Meet the IM Team of the Year
CODC Chief Information Officer Nathan McLeod (second from right) accepted the award at the 2023 ALGIM Conference (Navigating Uncharted Territory) held in Wellington in November. “I'm pretty proud of this team. They’re 56% of the way through cleaning up, digitising and protecting our rateable property files, while making this public information more accessible to our community.”
The team has also recently completed a major migration of regulatory documents into the central storage system CentralDocs, at the same time carrying out all the tasks related to day-to-day information and records management, privacy and LGOIMA requests, as well as continuing to give provide advice, support and train the organisation.
The 56% digitised rateable property files equate to 8,073 of the 15,000 properties from across the district; 1037 of these are digitally born as the Council now receives building consent and resource consent documents digitally reducing costs and effort.
Some property files take half an hour to scan; some can take a week or more. A house or piece of land in every file is unique – whether that be the size of it, types of documents, age of documents down to paper types.
“Scanning is only a small part of the whole digitisation process, the preparation beforehand and the Quality Assurance (QA) afterwards is what takes the time and what will set us up for success,” Mr McLeod said.
The team is handling documents with beautiful penmanship and hand drawn plans dating back to the early 1900s and more recently, funny photos and notes.
“A lot of old fading or damaged documents that we can enhance when we scan are actually better than the originals. Every day is different, and it is definitely not a boring job.
The information capturedwill be seen well into the future – as we like to say, ‘the documents of today are the archives of tomorrow’.
“The work we are doing now to eliminate paper files and have all properties ‘born digital’ will future-proof CODC against any natural or man-made disasters e.g., Alpine Fault, fire etc. The digitisation process is not just the often wrongly perceived task of simply scanning paper and saving information into a folder. There are slick, sleuth-level investigations happening in the background constantly to produce the high-quality work that the digitisation team has become well known for. Property files can vary greatly in size and complexity and the team has solid procedures in place, so the information makes sense for customers today and preserves it for the future.
“We are supporting our internal teams at CODC to do their work. Our work also supports property owners, architects, engineers, plumbers, and builders in their projects, as well as Real Estate agents, although we always recommend getting a LIM!”
As an example of how professionals appreciate what the team does, “a planning consultant sent an email last year saying thank you, it is such a valuable service we provide,” Mr McLeod said. “There was also a schoolboy last year that one of our digitisation assistants helped with information on bridges in the area. He went on to build a model too based on that information.”
