You will have noticed an enriched ALGIM webinar programme in recent times. To enable ALGIM to continue to bring great speakers and topics of interest to your desktop we are offering a new subscription model. We have designed the annual subscription option to be a lot more cost effective than the current ‘pay as you go’ model.

With our new subscription service, we will provide your council with at least 24 high-quality webinars each year, providing education and thought leadership across all disciplines.

Subscribe for all this value and more:

• 24 high-quality webinars
• Bringing industry experts and practitioners to you
• Unlimited access for everyone in your council
• Ability to participate in live Q+A sessions with the presenters
• You can watch live or view recordings any time at your convenience
• One low, annual subscription fee per council
• You can use these webinars and recordings as training resources for staff
• The webinar programme content is designed for local government

To take up this great offer your council must be a current member of ALGIM.

Starting from 1 August 2020, and with three pricing tiers depending on the size of your council, you will see this pricing provides excellent value for money for your council. Pricing can be found here.

As the programme is starting on 1 August instead of 1 July, the prices for the first year have been adjusted to 11 months pricing.

Subscribe to the webinar programme

Back in March 2020 ALGIM surveyed councils to find out more about the technology they use in their council chambers, and how they are live streaming meetings.

With the obvious caveat that this was carried out pre-COVID, there are a lot of great lessons to be taken from the research.

Read the paper (member log-in required)

The Web Audits and CX Mystery Shop are some of ALGIM’s most valued annual activities for local government.

They provide a snapshot of the local government sector, guidance on where councils can improve, and provide annual rankings.

While ALGIM won't be undertaking the annual, large-scale Web Audit and CX Mystery Shop in 2020, due to COVID-19 restrictions, we welcome requests from those councils who wish to engage ALGIM to undertake an individual web audit or mystery shop for their council.

For more information and pricing, please register your interest.

Register your interest

ALGIM is always looking for new ways in which we can support the digital and ICT needs of our members; something which is more important than ever during this time.

We are members of the international grouping called the Linked Organisation of Local Authorities (LOLA).

LOLA, together with Socitm in the UK and Major Cities of Europe (MCE), has created a Covid-19 Digital & ICT Impact Survey to allow us to provide our members/organisations with key insight into the challenges they, together with other businesses and organisations in their localities, are encountering. We would like your help to complete this short survey (15-20 minutes):

Take the survey

We aim to gain insight from all areas of activity, so we would appreciate if the survey link could be distributed to relevant members of your organisation to complete.

Gaining responses from a variety of local government organisations in the public sector, and also a wide scope of staff within them, will not only allow for us to provide comprehensive and in depth results to you, but will also allow you to examine these by location, sector, size and more.

We aim to obtain, as widely as possible, a global insight into the challenges being faced by local government organisations and how they are adapting.

Our survey is also unique in that the results will be tracked over time, providing you with adaptable insight over time to the changing challenges arising and digital tools available as we transition through lockdown and to the new ‘normal’, allowing you to understand the key areas to focus on with a vision of what the wider public sector is facing and doing to adapt.

We would appreciate your help in completing this short survey. We would like to collect he first phase of submissions by the end of May – it should only take 15 to 20 minutes, and we will be providing results within 2 weeks of this phase one.

Planting the flag - a new local normal

LOLA have also put together a document that provides an initial outline on how local government can emerge from the crisis with a new sense of purpose, without reverting to the way things were.

This is about making the most of the rapid changes we've been implementing over the past couple of months, and using them to come out the other side more engaged with our communities, and equipped for the future.

Read the document

New Zealand’s ‘Go hard, go early’ attitude into COVID-19 stay-at-home lockdown challenged all  78 local authorities on a number of fronts, including support for local businesses and communities through a phased re-entry into an economic recession.

Often criticised for moving too slowly, councils are showing they can collaborate and move at an accelerated speed to meet the needs of their respective communities.

Ashburton District Council launched its COVID-19 community hub - a web app for COVID-19 related resources, news, information and alerts - within days of moving into restricted levels of lockdown. Co-developed  with neighbouring Timaru District Council, with concept design suggested by Squiz, the app - technically a Progressive Web App (PWA) - was conceived, designed, tested and launched within an impressive two-week window.

The app has since been adopted by a number of other councils in New Zealand, including  Gisborne and Mackenzie district councils.

Ashburton didn’t stop there. They followed up with an ‘open for business’ campaign that delivered an intuitive business directory to help rally community support for local businesses. This marketing effort, and business directory tool developed by Squiz, would spark life to a stalled local economy,  as the national COVID-19 alert level was downgraded.

“There is no textbook for what we are facing right now,” Ashburton District Mayor Neil Brown said, “but our best hope is to continue supporting one another and being united as a community to get our district through this,” he added.

COVID-19 restrictions may continue for a while.

However, Ashburton District Council continues to  work innovatively to  stay one step ahead and  help reduce uncertainty while  supporting  its  community wherever possible, and within government guidelines.  

The beauty of Mid Canterbury Open for Business campaign and business directory, is that it will help residents find what’s available in the district, said Mayor Brown. 

The benefits are obvious. Not only has Ashburton District Council prepared itself to support their local community, its Economic Development Department is now sharing their knowledge and tools to help other local government organisations succeed. 

Both the COVID-19 app and the Community Business Directory were developed on Squiz’s Digital Experience Platform.

Links

●      Covid-19 apps - https://covid19.ashburtondc.govt.nz/app, https://covid19.gdc.govt.nz/app, https://mobile.mackenzie.govt.nz/app/_recache

●      Ashburton’s community business directory - https://openforbiz.ashburtondc.govt.nz/app

Every year ALGIM takes pride in holding informative and engaging conferences for our local government members.

Unfortunately, due to the continuing COVID-19 situation and the impact this has had on mass gatherings, council training budgets, and travel restrictions, we’ve had to make some tough decisions.

ALGIM Autumn and Spring Conferences

The ALGIM Autumn Conference (GIS and Information/Records Management) and ALGIM Spring Conference (Customer Experience and Web & Digital) are cancelled and will not be going ahead in 2020.

ALGIM Annual Conference

The ALGIM Annual Conference is still scheduled to go ahead in November, although as we all know the future remains uncertain, so a decision on this will be made closer to the time.

We are looking to expand the topics for this programme to include areas of interest for GIS, IRM, Web and Digital, and CX.

What if you’ve already registered?

If you’ve already registered and paid for the Autumn Conference, we are happy to hold this as a credit towards the Annual Conference (which will incorporate some of the content from the Autumn Conference) or it can be put towards one of the many training courses run by ALGIM throughout the year.

Alternatively, we can organise a refund if you would prefer. Please contact admin@algim.org.nz to arrange that.

Thank you for your understanding. If there’s anything ALGIM can do to help your council in this time, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

• Thank you to Enghouse Interactive for sharing their new e-book on how to set up a remote working contact centre. You can find the link to the e-book at the bottom of this post.

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• Enghouse Interactive has a dedicated Work from Home page, designed specifically for IT staff and contact centre managers wanting to understand more about remote working; visit enghouseinteractive.com.au/work-from-home/
  

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• New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown is potentially due to be lifted over the next few weeks, but many organisations are talking about making the call to keep their staff at home indefinitely for safety reasons, where feasible. For a contact centre in particular, social distancing is a challenge with tens or hundreds of agents – previously grouped closely to achieve a tight team environment!

  Even when COVID-19 safety reasons go away (although we can only dream of when that happy time may come) there are declarations across the board that for a variety of reasons, home working on the wider scale is here to stay. Travel fatigue, petrol costs, environmental concerns, work-life balance, recruitment advantages and scalability are just some of the reasons that compel this view.

  Another reason that was brand new to many employers, arising for the first time last month, is the link between Business Continuity and working from home. Businesses whose workers were already used to regularly (if not permanently) working from home had a much better time of it recently when it came to COVID-19 and the transition to remote work.

  We have seen (via our video calls!) makeshift offices emerge in dining rooms, garages and bedrooms throughout the country.  Many were up and running quickly, working over VPN or browser and communicating externally and internally via mobile and video.

  But moving a contact centre operation to a home environment isn’t quick or easy, and must be carefully planned to fully reap the benefits. Businesses also need to think about issues like team management and security. Another consideration over the last few weeks has been scalability. While some organisations have downsized, there have been many who have needed to ramp up their contact centres to deal with an increased load as customers or residents seek urgent information relating to the current situation.

  If your managers have had to act as reactively as most of us, it might be a good time now to sit down and review all the elements of a successful work-from-home operation, possibly under increased load. If this is the way of your future, even in the mid-term, then you need to look at ongoing recruitment, provisioning, training and management of the contact centre with a different, ‘virtual’ mind-set.  

  In light of many organisations having to work from home due to the current crisis, we have created an eBook checklist detailing the critical elements for an organisation to review when moving their contact centre team to a remote working environment.

• What equipment should you think about?

• What are the things you can do to ease the transition for customers?

• Are there tools to help?

• What are the ways to help your staff?

• What should you do to prepare for the future?

Enghouse Interactive has a dedicated Work from Home page, designed specifically for IT staff and contact centre managers wanting to understand more about remote working; visit enghouseinteractive.com.au/work-from-home/

View the e-book

Now that you have everything largely in place for the COVID-19 crisis. Have you done all that you could have and what should you be thinking about for the near, medium and longer term to best support your organisation?

Effectus has customised this 10 step plan from Info-Tech Research Group to help answer those questions and provide a good practical reference document for local government.

The ten steps are:

• Prepare IT to support the business
• Inspire and over deliver
• Make technology awesome
• Turn this strategy into a tactical project
• Focus on the customer
• IT must help lead business process innovation
• Protect core operations and IT process
• Prepare for the economic downturn
• Re-prioritise the work programme
• Review and revise security priorities in a pandemic

You can see detail on these, plus more in the strategy document.

First off, a big thank you to Environment Canterbury for sharing this document with us to provide to the rest of local government. 

Having the need to suddenly roll out collaboration tools thrust upon us, it's handy to have a comparison on the two from a local government perspective. That's exactly what this document does. 

Have a document you think could be handy for everyone else? You can reach us on marketing@algim.org.nz

Environment Canterbury collaboration tools

Purpose

• This document is to give a brief overview of the reasoning behind the implementation and use of Microsoft Teams for Environment Canterbury. This implementation has been pushed through under urgency with the event of Covid-19 and the stage 4 lock down.

  Current state

  Microsoft Teams is a unified collaboration platform and forms part of the Microsoft 365 suite of products. It is demonstrated as a single pane of glass, like a window to all the other applications and tools available. Skype for Business (cloud based) is being incorporated into teams, and it is likely we will see this with other Microsoft offerings.

  Environment Canterbury runs a Microsoft environment (stack) and has opted to use many of Microsoft’s cloud offerings. These cloud offerings provide greater resilience than on premise solutions, with portal.office.com being accessible from any internet enabled computer. Environment Canterbury has been “implementing” Office 365 for approximately five years. From the use of OneDrive instead of USB keys, to Power BI being our primary reporting tool, this path is not new, and is familiar for our users. SfB online is due for retirement in July 2021, while SfB on premise is due for retirement in 2024.

  As Teams sits in this M365 suite, the administration and management are not new. It is changing as Microsoft increases and improves the offerings regularly, but the platform administration is consistent with all other 365 products.

  Environment Canterbury requirements

• Environment Canterbury has previously used Skype for Business (on premise) for the provision of online communications. These include (but are not limited to) online meetings, chats, calls, screensharing, and file sharing. In addition, SfB is used for the live broadcasting of Council meetings and sits alongside the Enghouse solution to provide the inhouse call centre solution.
• A requirements document was completed to ensure that requirements of all stakeholders were assessed against any product for implementation.

• Other collaboration options

  There have been many other web bases SaaS products that have become available over the last few years that focus on communications offerings. Some of these that the BIS Operations team have looked at are: Cisco Webx, UniFlow (Cannon), Fuze (Fusion Networks), RICOH Unified Communications System (UCS) Advanced Service and Zoom. All options were looked at for their functionality in individual direct communication, group communications, meeting room functionality and large-scale broadcasting. Each was also assessed against what it provided over and above Microsoft Teams, as Teams already existed in the environment and was free with our AOG enterprise licencing.

  All options were more expensive than Teams (because Teams is licenced within existing agreement) and none provided significantly better experiences or functionality. Fuze would have been the preference of BIS Operations, but the increased functionality over Teams was limited and would have run on top of Teams.

  Zoom was considered in depth, as it is used at other regional councils. The following table gives a brief overview of Zoom vs Teams for Environment Canterbury.

  	Zoom	Microsoft Teams
  Cost	$180k per annum	$0 (included in current licencing)
  Core Purpose	Web conferencing tool	Collaboration tool
  Functionality	·       online meetings, ·       chats, ·       calls, ·       screensharing ·       file sharing	·       online meetings, ·       chats, ·       calls, ·       screensharing ·       file sharing ·       integration to Office 365
  System administration knowledge	Very little, we have been to one sales day	Well understood and developing, across BIS Ops and Knowledge Management
  Integrations required	Bolt-ons to connect to other products	None – all included
  Call centre	Can’t run with Zoom	Will run on Skype and Teams, compatible with Enghouse
  User interface	Is better on Zoom	Being developed on Teams

  Included is a System Administration knowledge row as any enterprise implementation would require an inhouse skill set, which is currently lacking.

  Also noted the although Waikato Regional Council had implemented Zoom, they are now dis-continuing the use and opting for Microsoft Teams.

  Teams Implementation

  BIS Operations, aware of the retirement of the SfB, has been assessing different options for replacement for approximately a year. Due to the above and knowing the business requirements it was decided to investigate what would be required to fully implement MS Teams.

  Funding was secured from Microsoft to bring Lexel to Christchurch to run a workshop with key parties to work out where we were, and what was needed, to undertake a full MS Teams implementation. The workshop was completed in late January and was hugely successful. The Lexel facilitators had excellent knowledge and had implemented Teams in similar environments to our own.

  Coinciding with the start of the COVID-19 event, we were working with Lexel to develop three statements of work as a result of their workshop. They were; Teams calling / chat, Team meetings and meeting rooms, Decommissioning of SfB on premise. This was then going to be presented to ELT for endorsement and funding (Microsoft had indicated they would also help fund implementation). As MS Teams is developing, including the “live events” option for council meeting, further SOWS and implementations would be completed and imbedded in Teams.

  Conclusion

  Covid-19 has caused the rapid adoption of MS Teams in Environment Canterbury. Use of M365 and other SaaS products take burden off the internal network. Moving most to this has decreased pressure on the SfB server, allowing it more capacity to cope with call centre traffic.

  These products are available from any internet enabled devices and have provided much needed capacity to the organisation. Limitations of any SaaS/M365 product will occur due to the user's internet speed and connection. There is some degradation of service across ISPs due to high use with everyone being at home, but this can be mitigated by not using video – and is irrespective of communication products used.

  Due to the Covid-19 level 4 implementation, Environment Canterbury was forced down a path quickly, but all the work completed previously has confirmed this is the right path for our organisation.

  Notes

  This report is for Environment Canterbury (Canterbury Regional Council) and is reflective of current state for this organisation. Other Councils who do not have teams implemented may choose to do this under their AOG licencing provided they have at least an Office 365 F1 licence. If they don’t have this, it can be easily acquired through the volume licencing centre and working with their licencing partner.

Many local authorities are using Teams but chances are that few have looked at the information management requirements. With the current situation the use of Teams has increased, and so knowing the IM requirements is even more crucial.

Teams is a great collaboration tool and great for chats. One of the positives is that the use of teams could reduce the number of internal emails. However all councils should consider the following:

• Teams should be used for chat, provision of meetings etc rather than a document store and an information source.
• The creation of collaboration spaces needs to be a controlled process; the ability to do this should be relegated to the appropriate people.
• Monitor and keep track of the use of teams.
• Have a consistent approach to the naming of Groups and Teams.

Teams can be a great tool if the use is monitored and staff are not allowed to “do their own thing”. If processes are not put in place when Teams is implemented then Teams can become another nightmare like shared drives are for information managers.