New Zealand's Parliamentary Service transitions to TechnologyOne platform
New Zealand's Parliamentary Service -- which provides administrative and operational support to the country's members of parliament -- has completed a transition of key information technology systems from on-premise operation into a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment.
Parliamentary Service's new TechnologyOne SaaS system went live in early February and comes off the back of the procurement framework arrangement, announced in April 2021, between TechnologyOne and the New Zealand Minister of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE).
According to the agency's chief financial officer Jade Goddard, the "ability to work anywhere, anytime, and from any device was a major selling feature".
"We were using an ad-hoc collection of applications that didn't talk to each other. Our Microsoft Dynamics installation was behind where you would expect a modern system to be and it was all on-premise, with all the disaster recovery risk that entails," Goddard said.
TechnologyOne said the transition had been handled smoothly as a result of the communication strategy that was devised by the Parliamentary Service to manage the move, and additional usage of the platform are already in the works.
"I'd like to see us introducing more dashboards and analytics. Previously that sort of thing was beyond our capabilities, we'd have to wait overnight for reports to run, for example. But now, with access to accurate, real-time information, we're able to deliver much more," Goddard said.
After the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the Parliamentary Service is the second agency to implement a SaaS environment based on TechnologyOne.
At the time the agreement was announced, it was said to be a means for agencies across the New Zealand government to be able to purchase the SaaS platform from TechnologyOne under a common contractual framework.