Bundaberg council hires new CIO

Bundaberg City Council has named Adam Holthouse to replace David Crowe as the council's chief information officer and push forward with its newly-developed IT roadmap.

Adam Holthouse

Crowe left the council late last year for a return to the private sector and retail industry, as IT operations manager at Donut King owner Retail Food Group, based in Southport, Queensland.

He farewelled a year-long career, during which time he had been living four days a week in Bundaberg and going back home to the Gold Coast on weekends.

Adam Holthouse, former ICT manager at the City of Armidale, stepped up to the plate in early January and is tasked with delivering on the council’s six-month old IT roadmap, complete with $2 million of approved funding each year for three years.

The roadmap is centred around refreshing physical IT infrastructure, centralising the council’s IT and improving processes. 

The council recently bought NetApp’s FlexPod infrastructure stack to replace its servers and storage, and is finalising the replication of infrastructure between its two sites in Bundaberg CBD and nearby Bargara.

Once complete, Holthouse will be able to look at choosing a new site for one of the data centres to ensure geographic redundancy — an initiative signalled by Crowe just before his departure. 

Crowe also started the groundwork for a move to a new end-user environment. The council is in the process of building a new standard operating environment — moving away from a "lot of Linux and Unix", Crowe previously told iTnews  — and onto a Windows platform. 

Holthouse said the council would study the case for virtual desktops or other thin client platforms after that build is complete. 

Holthouse is also currently reviewing the existing priorities of the council’s Information Systems branch, with a focus on its “digital first” strategy and its ‘digital records opportunity’’ (DROP) program.

The council has already begun shifting its workers off paper-based process and onto digital platforms, including Civica’s Authority for payroll and HR, and KnowledgeOne’s RecFind for records management.

"[The DROP program] has to date shown some significant savings in operational efficiencies and cost reductions over paper based processes," he told iTnews.

"As that program continues to roll out, the Information Systems branch will be looking to extend our digital focus to include the progression of further online services for our community and look to further our mobile capabilities to gain better efficiencies for our mobile workforce.”