May 11

Written by: CivicView News
Wednesday, 11 May 2011 

Winton Shire Council in Western Queensland has selected the locally developed enterprise management solution, CivicView.  

CivicView will integrate and manage operations right across the council, including critical financial and document management processes, to streamline data and management in a single enterprise system.

Following a rigorous tender process and demonstration of four short-listed products, CivicView was selected to replace the ‘Practical’ software system at Winton.

“CivicView provides Winton Shire Council with a fully-integrated system and all the experience and resources to cover all our software, technical and service requirements,” said Winton Shire Council CEO Greg Coulton.

Coulton involved key staff in the evaluation process to ensure CivicView would satisfy users across the organisation.

“I was primarily concerned with satisfying the needs of the day-to-day users: to provide council employees with a system that was functional and easy to use,” he said.

“Staff involved in the demonstration were really impressed with the operation of CivicView – it’s intuitive; it’s logical - this made them feel very comfortable about adopting the system at Winton and using it every day,” said Coulton.

“You can see CivicView has been designed by an end-user, not a software developer with no idea of how the application will be used, or what an organisation needs,” he said.

“The integration is seamless: you perform an entry once in CivicView and it flows through the entire suite, for multiple databases and applications.”

“CivicView is robust, easy to use and the price was right,” he said.

CivicView will be deployed on Winton’s servers and subsequently managed onsite, by local Winton Shire staff.

“Despite the level of functionality we get with CivicView, we don’t require in-depth IT expertise here to manage the system in-house”.

“This is a massive benefit for smaller councils like Winton Shire that don’t have an IT Department, or many technical skills on-staff for system upkeep,” he said.

“It’s also nice that we get to hold onto our data in an electronic format, so we minimise reliance on infrastructure otherwise required for a hosted solution, which can often be unreliable out here. With CivicView, Winton Shire can remain self-sufficient when it comes to managing our system and data, said Coulton.

Coulton has extensive local government experience, having worked at 15 councils across New South Wales and Queensland over 40 years. This experience – including work with over 5 different enterprise systems has developed Coulton’s ability to critically evaluate and implement effective business processes and information systems.

“The most important thing is that my employees have all they need to get the job done,” said Couton.

“I could see CivicView is a functionally-rich product that offers Winton Shire Council and staff all it needs and nothing it doesn’t,” he said.

Implementation of CivicView has commenced, with a ‘go live’ at Winton Shire council set for later this year.