Australian Heritage Commission

The Client

The Australian Heritage Commission is an independent statutory agency of the Commonwealth Government administered by the Department of the Environment and Heritage.

 Australian Heritage Commission
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The principle responsibilities of the Commission are to ensure that the Commonwealth meets its statutory responsibilities and obligations to protect and administer the heritage places declared under the numerous heritage listings as laid down in the Australian Heritage Commission Act 1975.

In order to ensure that heritage legislation is not only regulated but heritage values are appreciated by the broader community, a key strategy of the Commission is to provide effective public representation at a national and regional level. This primarily occurs through informing the community to the presence of heritage values and assisting community groups to work within State and local government frameworks to protect their local heritage. Consequently, the ability to manage its interaction and liaison with stakeholders is a core requirement of the Commission's business.

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The Challenges

In June 2003 SRA was engaged by the AHC to develop a Contacts and Consultants Database. The key challenges were to develop a system that:

  • could integrate all current and historical information about departmental contacts and consultants;
  • provided a single point of management for all departmental contact, publication and mailing list information;
  • eliminated contact duplication, error and redundancy within the department; provided the capacity, scalability and flexibility to be integrated as a single contacts system into all corporate departmental applications;
  • could handle the disparate security and business requirements of the numerous business units within the department;
  • conformed to the department's standard IT environment;
  • could be delivered in an extremely tight timeline to the highest standards.

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The Solution

In order to meet the challenges above, SRA analysed the contact management components of each of the existing major corporate systems within the department as well as The Australian Heritage Commission's stakeholder mailing system. As a result, the Contacts and Consultants Database has been developed by SRA to provide a single integrated framework to enable the management of all contact-related information within the Department of Environment and Heritage.

From a business perspective the Contacts and Consultants database:

  • Provides a single point for all current and historical information about departmental contacts and consultants;
  • Facilitates creation of mailing lists and history of mailing contact;
  • Facilitates management of publications and mail out information;
  • Provides a hierarchical Category Management facility that enables contacts and organizations to be categorized and reported on both vertically by Business Unit and horizontally by thematic category;
  • Facilitates mailing list exports and mail merge functionality with Microsoft Office documents;
  • Delivers structured Adobe PDF Reports directly to manager's desktops via the web.

In order to ensure that the system can accommodate the many and varied contact management requirements of the different business units within the Department, the system has been developed with a highly configurable business and security model.

The system utilises role based security to provide three levels of access within the system - system administrator, business administrators and business users. This ensures that users only have access to contacts and contact information for which they have appropriate privileges based on their business area and role.

A system administrator can create new business areas within the system thus enabling each business unit with the ability to maintain their own contact information as well as permitting other areas to either view or edit that information. Each business administrator can also define business-specific contact information and behaviours in addition to the core contact requirements of the department.

The flexibility and scalability of this approach ensures that Contacts and Consultation System can be incorporated as an integrated module into each of the corporate systems without compromising the contact-related business requirements of each of those individual systems.

The Contacts and Consultation database has been developed as a web-enabled application in PL/SQL toolkit deployed through the Department's corporate intranet via Oracle 9i Application Server (9iAS) and an Oracle Database. Management reports are deployed to the web via Oracle 9i Reports Server and are presented as Adobe PDF documents ensuring managers receive a consistently formatted output.

The system went into production in September 2003.

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The Future

In the immediate future it is planned that the system will be gradually integrated into each of the Department's major corporate systems. Other future enhancements under consideration include the development of modules to perform call logging, record client correspondence and track issue resolution, with the primary goal of improving the Department's ability to service its customers.

The Technology

Oracle 8i Database
Oracle 9iAS Application Server
Oracle Reports Server 6i
Oracle Reports Developer 6i
Oracle PL/SQL Toolkit
HTML & JavaScript

The Services

  • Project Management
  • System Design and Architecture
  • User Interface Design
  • Technical Development and Implementation
  • Data Migration
  • System Documentation
  • Testing
  • Ongoing Support

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