Honouring a commitment to relocate to more cost-effective offices the NSW State Government’s Ministry, Department of Premier and Cabinet (the ‘Department’), and NSW Treasury relocated to 20 floors of office space at 52 Martin Place. The new offices were designed with between 80-90 percent of floor space devoted to flexible working. Only a small percentage of staff were provided with dedicated desks and office space, due to the sensitivity of their roles or quantity of paper documentation they had to manage.
While there was a significant cost saving from the move, the relocation also represented an opportunity to benefit from a complete upgrade of the outdated technologies used across the departments, explained David Schneider, Chief Information Officer, NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet.
POMT was awarded the tender to design and implement the AV, Conferencing & Collaboration, Workspace Management and Media Distribution systems including the tenancy wide IPTV system and interface with a professional studio and function / event space. These solutions support over 1,250 staff across 20 office floors and more than 100 meeting rooms, breakout spaces and informal meeting areas.
“In the Department of Premier and Cabinet end-user technology infrastructure was quite outdated. We were mostly using desktop computers and had no wireless networking capability. We had at least 150 printers for just 400 staff, and no standard AV technologies. In our meetings rooms, staff would often give up trying to get the technology to work, so we really needed to improve the quality of the workplace technology,” said Schneider.
In preparation for the move, the Department completed a hardware refresh, deploying new laptops to all staff, implemented a managed print service with ‘follow me printing’, and completed upgrades to its messaging platform and standard operating environment.
“The planets aligned for us. We had executive commitment, the budget to achieve the outcomes we wanted, and hard timeframes for the move,” said Schneider.
POMT was tasked with designing and implementing virtual platforms for AV / VC management, workspace management and media distribution solutions. Also incorporated in the contract was on-going managed services, maintenance and on-site support personnel. “POMT met the tender’s cost requirements, showed great vision on the linkages between the physical workspace, technology and platforms, and also demonstrated its ability to deliver the technologies we need to support activity-based working,” stated Schneider.
As part of its on-going managed services to support the Department’s solutions, POMT has a dedicated full-time on-site resource at 52 Martin Place, Sydney. We support daily walkthroughs to ensure all the meeting rooms and technologies are fully operational and in standard configuration. We also provide on-call reactive user and technology support for any reported issues or difficulties, and manage the uploading and publication of digital content via the media distribution server.
“It’s important for us to have an on-site resource available to ensure a rapid response to any issues so that our meetings can get started on time. It’s also been invaluable to have someone available to provide ad hoc or scheduled training for new users of our workplace technology suite,” said Schneider.
