Auckland City is looking for advice on its spatial IT strategy.
In November the council issued a tender for information on spatial IT, seeking input from consultancies. Spatial IT is a term for the use of GIS, GPS and remote sensing technology to collect and store data relating to the physical environment.
IT and communications manager Ian Rae says the council has been using spatial technology since 1996.
“That foundation is very strong, but we believe its evolution since then offers further significant efficiency and service enhancements which need to be assessed. There are important leverage opportunities for us to consider in spatial intelligence, e-business and customer service.”
In 1996, the council went live with GE Smallworld spatial databases for land, water and drainage network and city planning, with an interface to property data in the council’s textual database. Last year, additional features including AMIS, an infrastructure management tool, were added.
In June, the asset management functionality was further expanded with the introduction of the ability to move financial data about council assets from AMIS to the council’s SAP AG financials system, Rae says.
“That synchronizes the physical asset register in AMIS and the financial asset register in SAP and significantly improves our asset management planning capability.”
The ultimate benefits to Auckland City’s population will be improved customer service, better decision-making capability regarding infrastructure asset management, greater ability to understand and model the impact of proposed environmental changes and efficiency gains through business-to-business e-enablement, he says.