Johannesburg City Parks has partnered with Microsoft to help the city's greening entity upgrade its technology. The city recently announced a software sponsorship of R1.4 million by the software company, which it hopes will help it prepare for 2010.
City Parks says it needed to improve its ways of managing natural resources. Software plays a unifying role in the conservation of the city's natural resources and is key in the run-up to ensure a green legacy beyond 2010, says City Parks MD Luther Williamson.
"The donation is set to assist in streamlining City Park's total operations and knowledge management systems. Better coordination translates to improved productivity and savings across our scope of operations,” he says.
Williamson adds that the donation has assisted City Parks in reallocating what it would have spent on software to other critical areas of operations. The software will improve project and customer relationship management, as well as to simplify the daily tasks of greening, conserving and managing parklands, venues and cemeteries, he says.
Microsoft will provide City Parks with software solutions such as virtualisation, power management and collaboration tools.
Vis Naidoo, citizenship head at Microsoft, says the suite of software is designed to ease a range of tasks, such as monitoring the city's watering and park ranger activities, as well as initiatives which educate communities on conservation and teach the unemployed youth basic IT literacy.
"When researching the needs of Johannesburg City Parks, the most notable were for well-researched information and a central database that staff can employ to foster greater productivity," he says.
Improving processes
City Parks says it will be able to coordinate functions, share information, automate business processes and execute proper and effective workflows. Projects can also be analysed to help gain better understanding of how schedule changes affect an entire project.
"As the preparation involves anything from information gathering to the development of environmental games using technology, certain programs assist us in graphing our visual links both at management level and at ground level. Structures, maps and links relevant to our greening operations can now be drawn and visualised using these programs," adds Williamson.
"We will introduce our staff to better, improved online methods. Certain software packages have also helped management to publish internal applications for our workforce and, notably, allow us to free up our resources for more effective IT operations," says Williamson.
City Parks says the CRM program will, for the first time, give it a foolproof view of what customers want and whether it can meet these needs from first contact through purchase and point of sales. It says solutions will help with conservation planning and development, aquatic services and technical resources management across the city.
Share