Hornsby Shire Council completes transition to Azure

Hornsby Shire Council has completed a modernisation project involving the transition of a range of on-premise applications into Microsoft Azure. While this cloud transition delivers immediate efficiencies and benefits, it also sets the council up for accelerated innovation in the future. To achieve this cloud transition, the council mapped out its long-term vision and strategy, centred on the key themes of ensuring the area remains livable, sustainable, productive and collaborative. To do that, it needs to serve the needs of its diverse population of around 150,000 people.

When Sharon Bowman, Manager of Technology and Transformation for Hornsby Shire Council, first canvassed the idea, she was told that it would be difficult to achieve, because the undertaking was scheduled in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the council has largely completed the transition, working with Data Addiction and supported by Microsoft Fast Track, and is now reaping the first round of benefits from being in the cloud.

When Bowman took on her role in 2020, the immediate challenge was to assess, then fix some of the technology challenges that people were facing. Except for a couple of SaaS applications — including Microsoft 365 — most of the council’s systems were on premise and somewhat unreliable. As an existing user of Microsoft 365, and midway through the deployment of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, which was supported by Data Addiction, it made sense to consider Microsoft Azure as the platform to underpin the transformation to the cloud and further reduce the complexity.

“The migration to Azure piece was incredibly quick and we had some fairly tight timelines which we had set ourselves because we did want to decommission our on-premise infrastructure — we had some end-of-life issues. The cloud transition piece was probably about four months in total. The Data Addiction team just absolutely powered through, kept everybody on track,” Bowman said.

Ben Johnson, Managing Director of Data Addiction, stated that the company wanted to use Microsoft to make a difference. “Both our team and the team at Hornsby Shire Council believe we have achieved exactly that and we are proud of our partnership. Because we are specialists in Azure, we have the privilege of being able to reduce the cost and complexity of transformations like this. It’s a great outcome,” Johnson said.

The council’s initial cloud transition is a lift and shift to the cloud, which has set the council up for further modernisation down the track. The transition to the cloud has also delivered operational benefits to Hornsby Shire Council’s IT team through reduced complexity and ‘single pane of glass’ for operations. The team no longer has to manage ongoing maintenance of the 92 virtual machines using multiple on-prem systems; instead, the rationalised set of servers can be managed easily using tools in the Azure cloud infrastructure provided by Microsoft.

The simplification and reduction in overheads has been one of the first benefits, with more anticipated as innovation gathers pace. For example, Hornsby and Data Addiction are working on a proof of concept dubbed ‘citizen on a page’ that will leverage the Azure cloud to collect and interpret all of the information that the council has about a resident in order to understand and tailor the best services to meet that resident’s needs.

“We are working with our customer service team to pilot use of this ‘single view of the customer’ at the front line, and then also having a look at how we can use it to give better information to our executive team and managers about the customer experience we are delivering,” Bowman said.

Instead of having to trawl through multiple systems, the solution collates everything and serves up a holistic view of the resident. This is one of the concepts being led by Hornsby’s team that is focused on digital and business transformation. A recent audit revealed as many as 500 largely paper-based forms used in council processes, many of which Bowman believes will be able to be streamlined, digitised and modernised using Microsoft Power Platform, in order to help bring the council’s vision of the future to reality.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Connect world