Auckland City Council(MIS100 2009)

By CIO staff | Friday, July 24 2009

2008 ranking: 47

Senior IS executive: Ian Rae, CIO
Reports to: General manager, organisation performance
Size of IS shop: 95

PCs: 2473
Mobile PCs: 275
Terminals: 250
Hand-held devices: 447
Total screens: 3445

Industry: Government and defence
PC environment: Windows XP, HP
Server environment: Windows 2003, HP, IBM, Sun
DBMS: SQL, MaxDB
Address: 1 Greys Avenue, Auckland
Website: www.aucklandcity.govt.nz
Key IS projects this year: Continued geospatial system developments; customer service technology enhancements including CRM expansion; financial process and systems evolution.

Last year a key issue was beginning initial preparation for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, this year it’s deciding whether or not to fund zoo elephants during a recession. Auckland City Council has a diverse range of issues to deal with, and has developed a correspondingly wide range of business objectives to tackle them. These have been established in the areas of economic development, transport choices, natural and built environments and an efficient and capable council.

Long-serving CIO Ian Rae says individuals and organisations find it easy to do business with the Auckland City Council because of its smart use of technology.

Examples include modelling technologies used to assist town planners in making the right planning choices, programme management software to assist the Council in achieving capital investment plans; and raising community technology awareness and competency through local library learning centres with free internet access. This year, people will also have more choice around how they prefer to interact with Auckland City Council. He says overall ICT project budgets will remain the same this year.

The Council’s three largest ICT projects by investment cost this year are CRM expansion, geospatial developments and EDRMS architecture. Business intelligence and knowledge management system improvement and upgrades are also planned for 2009, along with an extension of wireless infrastructure throughout the council and city, and e-business projects designed to improve the value of Council web channels for internal staff and the public.

Auckland City Council outsources only application development — to Infor, Deloitte, Tenzing and Eagle Technology. All other IT functions are performed in-house.