Case Study - Wellington Shire Council

About Wellington Shire Council

Wellington Shire Council (WSC) is located in the Gippsland region of the state of Victoria, Australia and is approximately two hours east of Melbourne by road or rail. It extends from the Great Dividing Range and Victoria's High Country, through rich irrigated flats and some of the most productive grazing land in Australia. The Shire is named after a major geographical feature in the region, Lake Wellington, which is located in the south-east of the LGA. Wellington Shire has a strong and diverse local economy boasting oil and gas production industries, manufacturing, government, defence, primary industries, forestry, construction and retail industries.

The Council is Victoria's third largest municipality, coveringan area of 10,924 square kilometres and is home to 45,639 residents (2021 census) spread across more than 30 different communities. The organisation delivers more than 120 services to communities across the shire and uses award-winning technologies to seek and implement innovative improvements across their entire organisation.

Background

Over 300 users comprising of full time, part time and casual staff are supported across the shire with approximately 98% using mobile device technology such as laptops, mobile phones, iPad, and ruggedised devices. The Council IT infrastructure is a hybrid environment with a combination of cloud-based services and on-premise/legacy systems.

Challenges

The organisation had loosely worded policies in place. In principle they were mostly on paper, but they weren’t exercised strongly throughout all of the various business units across the shire.

“Due to the policies in place at that time, staff did not have a full understanding of acceptable use of systems and data. The existing policies were not up to date and consequently users did not have any clarity on service delivery expectations, what they could or couldn’t do, or have a clear framework to work to” Comments Max Horvath, Coordinator ICT Operations

“A comprehensive policy suite was just one of the things that we wanted to get cemented fairly quickly while we were doing other infrastructure upgrades and operational improvements. We also had pressures from an audit compliance perspective that needed improvement, but the amount of work needed to get a framework in place would be very time consuming” says Max.

Solution

After doing some background work and receiving feedback from other councils, the management team felt that Kaon Security’s Policy Management as a Service offering was the ideal solution for the organisation. The predefined templates and mapping to standard and industry best practice meant that WSC could implement a comprehensive set of policies within a short timeframe.

The Premium version includes:

• 25 key policies – for user, manager and technical roles
• On screen policy acceptance for all users
• User compliance reporting and activity logging
• Third party contractor licensing
• Ability to send policy review reminders
• Export policies to Word for offline reference
• Audit requirement details and compliance index
• Process and Procedures section
• Forms, Logs and Guidelines content.

Benefits

Max comments “Creating the policy platform was a fairly straightforward exercise. The review workshop allowed us to massage and finetune the policies to the organisations requirements, and the Kaon Security policy experts helped with recommendations on standards or operational guidelines for us to consider.”

“When the policy framework was established throughout the organisation there was almost sigh of relief from staff in the different departments as the ICT team was going to be providing controls and mechanisms around how the ICT space was going to perform in the future for them.”

“All my involvement with the Kaon Security team has been very stellar. Even from the very earliest days they have kept us up to date with developments and suggested where we could make changes or improvements. Like one of my favourite sayings - we don’t know what we don’t know - or we’re too busy with our day-to-day work, so getting prompts and support around those changes and new implementations is very much valued and appreciated.” says Max.

Leadership

Once the policies were established a formal announcement was sent out to the various business units, along with a program to educate new and existing staff on the policies and to show where they can source particular policy content. Management is also on hand to directly engage with the different departments from time to time should they need any clarification.