How City of Unley is delivering its digital strategy

With 40,000 residents, South Australia’s City of Unley is located minutes from Adelaide’s city centre. In 2017, City of Unley developed a digital strategy with a focus on three key areas:

• to offer digital services for its citizens
• to employ smart technologies and make better use of data
• to improve its staff skills set, including digital skills

After years dealing with an outdated infrastructure that was unreliable and resulted in performance issues and constant outages it was time to move to a new infrastructure.

The daily battles with an ageing infrastructure

City of Unley manager of business systems and solutions James Roberts describes the council’s ageing IT environment as “barely running, keeping the lights on”. He tells Computerworld Australia they had 10 racks of equipment when they first started with a range of different SANs and servers and all sorts of equipment from a variety of vendors, “which was an absolute management nightmare”. It was a typical three-tier architecture fallen on hard times.

A lot of the infrastructure was as old as 10 years, with blade systems and storage that were out of support. Two main issues caused by the ageing infrastructure were the systems’ performance and constant outages.

Simon Sowerby, technology services coordinator at City of Unley, says that there were almost daily occurrences where things would just not go accordingly and not perform as they should. Tier 1 applications such as record keeping or financial systems, which require a higher level of performance than the ageing infrastructure was able to provide, would constantly freeze during a customer interaction with the council.

The IT team thus looked at refreshing the entire IT environment, including server room and data centre.

Putting the new IT environment in place

IT solutions provider Nuago was tasked with the system architecture review that would help the Unley council make the design of its new infrastructure. 

At the time, the digital strategy was still a draft, but based on this draft the IT team was able to tell Nuago where the council wanted to be in a few years. Based on that, Nuago made recommendations around hybrid cloud and helped the council design its specifications around what the environment should look like.

The next step was to go to market and look for a new infrastructure. By 2018, City of Unley had stood up the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, a hyperconverged data centre platform for both on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, to replace the three-tier architecture with a more unified, managed one. Once deployed, the new Nutanix systems was run in parallel with the legacy system for a couple of weeks as workloads were transferred to the new infrastructure. 

The new systems include ERP, customer request management system, GIS mapping, 3D modelling of the city, smart-cities technologies, phone and contact centre applications, archiving and auditing applications, building management, and irrigation tools.

City of Unley also consolidated its firewalls using Fortinet’s FortiGate and performed a complete refresh of user computing, with 30% of staff receiving Microsoft Surface Pros.

Some corporate applications were moved to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform; that was a business decision rather than an IT one to serve as pilot of the Azure platform as part of the ultimate goal of moving to the cloud. The council is working on serverless APIs and integrating Azure API management services with on-premises apps running on Nutanix and working on getting APIs talking to each other.

When the migration took place, both Roberts and Sowerby agree that it was “smooth” and the main reason for it is the preparatory work done before going to tender and understanding where the organisation wanted to be and how to get there.

“I think it was the groundwork that we did about understanding what our future state looked like, and all the different paths that we needed to get where we were going. And then when we went out and we procured exactly what we needed and had a plan in place to move everything across. And when we did that it was quite a seamless experience,” Roberts says.

Building an IT team to move the strategy forward 

Initially the City of Unley IT team was made of just two people, but once the strategy was in place the council set out to build a larger team that would help move the strategy forward. This included data roles and people focused on digital transformation and on building websites and apps for online services.

Now, the IT team has 10 people, with the council total headcount of about 250 people. With that larger IT team and a new infrastructure, the team was able to focus on its digital strategy and deliver many services to the community, Sowerby says.

The challenges of a new infrastructure

There are always challenges when updating an entire IT infrastructure, and one of the biggest challenges at City of Unley was around people adapting to the hyperconverged environment.

The specific challenge was around how quickly the environment change, so the council had to make sure that everyone knew what was happening and were trained and ready for the new environment. Also, existing vendors were used to a three-tier data centre environment, so the IT team had to both learn the specifics of the hyperconvergence architecture themselves and then help their vendors, who are largely inexperienced with hyperconvergence, understand it as well.

When the modernisation project was approved, Roberts recalls, the council wanted to do a big cloud transition, moving towards a public cloud environment. But because the old environment was so unstable during its transition, they decided to stabilise everything first and revisit a possible big cloud move later. That cloud planning effort is now underway, and will likely start with a preference for software as a service (SaaS), with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) to be tackled afterwards.

Because of the decision to not go big on the cloud yet, City of Unley now faces a common challenge: capacity. Almost three years on from the infrastructure change, if the council needed to scale up it would mean buying an entire node and adding to the cluster, which Sowerby says it can be “quite pricey”.

What City of Unley’s citizens have gained

There are 50 services available online for City of Unley residents that were previously only accessible over the phone or in writing. Unley used the Azure API to connect to systems such as parking permits, development applications, and customer requests.

Not only the community is benefiting from this, internally quarterly corporate reporting has been automated with the use of Microsoft Teams, PowerAutomate, PowerApps, and PowerBI. iPads have been provided to more than 30 field staff, with printing being reduced with the introduction of online forms.

Pedestrian and traffic movement technology, a smart lightening system, and smart information touchscreens and benches from Sage Technologies were deployed to improve community experiences, and smart parking has been implemented in King William Road.

King William Road and Heywood Park are now “smart” precincts. Heywood Park has smart BBQs and bins, digital information kiosks, digital water meters, air quality and noise level monitors, electric car charging, pedestrian counting, and amenity block sensors to turn off lights when not needed.

King William Road counts on smart lighting, screens, and benches. And while parking has been removed from the street to create space for alfresco dining and temporary outdoor events, sensors have been installed in the surrounding areas to let people know where there is available parking, information which is accessed through an app.

Roberts says that along with the new Smart City Strategy—with IoT, smart technology, and sensors—there will likely be some movement around data, as research done by the council has shown this is a hot topic, and the importance of analytics and how it uses data to inform community and make decisions.

One goal for adopting the cloud more aggressively is to save costs on delivering citizen services. The council has realised that face-to-face interactions with customers cost an average of $16.90 per interaction whereas online ones cost just an average of $0.40.