Meet the CIO: Adelaide City Council

Responsible for a population of more than 22,000 and many times that number of daily visitors, Peter Auhl is driving a process of transformation at Adelaide City Council that is leading his city to be considered among the smartest in the world.

Tell us about a project that involved an IT supplier

We’ve just deployed leading-edge smart city infrastructure along one of our arterial roads here in Adelaide, which has revolved around a relationship with Cisco and the Smart City Lighthouse project. It’s an integration between a number of players. One of them is called Sensity from the US, along with Cisco and some local suppliers to do the installation. It’s quite a complex project to run from a technical point of view, because we have to work with leading-edge technology as well handle the logistical issues such as the timing of the deployment of sensors through the evening.

Where do you normally use partners?

We have lots of things happening, ranging from systems upgrades to integration projects, and we have just migrated a bunch of workloads to the cloud. We are looking to our partners to engage at a strategic level, not just talk about the technology.

What does a third party need to do to impress you?

They need to understand what we are trying to achieve from a customer outcome point of view. Our approach is very much trying to understand what the problem statements are first, then to bring in technology at the end of the process. The problem statements are very much focused around customer outcomes, which would be the users of our city. They range from business users and people coming into the city for work to those attending a sporting or cultural event, even tourists.

When has a partner impressed you?

Most recently meeting with the new CTO from Dimension Data, Debra Bordignon. She comes at it from a similar perspective and didn’t start talking to me about technology, but about the methodology and outcomes. That’s the transition companies need to make. They come in trying to sell you a product, without actually understanding what you are trying to achieve.

Do you see yourself moving more to the cloud?

We migrated all of our Exchange workloads last year and we’ve got a connection to the Equinix Marketplace. Every service we bring up from now on will be cloud-first where possible. I have tasked my infrastructure architect to get our entire data centre migrated to the cloud over the next two years.

Do you see yourself using partners more or less often?

The capabilities and skills we are looking for will be vastly different to what we have used previously. We are looking for partners that can bring UX experience, or data analysis, or facilitation and relationship skills, rather than just purist technical skills.