Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW) is the lead department within a network of government agencies and private organizaOons that work together to deliver transport services throughout New South Wales (NSW), the most populous state in Australia.

TfNSW is responsible for strategy, planning, policy, regulation, funding allocation, and other non-service delivery functions for all modes of transport in the state, including road, rail, ferry, light rail, point-to-point, regional air, cycling, and walking. TfNSW uses both public and private operators to deliver transport services on its behalf.

Multi vendor outsourcing led to IT service management challenges

Due to its history as a group of separate entities, TfNSW’s different departments each have their own technology tools and processes. When the agencies amalgamated, this created a complex IT service delivery environment that includes a host of multi-vendor outsourcing agreements across internal and external providers, some in early-generation contracts that don’t allow for change.

Mark Emberson, principal manager, service development and transition at TfNSW, said, “Letting each area choose multiple vendors means we can implement the right technology for specific purposes. The challenge is in gaining a complete view of IT performance across all solutions and all business areas.”

Traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions couldn’t deliver the speed or flexibility of reporting that TfNSW was looking for to manage and accurately monitor IT service levels across all vendors operating in its complicated environment in real Ome.

Prior to implementing emite, TfNSW conducted manual cluster-wide scorecard reporting each month. Time-consuming and complex, the process depended on the goodwill of several stakeholders and resulted in decisions being made using data that was out of date.

Rather than reporting on issues in hindsight, TfNSW needed a way to analyze and correlate data from multiple sources in real Ome to provide transparency into the exact status of IT service management across the organization at any given moment, and at the touch of a bucon.

emite stood out from the crowd

TfNSW chose emite because of its ability to instantly bring IT services management data together into an intelligent, customisable dashboard that is easy for everyone to use. With emite individuals can filter for the information that’s relevant to them. For example, finance managers can look at information relating to finance systems, while sales managers get reports on how sales systems are performing. Managers can also customize wallboards in minutes so enOre teams can stay informed about key metrics.

“emite shows exactly what each user needs to see. It can be a detailed report or a bird’s eye view, depending on user requirements.”

Mark Emberson said, “emite helps TfNSW harness IT systems performance data to inform the decision-making process. emite was the ideal solution given our focus on improving the delivery and maintenance of IT infrastructure services across the entire cluster.”

emite delivered comprehensive, automated reporting

emite has delivered the comprehensive real-time insight that TfNSW needed, letting the organization make better decisions faster. Sean Neale, senior service improvement specialist, TfNSW, said, “emite helps TfNSW visualise performance metrics by aggregating IT service management data from more than 12 data sources across five agencies into a single, uniform picture of our complex, federated environment.
emite now displays dynamic KPIs via high-impact wallboards throughout the organization.

“Making these metrics so easy to monitor in real-time makes us more responsive as an organization, which leads to performance gains. Traditional business intelligence solutions are not only expensive and Time-consuming to implement, they require specialised staff to provide reports, which often take a long time and omit key data, or include so much detail it’s overwhelming. emite shows exactly what each user needs to see. It can be a detailed report or a bird’s eye view, depending on user requirements.”

As well as providing insight into the current state of operations, emite can run what-if scenarios to test how the system would cope with change. If the change is likely to degrade system performance, for example, TfNSW can reject it without having experienced any deterioration in service levels. Employees remain productive instead of being hampered by slow systems as they’re tested.

Furthermore, emite lets TfNSW pre-empt system issues using past and present data. Because of its sophisticated correlation, aggregation and predictive modelling capabilities, emite can even detect potential security breaches and system breakdowns, preventing problems that would reflect poorly on the IT operations team and potentially the organization as a whole.

emite is also cost effective and highly scalable. This scalability is due to Elasticsearch, an open source search, indexing and analytics engine which can interrogate and manipulate huge amounts of data in any way conceivable, within seconds.

Additionally, emite can be purchased as a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution so users can be added or removed as organisational needs change. This way, TfNSW only pays for the capacity it needs, reducing waste. And emite can be up and running within 48 hours, compared with traditional BI solutions which typically take months or even years to implement.

Now TfNSW can further leverage its investment in existing legacy systems, while embracing emerging technologies.

Sean Neale said, “With emite’s readymade adapters for most data sources, new sources can be quickly added with low cost and licle risk. This futureproofing is exceptionally important as it gives us confidence that reports will function with ongoing new services. And we won’t be locked into any legacy toolsets as we look to modernize our IT systems.”

emite has helped TfNSW demonstrate the value of IT throughout its agency and organizational networks. With emite, TfNSW is aligning IT performance with wider departmental outcomes and the more reliably its systems operate, the more productive TfNSW can be.

For more information about TfNSW, visit www.transport.nsw.gov.au