news shadow - A Information Leadership meeting room with text on the door: Let's make work better
30 November 2015

ALGIM 2015 Local Govt ICT Vendor of the Year award

Information Leadership won the inaugural award presented at the annual ALGIM conference in November.

Mike Foley, President of ALGIM with Sarah Heal, Co-founder and Director of Information Leadership

Upper Hutt's Steve Lock take on their EDRMS/Intranet implementation:

 

"Upper Hutt City Council would like to recommend Information Leadership for the ALGIM 2015 Local Government Vendor of the Year award. Council were at a point where effective information management and in particular collaboration were presenting a challenge. These areas had been highlighted as areas of concern in our staff surveys. We had selected SharePoint as our IM product of choice but were struggling to get this kicked off. Based on recommendations from other Councils, we had a series of discussions with IL to understand how we could gain some traction with our implementation. The entire Executive Management team visited another Council to gain greater understanding of SharePoint capabilities and also IL’s capability to deliver.


IL made every effort to really understand our issues, in particular our size, limited expertise and limited budget. Through workshops with key staff and Executive Management they were able to craft a plan that would deliver a ‘digital workplace’ to Council over an acceptable time period and at the right price point.

IL’s approach was to work with Council to ensure they became self-sufficient in the delivery of SharePoint sites and capabilities and provide support in this journey. As with any project of this size there have been hiccups along the way due to Council resourcing issues. IL recognised these early in the various phases, and have always engaged with us to come up with solutions to these. In particular they have provided excellent resources in the design and project management areas.

IL’s whole design approach is based on best practise and lessons learned through other implementations, and in particular other local authorities. This has given Council a huge head start as we proceed through the delivery of our sites. Their use of a design wiki means every decision made is captured and available for future use. Their new Designbankwill enable us to contribute some of our designs to assist others as well as using others designs. This concept is an outstanding approach to collaboration, especially in the Council space.

IL has an excellent set of software capabilities that have made the implementation and staff acceptance of our SharePoint environment as smooth as possible. A new Intranet was one of the early deliverables as this was going to be key to ongoing staff acceptance of our SharePoint environment. IL worked actively with our team to ensure the solution met staff requirements and deadlines.

Recognising our budget limitations IL were able to offer an excellent outcome in regard to software licensing requirements. Their flexibility in this area is a differentiator to other vendors we have worked with.

IL offer outstanding training capabilities especially in Records Management and SharePoint Administration. We have had many staff trained and all have commented how well the training was delivered and the quality of the trainers.

Without hesitation I would recommend IL to other Councils considering using SharePoint in the IM space"


Steve Lock
Information Systems Manager, Upper Hutt City Council