The Council is charged by Government to undertake many Regulatory functions of which the RMA is one of the most challenging.
Aside from the RMA’s legal complexity, it also operates in an integrated way. Each part of the RMA interacts with other parts to create a complex information flow and dependency system complete with feedback mechanisms. These information flows and dependencies underpin the RMA and all need to be accounted for in any system workflow development.
The current systems for managing the complexity of the RMA information, national instruments and Plans are now out-dated. These systems were implemented several years ago and are constrained by having been developed incrementally from “paper based systems” built around discrete processing elements, with the simple filing of documents and reports as a system end state. This leads to significant rework and manual processing of files to find, mine and analyse information embedded in the resource consent process.
The Council has limited resources available to deal with this level of complexity and to meet the growing needs of both the Government and the public. It follows therefore, that Council needs to operate in the “smartest” way possible. Council’s small size relative to some larger authorities, allows it to be agile when developing and introducing new digital tools and processes to deliver better information outcomes.
Re-engineering of workflow processes together with utilising recent developments in information management offer an opportunity to make customer-focused digital tools that facilitate flows of information and improve customer trust in the services. Such tools will also provide a solution to address Council’s capacity and capability issues for the future by automating and standardising key consenting and compliance processes
To meet this demand, MDC has committed to rebuild its resource consent and environmental monitoring systems over the next 3 financial years, beginning 2017/18.
Due to the complexity and size of the programme, the implementation of this program is broken down into stages;
- Stage 1 – online application (live from 23rd March 2018)
- Stage 2 – Migration of Data and Online Processing (proposed October 2019)
- Stage 3 – Environmental Monitoring (proposed delivery 2020)
Best Practice
This feedback portion of the system is designed as a place where by Council will engage with our community of users regarding the system, how to interact and use each part as we develop more of it over time, as well as provide a feedback mechanism to inform and provide guidance on our expectations. We plan to maintain this section keeping it up to date.
High-level requirements
- To make the Council’s Resource Management business framework customer-focussed, resilient, and available in a cloud-based environment using robust data and secure open-source online processing with automated filing and quality controls.
- To liberate the information from the workflows for the benefit of the other components of the Resource Management system and other users. To future-proof data and information.
- Develop and provide a suite of linked digital tools to deliver an end-to-end electronic consent processing system for the Regulatory Department of Council.
- These digital tools should be both outward facing to provide a cost effective, seamless and integrated consenting and resource management service experience for any customer applying for a consent and inward facing to allow fully integrated internal processing of these consents by Council officers and others.
- The digital tools should seamlessly deliver online fully electronic processes for consent applications, consent processing, consent decision-making and consent monitoring, enforcement, science outcomes, auditing and governance.
- To provide a future-proofed, robust and resilient regulatory processing framework at a reasonable cost for the customer.
- To extract the maximum value from the information flowing through the process chain.
- To provide information effectively and efficiently to a range of customers, both internal and external.
