Sydney’s Data Addiction takes Hornsby Shire Council to Azure

Hornsby Shire Council has tapped Sydney Microsoft partner Data Addiction to modernise its systems and move its applications to Azure.

The council sought to move its legacy systems that had been somewhat unreliable from on-premises to Azure, as well as its other apps like Microsoft 365.

Data Addiction provided support in the migration and also had Microsoft’s Fast Track service involved to allow the council to onboard Microsoft cloud solutions and drive user adoption.

“Our mission is to use Microsoft to make a difference. Both our team and the team at Hornsby Shire Council, believe we have achieved exactly that and we are proud of our partnership,” Data Addiction managing director Ben Johnson said.

“Because we are specialists in Azure, we have the privilege of being able to reduce the cost and complexity of transformations like this. It’s a great outcome.”

The migration was kickstarted in 2020 when Hornsby Shire Council manager of technology and transformation Sharon Bowman was brought in to assess and fix technology challenges the council was facing at the time.

“One of our strategies moving forward is to reduce complexity and part of reducing complexity is to try and reduce the number of different moving pieces,” Bowman said.

“As an existing user of Microsoft 365, and mid-way through the deployment of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, which was being supported by Data Addiction, it made sense to consider Microsoft Azure as the platform to underpin the transformation to the cloud and further reduce the complexity.”

Bowman added that the migration was “incredibly quick” and worked well with the council’s “fairly tight” timelines the on-premises infrastructure were nearing end-of-life and facing decommission.

“The Data Addiction team just absolutely powered through, kept everybody on track. It was really, really well project managed,” she said.

“After the first couple of weeks we realised that everything was running really smoothly and we had so many other parallel projects going that I basically just said to everybody, ‘look, just keep me informed and let me know if anything needs to be escalated’.

“Then all I did was look at the weekly reports and everything was green and I didn’t really need to pay very much attention to what was going on with that project at all.”

Looking ahead, both Data Addiction and Hornsby Shire Council have started working on a proof of concept dubbed ‘citizen on a page’, which leverages Azure to collect and interpret Council data about residents in order to understand and tailor the best services to meet that person’s needs.
“We are working with our customer service team to pilot use of this ‘single view of the customer’ at the front line, and then also having a look at how we can use it to give better information to our executive team and managers about the customer experience we are delivering.”Got a news tip for our journalists? Share it with us anonymously here.

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