Council Agenda Management Software

Case Study – The City of Glenorchy

Introduction

The Glenorchy Region of Tasmania is home to about 43,000 people. Its total area is 127km². The major towns include Glenorchy,Claremont, and Moonah.

The city of Glenorchy lies on the west bank of the Derwent River to the North of Hobart. The river and the Mount Wellington Range form natural boundaries to a town which was indebted to agricultural and horticultural producers for its original prosperity, but which now has a strong industrial base.

In addition to producers as diverse as miner Nyrstar, International Catamarans and Cadbury Schweppes, Glenorchy is also home to the Royal Hobart Showgrounds and the Tasmanian Transport Museum

The City of Glenorchy and Infocouncil

Prior to the introduction of Infocouncil, Council used Word templates for reports, agendas and minutes, and they distributed and recorded these manually.  Glenorchy decided to make the transition to Infocouncil in September 2008. We conducted a satisfaction survey with this council in January 2010. Kevin Scott, who is the Business Improvement Officer in Governance and Performance, kindly completed it. All quotations are from Kevin’s survey form.

Reports and Agendas

Kevin found that achieving standard, council wide formatting was of a “good” standard and that converting a report from normal to confidential was “great!”  When asked about the frequency of difficulties or inefficiencies in the compilation of an agenda, i.e. the requirement for reformatting and cutting and pasting, Kevin stated that “compilation is excellent”.  He has found the ease of recompiling and repaginating to be good and the ordering of reports to be easy, “once [users] were directed to the correct procedure.”

Kevin did mention that council experienced “some initial difficulty” in regards to using Infocouncil’s approval system, but continued to say that “once people become more familiar with requirements we do not expect too many issues”.

Minutes

In regards to capturing the minutes, Kevin found there to be no current problems, with an initial problem addressed and rectified by Infocouncil.  Continuing on minutes compilation, Kevin remarks that the ease of incorporating confidential items is again, “good”, as is the ease of moving between motions, divisions and multiple resolutions.

Overall

Kevin’s key response to the introduction of Infocouncil is that it has been a good addition to council, primarily because he has found the efficiency of those who use Infocouncil to be “excellent” and feels that this will “continue to improve” as council becomes more familiar with Infocouncil. 

Rating of the past and present processes

Here are Kevin Scott’s overall ratings of the two systems when asked: "What rating, out of ten, would you give each system, taking everything into account, where 10 = fantastic and 1 = terrible?”