Matt Cowley Tauranga City Councillor

When I stayed a night in Tauranga Hospital last year, I was amazed at how efficiently I moved between departments.

I searched the internet and found many hospitals model themselves on other industries such as race car pit crews, airports, and military logistics.

It's incomprehensible how race cars can refuel and change four tyres within seven seconds. The goal of the pit crews is to get the car back on the track as fast as possible.

There is nothing sexy to their secrets; it's about knowing the procedures when things go bad, learning from mistakes, and gathering as much data as possible to improve procedures.

Council is like most NZ businesses – we're data rich, but information poor.

Racing teams, airports, and the military invest heavily up front to scrutinise themselves, to minute detail, to continually improve processes.

The new council and new management team inherited the organisation with hundreds of databases and information systems. Few of our databases talk to each other and our financial team are still working on excel spreadsheets.

Can Council be more efficient? Absolutely.

For this reason, investing in our Information and Communications Technology is my key priority in the upcoming draft Long Term Plan.

Our chief executive has restructured our ICT department to improve the flow of information across the organisation and provide business intelligence. This will mean better customer experiences and more efficient processes.

Our frontline service desk, including our call centre, is more like air traffic control. We need to improve our online services so people waste less time lining up at our front desk.

We can use the same model as police use to keep their officers on the frontline for longer by giving our field officers tablets so they can do their paper work on the go.

Our staff meet with builders and developers to improve our systems. If there is a burst of building activity, we contract our consents function to other councils to ease the bottleneck.

Our core infrastructure services, such as water supply and wastewater, are operating below inflation cost increases - by comparing average renewal profiles of the 2009, 2012 and draft 2015 Long Term Plans.

To sum up, we do some things really well. But we also need to improve in many other areas. I hope we can learn from other industries that have taken decades to remove wastage from their operations.

Feel free to email me your thoughts ([email protected]), call/text me on 027 6989 548, and follow me at www.facebook.com/a.younger.voice.