engaging with cloud suppliers – whose very being is built around lean, flexible operation.

“When you’re a traditional government agency and trying to engage with an agile e-government approach, writing a spec, chucking it over the fence and saying ‘give it to me in six months’ doesn’t really work,” he said.

“Too often we try to transfer the risks, but it doesn’t always work. You both need to go in with your eyes open, hand in hand if need be, and sharing the risk and exposure. And we need to come to the realisation that if we wanted the benefits of quick delivery and rapid development, and wanted to do it fast, we need to dispense with the use of screenshots and logic for each screen, and so on.”

Sharing project risk, over-communicating to maintain the relationship, and in other ways maintaining the relationship between the two parties are all crucial to success, Perrin said. And, despite a period of separation after the project, AMSA is now re-engaging with SalesForce.com to build on what it has delivered, and to reuse some of the extant functionality for modules supporting training and certification.

“If you’re innovating, there will always be mistakes made – but it was still attractive for us,” Perrin said. “The cloud is no longer what we saw in the magazines in the airport lounge; it’s something that’s tangible. Offerings are maturing, and there’s a better understanding of what the cloud is. We know that mobile is one of the great benefactors of cloud – and yet the future is no longer about the technology, but about business innovation.”

GTR JUNE 2013 | 47

Case Study

MAPPING AN EFFECTIVE FLOOD RESPONSE ON-THE-GROUND INFORMATION CAN LITERALLY MEAN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH IN SERIOUS DISASTER SITUATIONS – WHICH IS WHY ACT EMERGENCY SERVICES HAS BEEN CONTRIBUTING SPECIALISED GEOSPATIAL AND MAPPING EXPERTISE TO SUPPORT AUSTRALIAN RED CROSS RELIEF EFFORTS. 48 | GTR JUNE 2013

T

he nature and scope of a response in the hours and days after a major disaster can determine the effectiveness of the entire relief effort.

Yet while the Australian Red Cross has repeatedly proved successful in mobilising large numbers of Emergency Services Volunteers (ESVs) for rapid disaster response, lack of on-the-ground locational information can compromise the efficacy of that response.

Aiming to improve this response, in 2003 – in the wake of devastating fires in the ACT – ACT Emergency Services established a crack team of geospatial specialists, called the Mapping and Planning Support (MAPS) group, which offers planning support for emergencies in the ACT and around the country.

The 90-strong team utilises Pitney Bowes Software emergency-services applications such as MapMarker, a location intelligence tool that builds on the company’s MapInfo software expertise to provide a way of managing geospatial information. Its expertise is well-regarded by emergency-services agencies around the country, which led to its deployment to Brisbane to help manage the response to this year’s floods.

“Instead of holding a fire hose or jumping onto a roof, the MAPs team hold a keyboard and create maps for the Red Cross around where their resources are and where their resources need to be,” ACT Emergency Services manager of spatial services Steve Forbes explains. “Mapping provides a huge support for the efficiency of running that response at a state level.”

Among the many data views managed by the MAPS team are rolling maps managing the location, status and staffing requirements of the many disaster relief centres quickly set up and maintained by the Red Cross during and after the disaster.

During their deployment, the MAPS team were kept busy for everything from making map books for local Red Cross personnel, to producing real-time maps that utilise Rapid Damage Assessments (RDAs) produced and supplied by the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service.

RDA data is collected in handheld devices that are synchronised with servers in Brisbane, then processed by the MAPS team for geospatial relevance and fed straight to the Red Cross to improve the planning of co-ordinated responses to disasters, such as door-to-door patrols to canvass affected areas and liaise with affected residents.

MAPS crew leaves Canberra to assist Red Cross Queensland in January 2013 (l to r: Giovanna Lorenzin, John Lee, Amanda Kildea)

Steve Forbes

Red Cross teams previously patrolled an area and meeting at the end of the day to manually share details on where they’ve been – but this process was fraught with the potential for error, Forbes says.

“In the past they would just say ‘the flood was really bad here’ and deploy teams that either had too many people, or not enough people on the ground,” he explains. “They would go out in a fairly un-coordinated fashion, maybe with copies of maps from a service station.”

“At the end of the day they would share information on where they had been, but in

this fashion it’s easy to miss complete streets, or go to a place more than once. A lot of work by the MAPS team went into producing mapping products that capture the community as a whole, and where people went.”

Properties visited by relief teams are recorded on standardised forms that are fed into the MapMarker software, then geocoded and added to an ever-evolving map to track exactly when, where and with what result the teams have visited affected properties.

It is then simple to produce follow-up maps of uncontacted properties, which can be fed to follow-up teams whose size is easy to determine based on the exact number of properties that must be visited. “This increase their efficiency ten-fold,” Forbes says.

Because they have been involved in numerous disaster-relief efforts over the years, the MAPS team are able to quickly set up in support of disaster-relief agencies for whatever they need – whether it be digital maps based on geocoded data, or large-scale printed maps to assist in operational planning.

The MAPS team manages a broad range of map-based products, co-ordinating with local government and other relevant organisations to integrate other geospatially relevant information

as a disaster unfolds. One ongoing effort involved the geocoding of the Red Cross National Registration and Inquiry System (NRIS), which “a national system for joining the dots” that helps reunite families displaced during disasters.

After each deployment, the MAPS unit works through an After Action Review – a process in which the actions taken during the disaster are reviewed, and any lessons learned identified so they can be built on or problems avoided during the next disaster.

“That helps the team make sure they’re not getting tripped over by the common things that we didn’t get quite right, and that they’re focusing on the things that went well,” Forbes says.

“This goes for MAPS crews, too. Disaster agencies could never afford to employ large numbers of spatial experts to travel to disasters around the year. This effort represents the application of professionals that normally stay in the back office, who can bring their everyday skills to emergency services.”

“We take them from their everyday environment and literally throw them into the disaster zone for the greater good of the affected communities. Staff often come back with new enthusiasm, so from a professional development perspective it’s a great opportunity.”

GTR JUNE 2013 | 49

Case Study

DATA CENTRE BUY PUTS BUNBURY’S HEAD IN THE CLOUD

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major systems and data-centre overhaul at Western Australia’s City of Bunbury has not only improved the city’s operating efficiency, but has its executives eyeing longterm opportunities as a hosting provider for other regional councils hit by the IT skills crunch.

Bunbury recently adopted IBM’s PureSystems architecture to overhaul more than 35 legacy application servers, which had been moved intact into the data centre the city constructed over two years ago.

In a fast-tracked implementation, Bunbury and integration partner Stott + Hoare were able to migrate the old servers onto the IBM PureFlex server – which combines a server, IBM Storwize V7000 storage, networking and software into a modular and manageable unit – in just over a month.

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A VMware vSphere private-cloud platform hosts Windows Server 2008 R2 systems and SharePoint Server – creating a virtualised environment that has not only simplified the architecture of its enterprise applications, but paved the way for an ongoing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementation built on VMware View.

When the implementation is complete, the VDI infrastructure will ultimately centralise around 300 user desktops in a cloud-like hosting model that lets them run Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2010 and other applications from anywhere.

“Virtualisation makes it very easy for my team to manage the infrastructure because it’s centralised,” Bunbury CIO Mike Fletcher explains. “And I don’t believe end users notice the difference with VDI; to them, it’s just a desktop.”

Yet it wasn’t the kind of technology that can be simply dropped in place: “It’s an interesting

cultural change: because we’re so diverse in local government, it’s not the sort of thing you can just plan across the board,” he adds.

“Because local governments are so diverse – for instance, the sports centre operates totally differently to the library – each of those dynamics needs to have a lot of thought and consideration prior to implementing.”

The project is one of numerous technological changes at Bunbury, with other implementations ranging from an upgrade of the council’s recordkeeping system – which now supports video and unstructured data alongside conventional structured information – and an effort to improve disaster-recovery capabilities.

The city has also implemented around 50 Apple iPads for staff, who can access council systems and their VDI desktops through the tablets. These are expected to become facilitators for more flexible work as the national broadband

network (NBN) snakes its way into the area, improving connectivity to employees’ homes.

“With the NBN and the cloud environment, there are great opportunities for mobility,” Fletcher says, noting the importance of executive support from new CEO Andrew Brien, who brings 20 years in local government in Queensland where he oversaw the amalgamation of two City councils and two Shire councils to form the Fraser Coast Regional Council.

Fletcher credits Brien’s progressive attitude to the introduction of the mobility initiative and the benefits it is expected to deliver in the long term: “prior to Brien coming onboard we hadn’t had any interaction with mobility,” he explains.

“In my view the environment wasn’t ready, and the bandwidth wasn’t delivering some of those outcomes. But the iPads have been stable, and councillors are reasonably happy with them for downloading electronic minutes, agendas, and the like. We have also been playing with live streaming, and general staff are using them to manage their emails and so on. We’re getting some efficiencies out of them.”

Long-term plans Brien’s credentials in council amalgamation support the longer-term strategy for Bunbury’s data-centre investment: with its new data centre in place and plenty of excess capacity after the completion of Bunbury’s systems migration, the city anticipates offering its VDI and server infrastructure to other councils on a hosted basis.

This council-in-the-cloud approach will not only offer lower ongoing costs, Fletcher explains, but will help councils address ICT skills shortages in an area where they have hit hard. “We all know the industry is changing and becoming extremely complex,” he says.

“Finding skilled people to manage these technologies is not easy. Similar sized councils are recognising these issues, and smaller councils effectively would have no hope of delivering those types of services. With our excess capacity in racks, capacity and storage, it’s not too difficult for us to then host other councils in the cloud environment.”

This strategy reflects a growing trend amongst local governments to look for opportunities to share expensive infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions. A robust, scalable private-cloud infrastructure promises the ability to turn councils like Bunbury into centres of service excellence, from which other councils would be able to access their own VDI images and other applications.

Such a capability would facilitate emerging policy from the new minister for local government, John Castrilli, who previously served as a City of Bunbury councillor and mayor, and is now managing state-government efforts to amalgamate smaller WA councils.

“I think out of his efforts, more dialogue will occur and more councils will start looking for alternative services – and this project will start building its own momentum. The city wants to be a tech savvy city, and we’ve got to do these things anyway. But we’re just trying to get the biggest bang for the buck for the ratepayers.

It’s all about trying to be smart.”

CC BY-SA 3.0, Bernard Morey GTR JUNE 2013 | 51

round table

EMERGENCY SERVICES: ON THE MOVE A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION FEATURING EXPERTS FROM AIRWAVE SOLUTIONS, MOTOROLA SOLUTIONS, TAIT COMMUNICATIONS, AND TELSTRA.

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Radio providers understand the world of missioncritical voice communications and how that has to be set on not compromising the mission of the customer.

Rob Hockings, Public Safety Specialist, Tait Communications

F

rom the Queensland floods to the Boston Marathon bombings and myriad other large-scale incidents, the role of emergency services organisations (ESOs) continues its primacy around the globe.

Time is seeing ESOs continue their technological reinvention, with increasingly pervasive wireless broadband, spatial information and mobile-computing technologies providing tantalising new opportunities for improving response speed and effectiveness. Yet there are challenges, too, as ongoing spectrum disputes, interoperability efforts and the pressure of everyday response continue to shape the development of the industry.

This issue, we bring together four industry experts who are involved with delivering and supporting a range of emergency systems across Australia. These include Malcolm Keys, CEO of Airwave Solutions; Paul Thompson, general manager – government and public safety with Motorola Solutions; Rob Hockings, public safety specialist with Tait Communications; Alex Stefan, national general manager for public safety and security, Telstra.

GTR: How are increasingly powerful mobile devices, and bring your own device (BYOD) programs, changing emergency-services strategies?

Hockings: They have been a mobile workforce for quite a long time; it’s just the nature of the business.

But they are really looking at the mobile workforce now, probably more in the last 12 months than we’ve seen previously. They’re quickly realising that in order to achieve this mobility they’ve got to provide a richness in the field that could possibly be richer than what they have in the office.

There’s more rigour around the process and admin, and how you can get information to the field in a timely manner rather than forcing users back to their home environment [to sync]. Getting that information transaction completed quickly and efficiently means those resources are ready to deploy to another response sooner.

Thompson: We understand that BYOD is a very attractive to a CIO as a cost-saving initiative, but does the device have the integrity when it is potentially being exposed to harsh environments, enterprise grade applications and day to day duty?

Our view is that consumer-type devices just aren’t going to cut it; they’re potentially very dangerous in the wrong hands. If you think about using an iPhone in the field, just forget momentarily about the lack of ruggedness, reliability, call setup time, and those sorts of things that officers value from a safety point of view.

Once you start taking data – whether it be capturing images, capturing video or recording conversations – this stuff needs to be evidentiary grade in a policing situation and has to be able to be downloaded to a central and safe repository. For instance, we just developed a TETRA radio with a camera in it. It’s timestamped, tamper proof, and it’s all about capture security and integrity of evidence that’s able to be used in court.

I think the public would be concerned about where that information lies, which raises questions about where you store that information on the network. Do you store it in a device or in a simple repository where it can be controlled and managed?

GTR: What considerations must be taken to ensure new solutions are effective for ESO personnel?

Hockings: You’ve got to give them what’s relevant. You can send a whole lot of information to them, but you run the risk of sending too much and leaving users to figure out what’s relevant. You have to apply a business rule or operational context to filter information to make it relevant. The user interface is also really important because it’s got to fit their behavioural traits, fit how they’ve been trained, and fit how they react.

Off-the-shelf is definitely extending to the mobile domain – but the challenge is for vendors to get on board and demonstrate how we’ve aligned with the journey. Smart devices are normal in the domestic world, but they’re not as common in the public safety environment.

There are training implications, and if solutions are more customised, away from ‘normal’, they need more training. The question being asked is less and less around the technology they use, and more on its fit and value. It’s all about outcomes.

GTR: Custom emergency systems have historically been complex and difficult to manage.

How can developers hope to keep adding so many new capabilities and devices to the ecosystem?

Hockings: A whole lot of technology has to be brought together to meet the outcomes, knowing those outcomes are moving targets. It’s not just about a single piece of connectivity; it’s about providing connectivity through a number of parts.

You have to look at the connectivity layer, data layer, and the data integration layer – and that means you have to apply business rules or interpretation.

GTR JUNE 2013 | 53

round table

The challenge for Motorola and other vendors will be getting those standards lined up to be able to accommodate the features which are specific to public safety that the Emergency Services Agencies will need.

Paul Thompson, General Manager – Government and Public Safety, Motorola Solutions

It’s almost like the [seven-layer] OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) layers in what you see and what these layers look like. They are looking at trying to reduce the amount of customisation with a common off-the-shelf approach, knowing they’re going to have to do more and more with these things. They are being very deliberate in the specific conversations they’re having, and it’s a real balancing act.

Stefan: One of the great outcomes we’ve seen this financial year has been the implementation of the Emergency Alert 2 system – Phase 2 by Telstra. Emergency Alert allows the emergency services to send alerts to citizens to warn them of potential incidents. The new service is now predicated on the location of the mobile phone rather than the registered account address, which has enhanced it quite significantly. The service will be available on the other carrier networks later this year.

GTR: Social media has reshaped the reach and interactivity of emergency-services organisations. How can they best manage this change?

Stefan: One of the things that’s been really interesting is the ability of the community to communicate with ESOs themselves through social media. Through mobile phone, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever social-media engine you use, you can provide contemporary updates to the ESOs themselves. It’s an invaluable tool when people are looking for a single source of truth during these events. Community engagement is increasing as a consequence of all these wireless technologies, and I would think can only continue to grow.

54 | GTR JUNE 2013

Hockings: If you look at the recent floods in Queensland and the way agencies used social media to inform the public, they’ve been extremely successful. The information was relevant, it got out there quickly, and emergency services were able to use that tool to affect public behaviour. The public were informed, and that made a huge difference on the response.

But if you look at social media being used as an addition to triple-zero type call information coming from the public, you’ve got to come from the other way. You have this incredible amount of information coming in and have to sort out what’s real, what’s not, what’s duplicated, and what’s additional. And I think that’s the next challenge. It will be very interesting to see the journey they take, and how vendors can play a role to do something for agencies that allows them to achieve this outcome.

GTR: With all this talk about new technologies, the old standbys are still important. How are voice radio solutions evolving, and how will they tie in with the other parts of the technology ecosystem?

Hockings: Radio providers understand the world of mission-critical voice communications and how that has to be set on not compromising the mission of the customer.

At the same time, these other technologies are becoming more and more important. So what we’re doing at Tait in terms of our solution offerings is unifying the two worlds – the mission-critical communications and business-efficiency communications – into unified critical communications.

This is what customers want: they’re not going to look at those two things differently, and not

going to look at the expectations around networks like LTE much differently than they’re going to do around their expectation that it ‘just works’.

Thompson: Today, it’s still about the P.25 and mission-critical voice that’s been in the market for some time. But we’re starting to see those emerging applications, like automobile license plate recognition, the ability to interrogate databases, and collaboration applications giving officers in the field situational awareness and better background data.

The one thing that sits beside that is the advent of video, which is going prime time. It really is impressive in terms of what’s being done there technology-wise, and there’s no question the analytical applications behind that are evolving every quarter, to look at things like unattended baggage at airports, congregation of people around ATMs and in public spaces, and so on.

That’s the tsunami that is going to come across this sector, and it’s going to be not unlike the change in the consumer and enterprise world from circuit-switched packets to IP. We don’t see voice going away for a long time because it’s a lifeline, it’s instantaneous, it’s resilient and it protects officer safety. But P.25 and LTE as a public safety-grade service, is where we’re going to evolve to.

GTR: Assignment of 4G radio spectrum has been a divisive issue, particularly with the recent 700MHz and 2.5GHz spectrum auctions.

How will this affect delivery of next-generation emergency services?

Keys: This is an area that we’ve been tracking for a number of years, and it’s a major project to free up that spectrum. We’ve been strong advocates

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round table

for PPDR [Public Protection and Disaster Relief ] spectrum to be allocated, but we also think that in terms of the 700/800MHz debate, ESOs have been given a great opportunity in the 800MHz band.

That band has fantastic propagation purposes for voice and data. I think it will be used only for data in the short term – LTE based data services for mission critical applications.

The only negative is that ESOs have put forward an argument that they need more than the 5MHz+5MHz they’ve been given. It would be prudent for ACMA to reserve another 5% or so on the basis that the first allocation is taken up, and they should be planning for some additional frequencies, particularly in metro areas where demand will be highest.

I recently took a delegation of manufacturers to Canberra to discuss their support for the 800MHz band, and to make sure ACMA were comfortable that manufacturers would actually support that spectrum band. We had five or six vendors that said all they need is clarity about what’s going on; the product design doesn’t change with the spectrum band, but they just need 12 to 18 months’ lead time.

Thompson: The auction results may become another dimension to the States’ dialogues with the Federal Government about dedicated emergency services spectrum. This leaves the opportunities for the States to talk more realistically about what they need, in lieu of the 5+5 that’s been nominated. When some of the scarcity is removed, there’s a legitimate opportunity for states to justify a legitimate case for accessing some of that spectrum for emergency management.

The only two things we think about 700MHz and 800MHz are that Australia doesn’t want to find itself in a non commercially viable spectrum that others in the rest of the world are not in. It’s about making sure that we get something that’s common with at least our territory, the region and the rest of the world.

The second part is that we need to be careful of what bands they’re in, in terms of the technical issue of interference. There’s the bandwidth challenge, of course, but the much greater challenge will be the inter-agency, public-toprivate agreements that can be set up as video becomes more pervasive.

Stefan: The availability of new digital dividend spectrum is only going to enhance communications capabilities in coming years.

Telstra has advocated a roadmap in relation to mobile broadband for the emergency services, and we’ve seen wonderful work being done by the ESOs, including ambulance officers being able to get real-time data on patient information, or fire services using it to be able to stream video from the fire front back to operational centres.

It’s really a very pervasive technology and I can only see it growing.

Fortuitously, the technology these days lends itself to it: we are already implementing mobile broadband using the 850MHz domain and 1800MHz range, and have announced that we’ll be expanding our LTE capabilities with the 900MHz range. We have also announced that we will undertaking spectrum augmentation utilising 900MHz and 1800Mhz spectrum.

With the acquisition of the 700MHz spectrum at auction, at some point it will also be integrated with the Next-G network.

The availability of new digital dividend spectrum is only going to enhance communications capabilities in coming years.

Alex Stefan, National General Manager, Public Safety and Security, Telstra

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Hockings: If you look at the network itself, it’s about coverage, capability, and connectivity.

I think sometimes we get focused on an individual thing, and have to look at what makes a good network. It’s more than just bandwidth – it’s in the network’s design, and in defining its deliverables.

Carriers and technology vendors are providing a diversity of connectivity and I think it’s now up to the individual agencies and vendors to work out what this connectivity looks like, and how it’s going to fit customers’ public safety aspirations. Public Safety agencies want to talk more and more about business outcomes, and less and less about technological detail. And they don’t need to think about MHz and lower level stuff as much; they are able to be more prescriptive in terms of the business, and are choosing to be less prescriptive in terms of the technology.

GTR: When emergencies happen, the first thing most people do these days is to reach for their mobiles. How will ESOs manage demand peaks in major incidents, and is this justification for allotments in the 700MHz or 800MHz bands?

Stefan: Telstra has implemented LTE, which has provided additional capacity – but we want to ensure we can continue to meet customer demand. In relation to the ESOs, we’re recommending that the most efficient way would be to collocate the PPDR spectrum on the Next-G network and then augment it with commercial spectrum during major events utilising spectrum augmentation techniques.

When we have a major event, and if there is congestion in that dedicated lane (PPDR

Mission critical communication services are vital to the success of any emergency services, energy or key infrastructure network.

Networks, like those required to manage emergency services, are generally complex structures comprising multiple agencies, across geographies and possibly governments. As business complexity increases, public safety organisations are subject to ever increasing demands. To manage such a complex environment successfully requires a detailed and methodical managed services approach.

Talk to Airwave about the advantages of taking a managed services approach to critical infrastructure networks.

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Capacity for in-built network resilience Improvements in operational response capability Open standards to allow for scaling and interoperability Cost efficiency Independence

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round table

The pace of change in IT is so rapid, but I have seen in the last five years a really rapid increase from a slow process, analogue, to digital and IP. Malcolm Keys, CEO, Airwave Solutions

spectrum) for ESOs, it could be augmented by commercial spectrum holdings to ensure ESOs aren’t limited with bandwidth during a major incident.

Another thing we’re looking to do by the end of the year is trial HetNets [heterogeneous networks] to provide a specific capability in high-density areas like football stadiums, where you might have 50,000 people video-streaming their experiences. We want to be able to position [coverage] at different parts of the stadium, to carry that information through those particular cells.

Thompson: Some of this discussion has been driven by the advent of smart phones in the consumer space, and an understanding of the capabilities of applications and more IT-like features. But that’s only going to get enabled with the availability of LTE broadband. And, because of the nature of the public safety agencies, they really need to see that as possibly not an enterprise grade, but as public safety mobile broadband grade.

Keys: There has been a very strong argument by commercial carriers that ESOs use a carrier grade service. There’s an argument for roaming [to improve coverage], but they’re really not emergency services-grade networks for a variety of reasons, mainly to do with the level of resilience in the network. They tend to fall over and get congested in high usage – and ESOs can’t use priority access to take away capacity.

We saw this during the London bombings: the Airwave network continued to operate without any problem while the ESO response went into full swing. It was well utilised while the public network was heavily congested, and the Coroner’s report spoke very strongly of the need to have these commercial networks operating for the public good, to keep the panic level down.

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These are good reasons these networks need to be separated. Having said that, in remote and rural networks, if there are 4G networks out there we will design the products to roam between PPDR and carrier networks. It’s just not going to be cost effective to build out to the same level the carriers can, and it’s better to have the carrier grade service than nothing at all.

GTR: How well do you feel efforts to standardise operating frequencies and systems between ESOs in different have progressed?

Keys: There’s a strong level of planning going on at the federal and state level, and with the industry, trying to learn from past mistakes about allowing agencies to go off and use the spectrum.

I think around 2015 the planning agreement will be reached around overall funding models and the allocation of spectrum, how it’s managed, and how it will be built – hopefully starting in metro areas and spreading out to regional areas.

Because each state has a large number of facilities they can use to build the network, they will be able to leverage a large amount of infrastructure to make it a fairly low cost implementation. It’s important that you upgrade to the high-speed, best network – but it’s a long term investment. I’d say LTE meets a lot of that requirement, and even P.25 and TETRA – the common standards we use today – will themselves be underpinned by LTE technology.

So, within a decade, the new networks for public safety will be on an LTE based platform – not the commercial carrier version, but a missioncritical version designed with emergency-services protocols built in – mission-critical functionality like pre-emptive teardown of calls to make higherpriority calls; push to talk; and other functionality the commercial networks don’t support.

Thompson: Standards can be very important but they may also be a lagging indicator. When you consider that for many of the mobility vendors this is about an economic argument, and many vendors are focused on the much larger markets for consumer networks and handsets, therefore those standards are the ones that are predominant and a high priority.

The challenge for Motorola and other vendors will be getting those standards lined up to be able to accommodate the features which are specific to public safety that the Emergency Services Agencies will need. For example, in the consumer world download speed is of much less significance than upload.

But in public safety emergency management, it’s going to be your upload capacity and speeds that become important, because you’re trying to get information from an incident back to the command centre.

That’s why today we talk about software defined networks, which offers the ability to have technologies that are predominantly around policy and control capabilities that are going to be needed by public safety agencies.

GTR: How is the commoditisation of geospatial technology affecting emergency-services capabilities?

Hockings: It’s very much fitting into the situational management part of the equation, and the safety aspect as well. Consider the difference between data and information: geospatial takes data from the field, and represents it as a visual representation for a person to make a decision, undertake an action, and then in real time to see the outcome.

I’m seeing it as becoming more and more important now in its ability to turn data into

round table

information. Agencies are applying response and risk rules over the top, and conversations with customers are very much around those sorts of metrics. A lot of agencies have these geospatial systems in place. They’re just taking them to the next step, asking questions internally and coming back to the vendors saying ‘this is what we need’.

They’re defining the outcome.

Keys: I really see a confluence of the data streams that is driving some real operational benefits. Mapping tools, at a consumer level, are basically free and have opened the door.

As we deliver real-time GPS location data, vehicle and personnel location into the same mixup of geospatial data and mapping tools, suddenly your operational and situational awareness has increased.

You can visualise them with your geospatial data and your mapping data to create a whole range of new possibilities of understanding what’s going on in the field. Suddenly, going from never being able to get any information from government about anything, government departments are moving to sharing everything through standardised interfaces. The next challenge is going to be to get that data into the hands of the people in the field, so their situational awareness is improved.

GTR: How is the legitimisation of cloud computing affecting emergency-services planning?

Hockings: We’re seeing some quite deliberate moves in public safety in this area. Governments and organisations are now questioning whether

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they need to own their data storage and/or applications or whether they can have others own it. They’re working through the risks, which are becoming seemingly complex – but they’re going from the top down in these sorts of analyses, and that’s a great approach.

Stefan: My observation is that ESOs have been using cloud for an extended period of time.

Many phone and video services are hosted in the cloud. Emergency Alert is one of the best examples we have of an application that operates in a cloud based environment and delivers national, ubiquitous services.

One would hope one would never need to utilise the emergency alert services, but when you do have a particular flood, fire or other event, it can scale quite dramatically. As an illustration, 7 million messages were sent during the three weeks of the Queensland floods. We’ve also recently designed the Telstra Spatial Video Solutions services capability for the ESOs in relation to being able to host video in a cloudbased environment, which came out of recent bush fire experiences.

GTR: What will be the next big thing for technology in Australia’s ESOs? Stefan: One of the major events occurring in Australia is the G20 summit in Brisbane, which will obviously be an area of major endeavour for a number of parties.

Communications will play a major role through that event, and there will be some wonderful opportunities to see how various technologies can assist in those sorts of events.

Another significant innovation has been creation of a hub, interfacing traditional radio with mobile broadband and traditional telephony services. To be able to speak to someone at the end of a smartphone with a radio, and to create the integration between these various networks, is important. All these opportunities are about obtaining common operating pictures within the emergency services – and unified communications, be it through video or IP telephony, is still a mainstay that is still evolving in ESOs. Keys: The pace of change in IT is so rapid, but I have seen in the last five years a really rapid increase from a slow process, analogue, to digital and IP. That enabling benefit of IP is really starting to kick into the thinking of emergencyservices networks, and they’re on the cusp of really significant productivity improvement based on mission critical areas, and voice and data services, and the kind of devices we’ve been talking about – and the demand the users are now creating.

CC BY-SA 3.0, Leigh Blackall

broadband

NBN VIDEO HALVES KIAMA COMMUNITY FORUM COSTS

T

he rural town of Kiama, NSW has become a focal point of national broadband network (NBN) innovation as the local council expands the scale and reach of its Kiama Connect Project, a NBN-powered initiative that’s revolutionising customer contact by enhancing council processes using highdefinition videoconferences with citizens in their homes.

Kiama Connect (kiamaconnect.com.au) went live last year, after the council – the second area in Australia to get live NBN services, and a Labor showpiece with adoption rates of over 60 per cent – identified the many opportunities presented by ubiquitous connectivity in redefining council interactions with residents.

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The council’s early Kiama TV program (www.kiama.tv.com) evolved into Kiama Connect after it began partnering with the Department of Broadband, Communications, and Digital Economy (DBCDE), which awarded Kiama three tranches of federal funding through the Digital Local Government Program.

Kiama has been delivering Community Engagement Workshops (CEWs) about recycling, composting, development and other matters online, in real time, with many participants.

NBN-enabling the CEWs offered the heavily environmentally-focused council a way of involving large numbers of residents in workshops from their own homes, which increased access by stay-at-home parents, land owners living outside Kiama, residents with limited transport options,

elderly citizens with mobility issues, and residents with physical disabilities.

Expansion of the program this March drove the council to look for other workshops that can be delivered as part of the program, which is available from residents’ homes or via NBNconnected workstations in the council office, pavilion and library buildings. User sessions are delivered through a Web interface using 128-bit SSL encryption to secure the connections.

Council estimates suggest the online workshop delivery has dramatically cut the cost of delivering the workshops. Previous face-toface sessions were limited to 20 attendees and costed an average of $482.79 per attendee, but NBN-delivered sessions cost $247.43 per attendee and can be delivered to up to 1000

people at the same time. Within five years, the council expects the cost of the sessions will be reduced to $40.46 per attendee.

In the second half of 2012, 12 group training sessions were held to educate citizens about the NBN-carried services. This included 85 new organisations, 62 repeat organisations, and 52 individual training sessions delivered to organisations.

Kiama’s early movement to improve customer service has drawn interest from other councils around the country, with the council presenting to more than 50 other councils and offering a range of tips for improving service in the NBN world.

Among these, the council highlighted the need for a large, clear and easy to operate user interface; marketing efforts such as the council’s bulk buy of HD Web cams and noise-cancelling headphones for participants of the initial service trial; a videoconferencing helpdesk and user reference guide for those users that wanted one; and establishment of standalone systems at local community sites.

A number of other Kiama initiatives have supported the Kiama Connect services: for example, council forms and policies have been amended to address videoconferencing related issues, while videoconference staff and citizen training sessions are run with some regularity.

Kiama has also appointed videoconferencing champions to build networks of support throughout the community.

“It is important to identify that this project was not as simple as plugging in a new device and running a new system,” a council spokesperson said.

“This project required council to plan and integrate a videoconferencing platform, upgrade existing IT servers, review the means by which staff communicated with the public, [teach] staff how to engage a new online audience, and develop new policies and procedures to establish protocols for videoconferencing engagement.”

As Kiama Connect continues to mature, the council is looking into ways to apply the platform to new uses such as community engagement programs and public consultations. That strategy “of gradually migrating selected services to the videoconferencing platform has demonstrated improved accessibility and usability to the community,” the spokesperson said.

FIVE MONTHS FROM ELECTION, COALITION LAUNCHES NBN ALTERNATIVE

T

he federal Coalition has moved to avoid a repeat of its 2010 election fiasco by releasing an extensive policy document that spells out an alternative policy to Labor’s NBN (national broadband network) that would involve $20.4b in capital costs and $29.5b in total expenditure through 2019.

In a joint event with Opposition leader Tony Abbott, shadow spokesperson on broadband and communications, Malcolm Turnbull, launched the long-awaited policy, which spells out objections to Labor’s $37.4b fibre-to-the-premise (FttP) rollout (which will cost $44.1b when all costs are included) and proposes an alternative infrastructure built on a combination of FttP, fibre-to-the-node (FttN), fixed wireless and satellite technologies.

The policy (available for download here), broadly alleges that Labor’s NBN rollout “is failing” after a series of setbacks that recently culminated in network builder NBN Co revising its rollout targets downwards after subcontractors failed to meet their contractual obligations.

“Labor’s NBN is inching forward so slowly there is no chance it can be completed in its current form by Labor’s deadline of 2021,” the Coalition policy says, noting what it calls NBN Co’s “eroding credibility”.

“Under Labor, millions of Australians would be left waiting a decade or more for better broadband…. At present, up to two million Australian households and businesses don’t have adequate fixed broadband – they can’t access a service or it is too slow and unreliable for basic tasks such as streaming a short video or working from home.”

By 2019, the Coalition would deploy 2.802m FttP connections, or 22% of the total, while repurposing Telstra’s existing copper network to deliver FttN services to 8.968m premises, or 71% of the total. Some 572,000 properties, or 4% of the total 12.712m properties, would be serviced using fixed LTE wireless broadband, while the remaining 372,000, or 3%, would be serviced using satellite broadband services.

Rather than the 100Mbps service promised for all FttP premises under Labor’s plan, the Coalition would deliver a minimum download rate of 25Mbps “for the whole nation” by 2016, with private-sector involvement encouraged in the rollout of new ‘greenfield’ housing estates and multi-dwelling units. By the 2019 deadline, this would be increased so that 90% of the fixed-line footprint received a minimum speed of 50Mbps.

The Coalition FttN policy relies on VDSL2 (Very High Bit Rate DSL) technology, which is capable of speeds up to around 80Mbps over very short distances. However, VDSL2 performance attenuates based on the distance between a fibre-serviced kerbside ‘node’ and the customer premises – so the Coalition policy will be based on installing tens of thousands of these nodes around the country, with a minimum average distance small enough to support its target speeds.

If it wins the September 14 election, the Coalition will direct the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) to provide a ranking of broadband blackspots, and will prioritise the rollout to these areas.

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broadband

NBN SERVICE COMPLEXITY CHANGING TRAINING, OUTSOURCING MIX: SURVEY NBN Co subcontractors may be struggling to find enough qualified workers to keep the pace of the massive rollout – but public and private sector enterprises may soon face similar problems as they get hit by a drought of staff with adequate network skills to take advantage of the NBN, a recent study has warned.

In a survey of over 200 Australian IT managers, IT management vendor SolarWinds found that 52% of respondents expect that IT skills will be a key challenge in managing IT environments in the NBN area. Fully 56% agree that network complexity will be a core challenge of the NBN. “IT managers are looking forward to an era where the NBN is fully deployed, and available

NBN UPDATE THERE’S NEVER A LACK OF NEWS AROUND THE NATIONAL BROADBAND NETWORK (NBN). HERE, GTR RUNS DOWN THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS.

to both consumers and small businesses,” SolarWinds vice president and market leader Sanjay Castelino told GTR, noting that the NBN will bring about the same complexity to network architectures as server virtualisation did to what used to be a “pretty straightforward job” as a server administrator.

“When you have ubiquitous broadband like the NBN is going to provide,” he explained, “you end up having a whole new set of services that people want to consume over that broadband.

When you add that in, you tend to be deploying more and more complex technologies. As a result, you need further specialisation.”

This was expected to drive an uptick in outsourcing of network-management capabilities, with 59% of respondents expecting a greater level of outsourcing in the next three to five years. This includes two-thirds of respondents that already outsource over a fifth of their IT functions – suggesting that the depth and commitment to outsourcing is increasing.

Not all functions will be outsourced, however: the survey found that areas involving particular risk management, for example, will be

brought inhouse for tighter control. For example, 61% of respondents – and 75% of respondents in organisations with over 100 employees – planned to “reintroduce” data storage and access, while 56% planned to bring cyber-security protections back into the organisation.

“Local and other governments will have challenges in delivering some of the new services, and organisations will outsource many things where they don’t have the expertise or the staff,” Castelino said, noting that a rise in NBN-related and networking-specific certifications will help many IT managers stay current. “Coupled with outsourcing in areas where are skills deficiencies in the organisation, organisations will be training IT staff that want to learn.”

“You’ll see a balance around how skills are developed in organisations, and things identified that are strategic to the ability to develop applications and services. The balance between the number of people wanting to insource and outsource, is a healthy sign that the market recognises that while there are things that need to be outsourced, there’s not such a skills shortage that the organisations can’t take it inhouse.”

MALCOLM TURNBULL:

• Signed a $17.9m contract to roll the NBN into

• Debuted the Coalition’s broadband policy • Calculated that Labor’s NBN model would cost $94 billion by the time it was done • Said the Coalition policy could cost the same as Labor’s FttP policy in the long run • Expressed confidence in his ability to renegotiate

multi-dwelling units • Called on federal infrastructure powers after failing to negotiate a commercial agreement with the NSW government for access to power poles • Stopped accepting customers for its interim satellite service

the government’s $11b agreement with Telstra • Implied that current NBN Co CEO and

ANALYSTS:

board members will be replaced under a

• Said the Coalition plan makes sense

Coalition government

• Concluded there was little difference between the two parties’ positions

STEPHEN CONROY: • Said the Coalition’s apparent intention to buy

• Warned that renegotiations with the government could hit Telstra’s credit rating

Telstra’s copper network was its “dumbest piece of public policy” ever The NBN debate changed significantly in tone

THE ACCC: • Rejected NBN Co’s proposed special access

and content as opposition spokesperson on

GREENS SENATOR SCOTT LUDLAM:

broadband, Malcolm Turnbull, took the wraps off

• Called the policy “a stunt”

undertaking (SAU) pricing policy

CONTRACTORS:

of an approximately $29 billion alternative NBN policy built mainly around fibre-to-the-node (FttN)

NBN CO:

• Fell significantly behind rollout targets

technology, but with fibre-to-the-premise (FttP),

• Introduced plans offering 1Gbps, 500Mbps and

• Said “piecemeal” NBN contracts were stopping them

satellite and fixed-wireless components retained as per Labor’s policy. The policy spurred a firestorm of discussion in the NBN echo chamber, with opinions in both camps being flung far and wide, and the stage set for the election.

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250Mbps download speeds • Expressed interest in next-generation Ultra HDresolution TV broadcasts • Connected services in Gosford, NSW, North Adelaide, SA, and elsewhere

from investing in training to build out their workforce • Were brought before a parliamentary committee to explain the delays • Were accused of “gouging” NBN Co while offering low pay rates to workers

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66 | GTR JUNE 2013