Thinking, thinking

Thinking Windows has finally announced the go-live of their water-billing product Aquarate at Western Water, in Victoria.  The tender occurred in mid-2009, so that seems an awfully long time for a water billing implementation.  However, if I'm not mistaken Western Water is now the biggest site (in customer numbers) that Aquarate has, which ought to resolve those niggling doubts the competition has been promoting about Aquarate's ability to scale, and trhe company's ability to support its product.  Good luck to them.

A liitle ignorance

Astonishingly it seems that understanding and communicating the water reforms agreed by Australian governments almost twenty years ago hasn't percolated down to at least one CEO of a water authority that is the direct result of those reforms.  The Council of Australian Governments agreed, in the 1990s, that Australian consumers should know the full cost of collecting and delivering water to their taps.  They would know because they would be paying that price for their water.  One corollary of that reform was the local government councils who could subsidise water prices through their land rates while they also functioned as the water provider, would have their water business taken away

That reform has only now been put in place in Tasmania and SE Queensland.  The latter's water prices must reflect the cost of the infrastructure that successive governments put in place to "drought-proof" Brisbane and the sourrounding townships including the Gold Coast.  But a cone of ignorance seems to have descended over all the participants, with one Gold Coast City councillor (the city is a shareholder in one of the three new water utilities) questioning if the Board of the utility "knew what it was doing" and, so far as one can tell from the newspaper reports, the CEO of Allconnex Water failing to educate councillors in the full context of price increases

Branding government monopolies

Lithgow City Council, whose habit of demanding businesses in its area supply them with information they’ve already provided, has now decided to spend ratepayers’ money on something they already know.  The Lithgow Mercury reports that community comment is being sought on a concept for a new ‘brand’ which will positively promote the Lithgow Local Government Area, the Lithgow City Council, economic development and tourism.

“It is very important to recognise that a ‘brand’ is not just about a logo, it is about how we look, what we say and what we do,” Mayor Neville Castle said.  “It’s about how we are perceived and recognised by locals, visitors, potential workers and investors.  “The Council resolved to review its current branding, and this was followed by resolutions to upgrade town entrance signs, and to promote Lithgow to attract investors and visitors.”

And the winner is …

...

It’s something in the water

The Australian newspaper reports that “The government's top infrastructure adviser has warned that water utilities in regional towns are failing to comply with water quality standards.  This is because they are starved of crucial resources.  A secret report commissioned by Infrastructure Australia (IA) has found that some utilities are not meeting the national guidelines on what comprises good quality drinking water and are failing to deliver a secure water supply.  In recent previously unreported testimony to the Productivity Commission, IA said the report had found water quality reporting was very patchy for regional towns but available evidence indicated there was a problem that warrants attention.

They found that water utilities in many towns really struggled to comply with drinking water guidelines for a range of reasons: fewer resources, lower availability of technical knowledge, competition for the technical knowledge that exists in regional areas, inadequate infrastructure and poor processes for operation and maintenance of equipment. A key factor is the lack of adequately skilled people to operate, and systems to operate, and maintain water systems.

The IA’s director said many regional water utilities were not charging "anything anywhere near" cost-reflective prices.  "Many of them aren't even charging the sorts of prices that are obtained in major cities, where you would expect there would be economies of scale," he said.  "We believe that without pricing reform, many of those water utilities are never going to achieve financial sustainability."

Yarra Valley Water’s Oracle CC&B project finally goes live

How many consultants over how many years for how many millions of dollars?  We’ll probably never know, but there was a huge sigh of relief all round when Yarra Valley Water’s Oracle Customer Care & Billing project finally went live in July.  You would have to wonder at the impact on water prices when monopoly utilities such as the water companies spend what is reputedly $40 million on a water billing implementation.  The next cab off the rank for a water billing system is Allconnex Water in Brisbane, who you would have to hope will have more sense of the value-for-money proposition, and City West Water who have boldly decided it’s time to look at replacing all of their systems.  One of these days someone is going to be courageous (in Sir Humphrey Appleby’s sense) and select SAP for water billing – and then we’ll really see the dollars mount up.  At least the Yarra Valley Water experience of Oracle’s billing product (formerly SPL) has delivered a per-customer cost that’s nowhere near the stratospheric amount Aurora Energy in Tasmania is spending on the same product.  On the other hand, how much longer is Gippsland Water going to take before they finally decide they’ve done enough testing on their Hansen-8 product and go live with it?

Do large dogs have a place in the city?

Dog attacks have surged to more than 1,300 over just three months, latest figures reveal.  The figures show that 134 attacks required medical treatment and 31 led to hospitalisation.  Local councils have reported a 16 per cent increase in the number of attacks, with 1,306 attacks taking place between April and June this year.  An increase of 20,000 dog registrations happened in the same period.

NSW Local Government Minister Barbara Perry said in a statement:

It's not just people who are being attacked by dogs, there were also 1,235 animal victims including other dogs, cats and livestock that suffered from a dog attack during the last three months.  Unfortunately these attacks on animals resulted in 522 deaths.

The staffordshire bull terrier was the dog breed most commonly involved with 167 attacks over the three-month period.  Australian cattle dogs came second with 99, followed by 82 attacks by German shepherds.