Composable approach reshapes customer services and data…
“Councils were going to market to move away from ERP A and looking to take on ERP B, and the councils with ERP B were going to market because they weren’t happy and wanted to move to ERP C… It was this roundabout and no one seemed particularly happy.”
For Peter Darlington, Tasman District Council chief digital officer, that cycle of replacing one enterprise system with another was the start of a paradigm shift that has led to a more composable approach to digital services – and a move to systems and process thinking at the council.
“It gets you away from thinking about individual technology and starting to solve enterprise issues.”
The approach has gained international attention. Tasman District Council and Assurity Consulting have been shortlisted for Best Overall Testing Project, Public Sector/Services at the 2026 European Software Testing Awards, recognising the quality assurance and capability uplift that helped de-risk the rollout of the council’s new digital platforms.
The wider work has also seen the council take out the ICT Project of the Year at the Association of Local Government Information Management awards last year, for its emergency management tenancy to coordinate Civil Defence across Nelson-Tasman.
Beyond those awards sits a five-year programme aimed at modernising technology foundations across an organisation responsible for everything from water services and transport infrastructure to environmental monitoring, building consents and emergency management for a population of just 56,000 across 17 settlements.
It is, Darlington told iStart, a transformation story focused less on replacing aging technology and more on creating an architecture that can support customer services, including digital self-service, data-driven decision making, future integrations and the next wave of AI-enabled services.
Building the foundations
When a new business strategy identified digital modernisation as a priority in 2018, Darlington says the council’s technology environment was struggling to meet organisational needs. In 2021, it secured $16 million in funding for a digital transformation programme.
By then, the first phase of modernisation was already underway, with the council moving away from its legacy on-premise document management system to SharePoint Online.
The ‘Blueprint for Tasman’s Digital Future’ went much further, including introducing cloud engineering, dedicated cybersecurity and solutions architecture capabilities that previously didn’t exist within the organisation.
That move brought new thinking to the team, Darlington says, and started more of an architectural view of how to bring modern systems together – something Darlington says was one of the biggest learnings from the entire project.
“Starting to think in a more architectural way around what you are delivering in the organisation starts with understanding the business architecture and the business capabilities that you’re delivering services to, and then what is the underpinning enterprise architecture that delivers that, including the data architecture and the solution architecture,” he says. “It gets you away from thinking about individual technology and starting to solve enterprise issues.”
The Blueprint also included workstreams devoted to community channels and workflows looking at providing a digital omni-channel service capability; modernisation of core business systems; moving to cloud and setting up data and insights platforms to improve the quality, ownership and governance of data and the decision making as it became a data-driven organisation.
A composable approach
One of the systems under review was the council’s on-premise Magiq Enterprise platform, which had been in place since 1992. Rather than simply focusing on what ERP it would move to (spoiler alert: It is currently on Magiq Cloud ERP), Darlington and his team focused on developing an approach that would work for the organisation longer term.
That thinking led to the first stage of the council’s digital modernisation, including a Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform and customer portal built on Power Pages which is expected to go live in late January.
Documents and files, including environmental data and customer data, all sit within a common providing the foundation for more workflows and processes.
Darlington stresses the work is still at an early stage. Initial portal capabilities focus on information requests, feedback and basic service requests, with additional functionality planned as the platform matures.
Turning customer interactions into data
The customer experience programme is one of the most visible parts of that transformation.
Before CRM, customer requests were often passed around the organisation via email, passing between customer service staff and subject matter experts.
“We were often chasing where requests had gone to,” he says. “Requests would often bounce around the building and get several opinions from several experts, and the customers would end up more confused than ever.”
The Dynamics platform gives the council a consolidated view of customer interactions, requests, communications and workflows.
For Darlington, the bigger opportunity is what that means for data.
Information previously buried in individual communications can now be analysed to understand service levels, demand patterns, customer behaviour and channel preferences.
“We’re looking to expand that out in whatever we do, whether it’s starting to look at our infrastructure asset systems or our finance systems or regulatory systems, to bring that universal view.”
Achieving that vision requires thinking differently, he says.
“Digital maturity levels in councils are pretty low, let alone architectural thinking such as business architecture and thinking about your business instead of separate functions and departments, thinking about capabilities and how those capabilities interact to deliver quality service.”
Darlington is also realistic about the pace of transformation.
“Like a lot of organisations we were probably a little bit guilty of overselling the benefits and under-delivering.”
The benefits, he says, take time.
“Where we’ve got to now, the modern foundation has lowered risk. It has added modern tools for staff to get their work done and it’s improved capability. But that’s not really changing the dial for customers who work with the council.”
Preparing for AI
The next stage is focused on self-service and making better use of the digital foundations now in place.
When the customer portal goes live, residents will be able to search for information and documents, with future plans including conversational interfaces that can help answer questions and surface insights.
“It’s about bringing smarts to the front end and we’ve got the foundation in place, and can now keep building on it.”
The council estimates the program is delivering benefits of around $795,000 annually through productivity gains, automation and improved processes. “It’s not absolutely brilliant, but it is something,” he says.
While AI was not the primary driver when many of the programme’s decisions were made, Darlington said the resulting architecture has positioned the council to take advantage of future developments.
Customer information, data, documents and communications now sit within a connected ecosystem capable of supporting new forms of automation and service delivery.
Darlington believes the way residents interact with councils will continue to evolve.
“The council patron of the future doesn’t want to surf to a council website and jump through several hyperlink screens to get to the right service function,” he says. “They’re going to be wanting to talk to their own preference of AIs.”
Testing times
The move to a composable approach created new responsibilities.
With common off-the-shelf systems supplied by a vendor, the vendor does all the testing for upgrades, Darlington notes.
“Once you start designing in an enterprise cloud platform and you’re designing your workflows in your world, you’re having integrations in place with some of your back-end business systems, the testing is kind of on you.”
That realisation led the council to partner with Assurity Consulting.
“We went from pretty much a zero base of understanding around testing to forming a testing strategy for the organisation, having a virtual test manager work with us for a couple of years as we grew our capability and then implementing an automated test platform.”
Today, the platform runs 40-50 automated tests every night, helping identify potential failures across interconnected workflows and systems.
“The magic is really around the growth and capability,” Darlington says. “We’ve got enough testing knowledge and testing accountability that we can approach a test program, and that we can run an automated test program for the cloud environment that we have in place.”
For Tasman, the lesson from the past five years isn’t simply about replacing technology. It’s about building the architectural foundations, governance and capability needed to continually evolve it. And in a sector where many organisations are still focused on the next system replacement, that may prove the more significant transformation.
