Data Centre
DATA CENTRE Lend Lease's headquarters data centre was designed and constructed with the highest rating for energy sustainability.
Information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure is essential to any corporation. As a part of the decision to relocate its headquarters to 30 the bond, Lend Lease Management Services (LLMS) took the opportunity to re-evaluate its ICT to ensure that it effectively and efficiently met business needs for now and the future.
An SME Gateway member 'The Frame Group' Pty Limited (Frame) was commissioned to evaluate the current environment and propose solutions which would not only provide new capabilities and efficiencies to the business, but also contribute to the overall innovation showcased by the 30 the bond project.
To meet this requirement, Frame undertook an evaluation of a number of converging technologies encapsulating voice, video, data, and power management. The resultant ICT design produced , which incorporates all these components, has allowed LLMS to implement a fully converged network based on the Internet Protocol (IP). This provides not only extensive expansion and redundancy capability, but also ongoing flexibility as the business grows and changes in the future.
Innovative design of the cabling infrastructure, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), data centre and regional network, demonstrates the uniqueness of the project’s management and design philosophy. This converged approach has provided a single platform upon which all applications in the realm of voice, video and data, support the business. In the majority of cases, delivery of these services to the desktop is via a single cable. The flexibility of 30 the bond’s ICT design means that moving staff within the building can be undertaken with minimal cost and inconvenience.
The scale of the project required Frame to work closely with the many building disciplines on-site. The overall project required a sound management methodology to ensure all aspects of the ICT programme met time, budget and expected outcomes. Project management methodology, incorporating the internationally recognised PRINCE2 standard, was used to design and manage the ICT component of the project. Frame’s responsibility included coordination with third party suppliers, carriers and other sub-contractors.At 30 the bond, Frame focussed on the key factors of quality, flexibility, security and user friendliness. Considerable design and planning was executed by Frame to ensure a smooth transition to the new headquarters. Frame is proud to have been a primary consultant to LLMS during the design phase and Bovis Lend Lease during construction of this landmark project. These close partnerships permitted Frame to deliver ICT infrastructure that is fully integrated with the unique requirements of 30 the bond.
ICT Support
Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital - ICT Restructure
The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital is a world leading specialty treatment and research establishment. Based in East Melbourne with over 50 outpatient clinics around Victoria, the Hospital provides eye, ear, nose and throat services to over 243,000 people a year.
Project
The Hospital had identified limitations in all key facility and IT support functions that were impacting on day to day support and patient handling operations. We were asked to review all support activities from IT through security to building and equipment maintenance and recommend organisational, systems and personnel changes to improve effectiveness and commence a cultural change. Our services included:
- A detailed review of all areas of support by discussing current operations and future plans with individual departments including new facility planning, maintenance, security, patient records, IT systems and existing hardware support.
- Further reviews of the current and future needs of the hospital and research arm with senior management, doctors and sample nursing staff over the full shift operations.
- Analysis of the current planned and future needs of the hospital in conjunction with a cross section of key personnel at all levels.
Results Achieved
- A new organisation and reporting recommendation was developed and presented to the hospital executive along with staffing change recommendations and training suggestions. The new organisation was accepted and staff changes and replacement implemented.
- The key areas of maintenance, security and IT systems and support yielded immediate benefits with ongoing change management and training being actioned.
- Improved response times, more effective structure, greater job satisfaction from support staff and process/ structure that reflected the true needs of the nursing and research facilities in the hospital.
Web Services
Bureau of Meteorology Web Service
Our Member LISAsoft assisted the Bureau of Meteorology (the Bureau) to configure a range of standards based web services based on the Australian Hydrological Geospatial Fabric (Geofabric).
The Geofabric is a suite of products that describe important hydrological features such as rivers, water bodies, aquifers and monitoring points. By detailing the spatial relationships between these hydro-features and how they are connected, models can be developed to show how water is stored, transported and used through the landscape.
The project was broken down into the follow stages:
Analyse User Requirements
Analysed Geofabric use cases provided by the Bureau, and categorised how the use cases could be addressed by WFS Simple, WFS Complex, WMS or WPS web services.
Review Geofabric Information Model
Reviewed and updated the Geofabric application schema and ported the six Geofabric products from ESRI Geodatabase format to the Postgres open source database.
Geofabric Web Services
Deployed and tested Geofabric features within GeoServer to provide WFS 1.1, WFS 1.0 and WMS services.
Performance
The information rich model provided by the Geofabric requires the use of Complex Features functionality. This Complex Schema functionality is still only recently implemented in the GeoServer WFS code, and LISAsoft identified and recommended areas for performance improvements. For this project, high performance general mapping was addressed by Geofabric’s WMS and WFS 1.0 interfaces, while data integrity was addressed by the WFS 1.1 Complex Schema interface.
WFS Clients
LISAsoft highlighted the immature support amongst WFS clients for Complex Schemas, which, in the short term, will hinder the usefulness of a Geofabric WFS 1.1 interface to stakeholders. LISAsoft partially addressed this by additionally configuring GeoServer to publish Geofabric data via WFS 1.0 (with GML Simple Feature format), as well as via images in the WMS format. The GML simple feature format is more widely supported, but it loses some of the relationships between different attributes.
Processing Queries
LISAsoft provided recommendations on how to address more detailed analytical analysis, which included the use of Web Processing Services (WPS).
Deployment Options
LISAsoft provided the Bureau with a report covering options for deploying the Geofabric Services into a production environment. The report covered the application stack of software required, server specifications, configuration considerations and scaling options. Various deployments into both cloud and internal infrastructure were compared and recommendations provided.
The Geofabric project completed on time and budget and has validated the application schema approach taken by the Bureau. The User Analysis work and the outcomes of the implementation pilot provided valuable lessons and have been used by the Bureau and the greater community of industry partners interested in the Geofabric datasets. The Bureau is now moving towards making Geofabric web services publicly accessible.
Strategy & Architecture
Strategy & Architecture
SME Gateway member has an ongoing engagement with the Department of Environment and Energy for the last two years. During the engagement the consultants conducted two main streams of work:
Strategy and Architecture:
- ICT Strategy and planning, Enterprise Integration Strategy, Mature Enterprise Architecture capability, Business Capability maturity.
Online Services Delivery:
- Blended team working on an agile/ DTO based delivery of Online Services, Implementation of the departments first hybrid cloud based environment, Development with MuleSoft ESB and integration with CRM, SAP etc.
In addition to these streams of work, they have helped develop Environment’s internal capability. The member's staff provided training, education and mentoring services which has matured the departments enabling capabilities.