There are many potential fishhooks in reform of the water sector and creating new organisations to run the sector will take significant investment, says Greg Preston, Manager, Building Innovation Partnership, University of Canterbury.
At the heart of these new organisations is the need of consistent data and information management systems to ensure that decision-makers get the right information, at the right time, in a way that is easy to digest.
The temptation is for each council to see this as an isolated problem that they must solve alone. However, whatever form the three waters organisations take, the information needs are very much the same.
Change provides a golden opportunity to create better systems that serve communities better. One of these changes would be the adoption of common standards for data across the company.
This is being successfully done by the Transport Agency under its Asset Management Data Standards (ADMS) project. This ensures that all agencies involved in national and regional transport can share their data in a standard way. Doing this for water will revolutionise the way we deliver these services to our communities.
Standardisation leads to more efficient processes and better decision-making by driving continued asset data quality improvements, accurate reporting, and nationally consistent decision support tools. Systems improvement developed in one area can be seamlessly rolled out across the country
The three waters reform, while repealed, still offers opportunities to manage our collective assets better under the current Local Water Done Well policy. Several important projects have been mothballed but still exist. These artefacts include: A nationally consistent three waters asset data standard; a sophisticated online portal in which assets and other data from councils is being uploaded and transformed into the new standards; and the National Engineering Design Standards (NEDS).
Leveraging these artefacts and building a national asset data capability will make a step-change in the way that our assets are managed.
To be truly transformative a national capability needs to be built. For this to happen we need to create a national data taskforce.
As well as a transformation role, the task force would have a training and support role for the new organisations and councils, creating a system with far greater data literacy and analytical capability.
However, this will require investment. This investment will need to come from councils. But using a shared approach will create much greater efficiency and reduce the burden on rates without affecting local decision-making and ownership.
If the lessons from the AMDS are to be learnt, the return on this investment could be very high indeed – a conservative return on investment is greater than 6:1 but it is likely to be much greater.
The good news is that the systems for this process have already been largely created and the new investment will be in the people and processes. This is an investment that a badly dented water sector desperately needs.
Here is an opportunity to create a truly efficient, data driven water sector, so let’s grasp this opportunity for the benefit of our communities, our environment, our economy, and our collective futures.