Case Study: Northcott Disability takes control of its data

NSW-based Northcott Disability needed a better way to understand its data especially with 2600 staff members and customers across city and regional areas.

Paul Herbert, CIO at Northcott Disability spoke to Digital Nation about how it overhauled its legacy system and implemented a better solution to take control of their data.

“When you're in a large organisation like Northcott with many customers, sometimes incidents occur. When that incident involves a customer, our quality safeguarding team will lean in support and investigate to understand what happened, what are the learnings and how can we improve and improve our service,” he explained.

“Part of that process is as reporting those incidents as part of our statutory obligations, especially around a customer safety issues, or safeguarding at the time, we were using an on-prem risk system to manage incidents.”

With the changes, this system was no longer meeting the company’s needs. Herbert said they were looking for a smarter system that mapped out and support our regulatory reporting requirements.

“The on-prem system that we had it could capture the information, but only if you're in front of the computer. Thinking of the hybrid work style of today, that's not a great experience,” he said.

“It had limited capability, it didn't have the flexibility we needed. Across the sector, there has been this rapid rise in demand and resources are stretched as organisations such as Northcott strive to deliver high quality services to a growing number of customers.

“You couple that with the changes in the sector, especially those brought about the NDIS quality and safeguards commission, they're there to ensure that rule provides a high quality of service.”

At the end of 2019, Northcott Disability implemented Workato to better integrate their legacy data.

Herbert describes Workato as a low code, no code system, which helps organisations design workflows.

“Within about three weeks, we were able to set up all the necessary automations and integrations to support our new system. One of our senior business intelligence developers, couldn't believe how easy it was and how fast we're able to turn it on,” he said.

“Now we have a good security and risk management system that's underpinned by an integration system that has automated so much of what we can do. It has also made some key changes now we can we can capture incidents, we can manage those investigations, all those things, report on them to the executive to the board and to any statutory bodies as well.

“It's been a real game changer when it comes to risk, this allows us to deliver, improve on our compliance and deliver a better quality of care,” he added.