Connecting a remote workforce: Parks Victoria's comms challenge

Rolling out a major IT project to a distributed workforce is difficult enough – but consider how much more difficult it would be if your employees were spread out over 4 million hectares of bushland.

That’s precisely the challenge Parks Victoria is facing as it prepares to deliver a series of communications and collaborations platforms to staff spread out over 18 percent of the state's total landmass.

“From a technology perspective, it's about us ensuring that everyone's connected,” Parks Victoria chief information officer Jennifer Rebeiro told iTnews.

"That's an absolute priority for us as an organisation."

Communications is the key

As part of its bid to improve communications among its scattered workforce, Rebeiro will begin rolling out Skype for Business as a unified communications platform from next month.

Parks Victoria has about 1000 staff, of whom at least 600 are regional (the exact number varies seasonally).

The agency does not currently do BYOD, but does issue mobiles to staff. The majority of the computer fleet is made up of desktops, but the agency also allocates laptops in some circumstances.

The deployment of Skype for Business means staff away from a depot or office will still be able to video conference into a meeting using their smartphone or laptop.

“[The comms project] will be about enabling our people to be contacted where they're doing work, rather than going back to base or a different site to attend a meeting,” Rebeiro said.

The organisation is also preparing to introduce a new SharePoint deployment and intranet site to allow document sharing and access from any location.

The aim is to ensure all its staff have access to the information they need to make decisions, even if they are based in an isolated location.

“SharePoint will go [on] the fourth week of November,” Rebeiro said.

“The technical aspect of [the intranet site] is now complete, and now we're uploading content.

“[The intranet is] about providing information within three clicks so they don't have to hunt for the information they're after."

Connectivity

The ability to roll out communications and productivity platforms to remote staff depends on connectivity over significant distances.

“If you look at a map of the state of Victoria, we operate from right at the very top, from the Murray Parklands in Mildura, right down to the Cape Howe Marine National Park,” Rebeiro said.

“So we operate over a very diverse landscape where there is no population, and that makes it interesting from a connectivity perspective, so that's one of our unique challenges.”

According to Rebeiro, the connectivity situation has improved significantly over recent years as Telstra, the agency’s telco provider, has rolled out mobile networks to more remote parts of the state.

“There are parts of our business that have issues with connectivity, but it's about understanding 'fit for purpose' and what people are doing when they're connected,” Rebeiro said.

“We're looking at providing some consumer services rather than WAN/LAN services to deal with the connectivity issues.

“We might say to a person in Mallacoota [in East Gippsland] that ‘we'll give you a laptop with a 3G card’ so you can connect into our systems that way.

“What we're interested in being is a world-class parks organisation with the technology to back that up, bearing in mind we operate in a cost-constrained environment as well.”

Change management

A crucial aspect of the rollout will be making sure staff understand how to use the new platforms, including how to access them both from their mobile phones and desktop PCs.

"Our staff are extremely passionate about what they do and how technology can support them. So we want to make sure we keep that passion up so their experience is a good, positive one,” Rebeiro said.

“Part of [the change management process] is using the technology itself and organising Skype for Business meetings; part of that will be using the intranet, email bulletins and staff briefings.

“That will be a very slow, staged process because we want to make sure our technology experience is good as it can be.”

The agency has drawn ley lessons about the implementation from an earlier rollout of social networking tool Yammer.

"We implemented Yammer 12 months or so ago, so before my time, but that's been a really valuable implementation,” Rebeiro said.

"We have lots of valuable engagement across the state with Yammer and people learning from each other, providing advice and sharing photos. So it's helped us to create a very connected organisation."

In-sourced IT provisioning

Parks Victoria is not a customer of Victorian state government shared service provider CenITex, making it responsible for its own IT procurement.

“We are a statutory authority working with the Department of Land, Water and Planning so we work closely with that department through a management services agreement,” Rebeiro said.

"We exchange data with them. And while there's opportunity to share systems with them in the future, at this point in time we don't."

Parks Victoria currently uses Oracle for finance and payroll, and Rebeiro is looking to introduce a CRM system in the near future.

"We need to have an overall view of who our customers are, so we're looking at CRM solutions at the moment,” Rebeiro said.

“We have a series of commercial off-the-shelf solutions we've made to work with our businesses. We still operate off Excel spreadsheets in parts of our organisation as well."