Customer Story
Corangamite Shire Council Moved Quickly to Adopt Web-based GIS
Home of the famous Twelve Apostles limestone formations and the “unofficial dairy capital of the world,” Corangamite Shire Council is known as a place to tour and relax. At the shire council offices, however, the pace of business is brisk, and IT/GIS Officer Ben Stephenson wears many hats to support the various engineers, planners and customer support and financial staff. As more staff members seek location-based data visualization to make decisions, the council is letting them self-serve, with the web-based Spectrum Spatial solution from Precisely.
With so much on his plate, Stephenson takes every opportunity to hone the efficiency of the GIS function. He’s an expert at using Precisely MapInfo Pro to create maps for any need. But in the past, publishing and updating those maps wasn’t as efficient as Stephenson would have liked. Users weren’t enthusiastic about the former client/server GIS user interface, either. In some cases, they tended not to use the system, thus missing out on its potential benefits.
When his Precisely account manager introduced him to Spectrum Spatial, Stephenson immediately saw the potential of the web-based tool and he had little trouble convincing the council to approve the purchase. “Spectrum Spatial is vastly superior to what we had, in terms of ease of use, ease of maintenance and responsiveness,” he says.
Migrating to Spectrum Spatial went smoothly: It took Stephenson only five days to transfer all of the council’s required data sets into Spectrum Spatial. Stephenson also integrated Spectrum Spatial with CRM, property rating, finance and asset management systems of Corangamite Shire Council.
To ease the adoption of the new software, Stephenson arranged training sessions for the users. He was pleased to find that some of the least tech-savvy staff did not require any training and were able to use Spectrum Spatial from the first day they had access to the system.
