Overview

Providing a disparate range of services across a growing community is an ongoing challenge for local governments as they seek to evolve and manage delivery for their ratepayers. A local government council in inner city Melbourne – a community of over 100,000 people – was challenged with managing daily operations across 30+ business units while gathering operational data and providing reporting and analytics.

Mantalus partnered with the Council to build bespoke AWS cloud infrastructure to support a custom Data Platform that would enable the council to gather data from these multiple systems to monitor and ensure quality of service for their community.

Background

Like many growing organisations, a common challenge faced by the Council is dealing with legacy systems and networks that rapidly become inadequate in a digitally driven, service-oriented environment. The Council was facing multiple blockers in monitoring their daily volume of service requests. These requests are handled by various business units using applications and systems that lack integration with the company’s workflow, tracking, and reporting systems.

Mantalus’ collaborative approach to working with customers to develop custom AWS solutions provided the optimal engagement model for this organisation. Having accumulated extensive experience in managing the consequences of legacy network architecture, the Mantalus team recognised the crucial challenges in replicating the topology of a data centre network within AWS Cloud. After mapping the delivery model and identifying the solution, Mantalus focused on integrating tracking and monitoring of their systems into a customer-centric model. This involved establishing the necessary infrastructure and reporting systems to facilitate an ongoing improvement approach.

Challenge

The local Council’s isolated systems presented hurdles in tracking internal workflows and implementing standardised service level agreements (SLAs), quality assurance protocols, and delivery metrics, resulting in inferior customer experiences. Due to recurring inefficiencies and inadequate workflow management, the customer service team frequently struggled to provide updates regarding the requests, resulting in ratepayer frustration and dissatisfaction.

Solution

Using our team of highly experienced architects and AWS consultants, Mantalus created a customised AWS landing zone to service the Council’s new workflow processes. The AWS cloud infrastructure, specifically designed and built to host the council’s new Data Platform, incorporated the development of a data ingestion and integration layer. This layer empowered the council to leverage the Data Platform to support and monitor their critical services effectively. Subsequently, the data layer enabled them to report on their operational activities and output as a Council and fulfil reporting requirements for Victorian Government compliance obligations.

Planning & Discovery

While implementing AWS infrastructure to support novel workflow processes, the Council was simultaneously engaged in a significant IT transformation project and the construction of a new workflow system. Mantalus successfully collaborated with the Council’s network and security teams to understand the Council’s ecosystem and align with their existing security framework and IT Transformation roadmap. Given the project’s nature and its access to sensitive public data, prioritising security became an essential factor. It was imperative to implement robust security measures to safeguard the integrity and confidentiality of the data, with the goal of creating a platform that protects against potential cyber-attacks, data breaches, and unauthorised access.

Mantalus’ experience working with government organisations, providing proactive and flexible iterative planning and build processes, allowed them to provide seamless delivery. The Mantalus execution and approach ensured that the architecture supported all current and future application requirements.

Foundational Architecture

In addition to designing an architecture for a highly available platform that ensures minimal downtime and supports enhanced productivity, Mantalus deployed a best-in-class Monitoring & Alerting solution. This cloud-native solution provided the council with proactive infrastructure oversight and alerts for key stakeholders, triggering when agreed performance thresholds were breached.

Additionally, Mantalus designed and built the capability to integrate these operational processes with the Council’s chosen 3rd party toolset.

Ongoing Support & Relationship

In addition to designing an architecture for a highly available platform that ensures minimal downtime and supports enhanced productivity, Mantalus deployed a best-in-class Monitoring & Alerting solution. This cloud-native solution provided the council with proactive infrastructure oversight and alerts for key stakeholders, triggering when agreed performance thresholds were breached.

Additionally, Mantalus designed and built the capability to integrate these operational processes with the Council’s chosen 3rd party toolset.

Outcomes

Best-in-class Mantalus Cloud Infrastructure

Mantalus’ highly resilient, underlying AWS infrastructure design enabled the council to use the Data Platform to successfully:

  • Operate more securely through an AWS Cloud solution designed to enhance data protection and exceed security requirements
  • Support and align with projects on their existing IT Transformation Roadmap.
  • Source data and develop reports from multiple previously siloed systems and applications through enhanced workflow reporting
  • Develop a “Single Pane of Glass’ view of Requests for Service and ratepayer enquiries to help delivery and customer service teams
  • Reduce VicGov legislative compliance overheads, shifting from a three-month lead time for manual reporting to real-time capability
  • Unlock previously hidden data and access internal capabilities 
  • Enhance workload management for better decision-making based on allocation and utilisation metrics, increasing employee satisfaction.

Achieving ongoing results and support with Mantalus

Mantalus worked with key stakeholders to set the groundwork for this foundational architecture to be fit for purpose and support current and future applications.

Mantalus’ experience in navigating the local government sector enabled us to proactively adjust to, and navigate, several unforeseen challenges during the engagement – whilst also working within the bounds of the existing IT Transformation goals.

Mantalus delivered specialised training and support throughout all aspects of the AWS architecture build, assisting the Council with integration and operationalising the data layer. Including this as part of Mantalus’ project execution ensured that the organisation’s Network and IT teams were sufficiently equipped to manage the infrastructure. The effective execution of this project resulted in an ongoing relationship where Mantalus provides managed services to the Council, a partnership that continues to flourish to this day.

Ongoing Managed Services and Operational Oversight

Mantalus Managed Services (MMS) is our class-leading, bespoke cloud managed service capability, based on five key operational pillars; Security, Availability, Efficiency, Resiliency and Compliance. For various reasons, Mantalus customers choose to implement a level of ongoing assistance and oversight from the Mantalus team, to ensure critical platforms and environments are well protected with appropriate monitoring, alerting and SLAs

In this instance, after a post-project period of hypercare, the customer elected to engage our MMS service for an ongoing annual support and managed services contract, so supplement their incumbent team, as they continue to upskill and enhance internal capability and shift more DevOps practices in-house over time.

Why Mantalus?

Mantalus’ capability is built on being the tip of the spear to solve difficult and unique problems with AWS technology. Our strength is based on having consultants with an array of industry experience, who have themselves faced a litany of complex, business critical, technology roadblocks; and found creative and class-leading ways to solve them.

We’re great at developing AWS centric architectures, where none have existed before. Think platforms or middleware that have never been attempted on AWS by anyone; or even completely AWS native solutions, removing the need for expensive 3rd party solutions.

So, where can we be useful and important to you? Anywhere there’s pain.

When you’re scratching your heads with a tricky use case that doesn’t fit neatly into a known solution or reference architecture…. think Mantalus. We’re the cure!

AWS has a fantastic array of services – and if you partner with Mantalus we can use them to help you solve just about anything.

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