Situation
A local Melbourne council required a strategy outlining how they would leverage innovative technology to support the provision of digital services to the staff and community.
Terra Firma was engaged to conduct a digital and technology current state assessment and develop a practical and achievable Digital Strategy and Roadmap for the next three to five years.
Challenge
The council had recently appointed a new CEO with a strong customer-focused agenda. The council was also experiencing constrains due to growing impacts of covid.
The new Local Government Act (2020) required more transparency and open government.
The previous technology strategy was due to expire, and the Information Services and Strategy department did not have the available internal resources to develop a new strategy in a timely manner.
Solution
Terra Firma completed a desktop review of council policies and strategies. This included the draft Customer Experience strategy, Local Government Act (2020) impacts, other councils’ strategies, the ICT and digital environment best practice benchmarks and trends and reviewing new technology.
We conducted all council stakeholder interviews and collaborative workshops via MS Teams to identify issues, discussion points, insights, and opportunities.
We developed a multi-choice questionnaire and conducted an online community engagement survey in collaboration with Council’s Community Relations Department to obtain community feedback on Council’s Digital Strategy requirements.
We conducted a Council Technology assessment and reviewed the outcomes of the previous technology strategy. This was collated into a formal Current State assessment and presented to the Steering Committee.
Our Approach
Our experts undertook a 5-phase approach to complete the current state assessment and develop the digital strategy:
• Discovery and Planning
• Current State Analysis
• Target State Design
• Roadmap Development
• Finalise the Strategy.
Our Future State draft strategy included the CEO’s customer-driven focus, stakeholder expectations and council challenges. We incorporated local Government Act (2020) impacts and future ICT trends effecting service, technology, and operating models.
The digital strategy framework was based on:
• Strategy on a page
• Strategic theme business drivers and key actions
• Strategic roadmaps describing the objectives, activities, and timing to complete the journey
• A strategy governance model
• Risks to the successful delivery of the digital strategy.
Outcomes
The ICT Strategy was well received and accepted by the Steering Committee, including the CEO and executives.
Terra Firma developed an achievable roadmap that will deliver on council’s ICT Strategy in a timely and cost-effective manner.
We implemented clear governance and risk management to ensure the strategy will be utilised as a working tool to focus on customer service.
Our strategy will deliver on key insights, allow staff to add value, incorporate new and emerging technologies, and extract value from existing systems in a resource-constrained environment.
