Leading Through Change: What Devonport City Council and Airways NZ Learnt on Their Journey to the Cloud

Post Date: 09/06/2020
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About two weeks ago we hosted our very first ShiftHappens APAC virtual conference where we invited a few senior leaders from government agencies to share their success stories on how they optimised their cloud investment and accelerated digital and cultural transformation.

All sessions have a consistent theme—organizational change and how AvePoint helps to drive that change and enhance technological adoption.

The two sessions we’re highlighting here will be presented by Devonport City Council and Airways New Zealand on what they have achieved on their journey to the cloud.

Devonport City Council

The global pandemic (COVID-19) has presented unprecedented challenges for federal, state, and local governments, who quickly realized that they were not well-equipped with the technology and knowledge to enable a strong digital workforce.

Devonport City Council was not one of these organizations thanks to a two-year digital transformation journey they had undertaken from 2018 to 2020.

Devonport City Council has been running a Living City initiative—the single largest community transformation initiative that’s ever happened in Tasmania—with the aim of making this community more attractive to tourists.

“While we were modernizing the community, we hadn’t really been modernizing the way we operate in local government,” said Jeff Griffith, who joined Devonport City Council in 2018 when the local government was still equipped with ineffective, old technologies like outdated PCs and offices that had paper stacks everywhere.

Over the past 2 and half years, Devonport City Council has initiated a cloud-first strategy to get rid of the old 1990s look and feel that they had in the office, including:

  1. Transitioning 75% of the employees to laptops
  2. Transferring core business systems and telecommunications services to the cloud
  3. Fully utilizing Microsoft 365’s capabilities for collaboration
  4. Moving the records management practices to the cloud
  5. Rebuilding the website which delivered 70%+ forms online

“To make the transition, we went looking for alternative quality cloud record solutions that would overlay SharePoint, that would give us the level of effective records governance that we needed. AvePoint Cloud Records absolutely stood out when compared to the other solutions out there,” said Jeff.

Devonport City Council was able to migrate over 1.2 milling records from HP Trim to SharePoint online and manage everything appropriately using AvePoint Cloud Records prior to the pandemic, which has left the council is a good position to cope with the unforeseeable lockdown and work from home situation.

“Our employees just carried on working through that period of lockdown as if there’s really been no change,” Jeff concluded.

For the full session replay, including an informative Q&A portion, watch on-demand here.

For more ShiftHappens APAC Sessions, watch on-demand here.


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Joanne is AvePoint's Asia-Pacific Marketing Manager.

View all posts by Joanne Chang
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