A city council in NSW

About This Project

A city council requires the development of ICT enterprise architecture to guide future decision-making in line with their five-year ICT and Information Management Strategy.

The Situation

The City was formed in 2016 after the amalgamation of two Councils. With over 361,000 residents, it is the largest council in NSW.

The council has developed a five-year ICT and Information Management Strategy to guide all ICT planning, purchases and deployments in an effective, efficient and sustainable manner. This strategy includes a number of initiatives, one of which is to develop improved enterprise architecture artefacts.

Enterprise architecture artefacts are high-level descriptions or models that describe how the council information technology architecture as a whole operates and interacts with others, what applications it uses to do this and how those applications function. These documents can be used to assist in making future decisions about ICT and information management within the organisation.

They appointed Information Professionals Group as the lead consultant to assist with this project.

The Approach

Our first step was to consult with key stakeholders at the city to understand their main business issues, challenges, and goals.

We advised that the project should start with a focus on applications architecture. This allowed us to immediately identify opportunities for improvement and provide a starting point for expansion into infrastructure architecture and technology.

From the start, we collaborated with the their Business Systems architect to ensure we were developing artefacts based on a shared understanding. This approach helped us avoid any inconsistency as they progressed through different stages, as well as allowing potential improvements to be identified and addressed early.

We also utilised the Information Professionals Group Local Government reference architecture, and known examples from existing local government technology architecture. This provided a baseline to compare with the its Current State and helped to make the whole project faster and more efficient.

By working in an iterative way, with regular version reviews and feedback sessions, we were able to manage expectations while also adapting to changing requirements for the information system architecture. This collaborative environment also helped to develop the skills of internal staff across the council.

We also worked with our research partner, Gartner, to leverage their knowledge and provide specific guidance — particularly in the areas of cyber and information architecture.

The Impact

Our work on this ICT enterprise project has been highly successful. The Application Architecture is already fit-for-purpose, although further refinements are ongoing.

The project is currently in the process of internal consultation and we will continue to be involved with the council to assist and provide guidance on issues such as implementation, application consolidation, investment, divestment and transition options.

The project has been an excellent opportunity for Information Professionals Group to continue to expand our experience with local government systems and applications, as well as providing specialist consulting services in the areas of ICT architecture and cloud architecture.

It has been very rewarding to work with the council and see this strategy come together. We hope it will guide decision-making in line with the local government’s vision of sustainable ICT services for all, as well as helping them to deliver on some of their critical strategic goals.