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City West Water has reduced maintenance costs, eliminated paper based reporting and increased responsiveness with an integrated job management system and a new fleet of Next G handsets.
The government agency provides water and sewerage management for 1 million homes and businesses in the greater Melbourne CBD area.
City West Water information services manager David Bellchambers said it was desperate for a replacement for its "disastrous" Statenet mobile radio network and clunky field reporting system.
"We rolled out 3000 Panasonic toughbook laptops running on Next G which saved us $20,000 in maintenance and repair over using regular Dell laptops," Bellchambers said.
"Our old mobile systems were big ugly desktop things in our trucks which chewed up enormous amounts of power and didn't often work.
"The new [platform] hooks into our SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition)system and alerts us of burst water mains and dangerous job sites using our GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping program."
An alert system, built on the Kingfisher protocol, monitors the pressure of City West Water's network of pipes and sends notifications straight to field laptops.
The Field Operations Case Utility System (FOCUS) integrates the agency's Oracle RDMS databases, including its Hansen asset management system, Smallworld GIS platform and interactive voice reponse (IVR) phone system.
Staff upskilling is the biggest benfit according to Bellchambers. The system has realised about 90 percent of its projected improvements, including KPI reporting from the field, reduced water loss, and fewer customer disruptions.
"We've got blokes out there who are 60 and are learning new skills because the system has taken up the mundane tasks," Bellchambers said.
The agency also cut head count, improved responsiveness and improved safety of field staff working in dangerous environments with an integrated alert system.
The system generates an answering message on the agency's customer service phone line through an email from the management system to the IVR, which is then coverted via text to speech.
He said the so-called off-the-shelf system from e-wise required a lot of customisation for the platform to work, but recommended businesses tweak similar implementations as much as possible to maxmise suitability and staff acceptance.
Bellchambers said it remodelled the system's secuirty to run over it's Wi-Fi network.
"We use RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service) and fully encypt traffic over our Wi-Fi VPN. We also ensure that on customer addresses are taken with laptops into the field," he said.
The agency recieves two external vulnerbility tests each year and is regularly audited by government agencies.
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CIO Live Podcast #79: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires Part II 05 October, 2007 06:00:00
For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders. - +
CIO Live Podcast #78: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires 28 September, 2007 17:34:25
For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders. - +
CIO Live Podcast #77: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part III 21 September, 2007 07:00:00
Part three in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance. - +
CIO Live Podcast #76: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part II 14 September, 2007 07:00:00
Part two in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance. - +
CIO Live Podcast #75: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part I 07 September, 2007 07:00:05
Part one in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance.
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Cutting Through the Spin of Recent Vulnerability Disclosures 13 October, 2008 10:53:00
The FUD surrounding the ClickJacking and TCP/IP vulnerabilities has the world seemingly frozen in fear. But once you cut through the spin, the vulnerabilities aren't all that they were made out to be.There are a few highly publicised vulnerabilities at the moment which haven't completely been disclosed and which, it is claimed, could threaten the whole Internet as-we-know-it. Only, when the vulnerabilities are finally disclosed, it seems that the whole incident has been somewhat Chicken Little. - +
PCI app security: Who's guarding the data bank? 13 October, 2008 11:09:00
Compliance strategies for PCI's new application security requirementsWhile Willy Sutton never really said it, the truth is that people rob banks because that is where the money is. Today's criminals don't walk into banks with loaded guns and get-away drivers. Rather they connect from a remote location using a browser and are armed with hacking tools and spyware. - +
Data-center security tools to not overlook 10 October, 2008 11:37:00
With the rise of security suites, it's time to consider some emerging security tools and rethink othersProtecting a corporate data center is like trying to keep an elephant safe from a swarm of flies. Despite your best efforts, bites happen. As the staples of security -- such as firewalls, antivirus software, spam and spyware filters -- come together in suites of products that allow for sophisticated management, there are other security tools either emerging or worth a rethink. - +
IBM, Secret Service, others study identity/cybercrime issues 09 October, 2008 10:09:00
Center for Applied Identity Management Research organization teams experts in criminal justice, financial crime, biometrics, cybercrime and cyberdefense, data protection, homeland security and national defense.IBM, LexisNexis and the Secret Service are among a group of corporations, government agencies and academic institutions that has formed to study and help solve identity management challenges around cybercrime, terrorism and narcotics trafficking. - +
Strange account management at Amazon 09 October, 2008 09:51:00
A careless login led to the discovery of some strange ccount management practices at one of the Internet's largest retailers.Via the RISKS mailing list comes an interesting tale of poor online account management at a major online retailer. According to Graham Bennett, accounts with Amazon display an odd behaviour that doesn't seem to have attracted much attention in the past.
NetStar Networks Calls Brisbane Home 13 October, 2008 12:01:00
New Verizon Business Managed Service Makes Collaboration Easier 13 October, 2008 10:06:00
F-Secure achieves excellent results in Internet security suite comparison 10 October, 2008 14:37:00
Lock It Up With Maxtor BlackArmour, Hardware Encrypted Storage Provides Government Grade Security For Consumers 10 October, 2008 09:04:00
Pitney Bowes MapInfo Launches New Version of AnySite 10 October, 2008 05:58:00
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Revolutionising Back-up and Recovery
Rapid adoption of virtual server technology, and the challenges associated with the backup and recovery of ever-growing stores of information is causing a number of IT managers to reevaluate their data protection strategies. New backup and recovery methods which use data de-duplication technology to reduce capacity and network bandwidth requirements are being deployed to keep up with explosive data growth, shrinking backup windows, compliance initiatives and security concerns. Read on to find out more.
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