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Devonport City Council in 2018 when the local government was still equipped with ineffective, old technologies like outdated PCs and offices that had paper stacks everywhere.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:
- Transitioning 75% of the employees to laptops
- Transferring core business systems and telecommunications services to the cloud
- Fully utilizing Microsoft 365’s capabilities for collaboration
- Moving the records management practices to the cloud
- 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.
Airways New Zealand
Starting in 2015, instead of upgrading the aging on-premises infrastructure, Airways NZ started its move to the cloud. However, when they were new to the Microsoft cloud, they saw some of the early chaos: no easy way of searching both infrastructures in a hybrid environment, users creating groups or sites that records managers couldn’t see or access, records management software not being set up properly to meet Archive New Zealand’s Mandatory Standards for Public Records, and so on.
In order to fix all these problems, they started to think about what the perfect world should look like and worked their way backwards from there.
“This way we were not constrained by existing tools but able to look at the big picture and decide what tools we needed, rather than making the tools we already had perform tasks they were not necessarily designed to do,” said Jenny Ryan, Digital Transformation Analyst at Airways NZ.
This is when AvePoint came into the picture. After understanding Airways NZ’s business needs and pain points, we were able to help them build a governance structure that allows their IT team to take back control of the provisioning process. Instead of using a standalone records management platform that doesn’t often integrate with users’ day-to-day workspace, we also made it possible for them to leverage Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint as THE records management system that meets all their “must-have” records compliance requirements.
“We believe we can achieve Microsoft 365 NZ PRA compliance once all our AvePoint tools are fully implemented,” said Jenny.
Watch the full session recording if you’re interested in learning more about how we managed to craft a solution for Airways NZ with our Cloud Governance and Cloud Records.
For more ShiftHappens APAC Sessions, watch on-demand here.
