Datacom has rolled out the first phase of its customer service system for the town of Manjimup in Western Australia. Kicking off with Service Requests, the comprehensive system will soon include services for finance and rates, rates payment, building and planning regulations, licenses, permits, and animal control.
Shire of Manjimup CEO Andrew Campbell was pleased to have taken Datacom on board: “The implementation was seamless and we’ve had a really positive response from our people using the new system. We chose Datascape because we were looking for something flexible, scalable and responsive that would support our growing community. We think it is the best solution to help us deepen community engagement, as well streamlining operations and service delivery.”
“The other thing we like is that Datascape is designed for a wide range of local government sizes, including small to medium sized councils. It’s scalable and allows local governments like us to choose what we need, then add more functionality as we go. It’s also cost effective as it’s priced per number of ratings assessments,” Campbell added.
Datacom Director of Local Government Mark Matijevic said it was a big day for the team who had been working towards the first implementation of Datascape for nearly three years.
“Working with the Shire of Manjimup has been great because they are both innovative and up for change, but also pragmatic. They know that they can’t have it all on day one,” Matijevic explained.
“Andrew understood our vision for Datascape at a very early stage, with local government being first and foremost based on community needs. So, the Manjimup team has come on the journey with us as we’ve built it. Their work on testing and validating our design has been invaluable, and it’s been a pleasure to have them as our very first Datascape customer,” Matijevic added.
“We describe Datascape as being ‘born in the cloud.’ This means it has been built specifically for local government and is entirely cloud-based,” he also said.
To support the implementation of Service Requests, Datacom migrated data from Manjimup’s legacy system and included ratepayer and citizen contact details, land parcels within the district, property data, rates accounts, change of ownership processes and subdivision processes.
“It’s significant for us that we’re able to manage these processes within Datascape from Day 1, as well as getting data from other government agencies such as Landgate,” Matijevic said.
The rollout of additional Datascape functionality to Manjimup will continue throughout 2019.
The Datascape implementation at Manjimup builds upon its use of other Datacom local government solutions. One is Antenno, a mobile app that supports direct two-way communication between councils and communities and allows people to receive alerts and notifications for places they care about. The other is Datascape Websites, a content management system with ready-to-use website templates and features.
