NZ’s first adopter of Datacom’s brand new council software solution, Datascape – Porirua City Council
Wednesday, 15 May 2019 – Porirua City Council is the first New Zealand council to go live with Datacom’s new smart council and community
cloud-based solution, Datascape. The council was looking for a digital and mobile solution that would put customers and
the community right at the heart of its organisation and Datascape was chosen as the best match for such a need.
The first stage of the go live for Porirua City will be enabling the Online Services module of Datascape, to provide
increased service levels. Online Services will change the way council and community work on building consent submissions
by giving visibility of a building consent from submission to issuing the consent.
The council has already deployed and released Datacom’s community engagement app Antenno to their community. The app
provides alerts on places and topics people care about, and allows people to report things directly to council.
This will be followed by Datascape’s Finance module, Property and Rating, and Customer Request Management Services,
which will provide the community with continued self-service. It will also include new online and intuitive ways to make
payment using the new New Zealand open banking standards, as well as debit and credit card payments. Over time, Porirua
will roll out the full Datascape suite, making them the first council in New Zealand to do so. Datascape will continue
to provide new ways for their community to interact with them and give their staff new ways to operate their business.
Roy Baker, General Manager Corporate Services/CFO at Porirua City Council said that the decision to go with Datascape is
a major step in the council’s journey to become more customer centric and connected with the community.
“Our customer focus journey started two years ago and since then we’ve been working to make it easier for people do
business with us, and put the customer at the heart of everything we do. We started this journey with the launch of the
Council’s various websites. We will be using Datascape and Antenno to move our systems and interactions with customers
to a new level,” Baker said.
“Online Services, particularly for building and resource consents, will address key issues for us, and Datascape’s
functionality in these and other areas has meant we will be able to provide these services in a timeframe that was not
possible with other approaches we considered. Antenno’s go live was seamless and we’re already getting great feedback
from our customers and staff.”
Mark Matijevic, Director of Datacom’s Local Government Solutions said he was delighted to have Porirua City Council as
New Zealand’s first Datascape customer.
“Porirua City Council is very focused on getting as much digital services capability up and running as quickly as
possible. They are closely aligned to our approach, which is centred on developing and delivering solutions to help
councils better connect with and engage their communities. Porirua City Council is also our first customer in New
Zealand to take up the entire Datascape suite,” Matijevic said.
“Porirua also wanted the high performance that comes from Datascape’s native cloud design. We know that our extremely
open design approach, using thousands of Application Programming Interfaces, will provide them with both easy and
incredibly powerful integration with other solutions and devices.”
An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system sits at the heart of Datascape, and will provide a far more complete view
of the customer, enabling better service. Designed for cloud computing, Datascape can be accessed from anywhere with an
internet connection, and can be scaled up as required, so councils will no longer need expensive onsite equipment and
maintenance or upgrades. Datascape is delivered via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, making it very cost effective.
“It’s great to work with Porirua City Council as a strategic partner and early adopter of Datascape,” Matijevic said.
“I think the Porirua team sees an opportunity in using Datascape to improve and evolve processes used by local
government in New Zealand.”
For more on Datascape: https://www.datacomlocalgovt.co.nz/datascape.aspx
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