The council uses SAP for its core ERP applications, Geomedia for GIS, Trim for document management, Teamsite for its web applications, with Borland as a platform for capturing business requirements and managing testing.

The council has client-server-based hardware. "It is inevitable that we will move to software-as-a-service at the application level, but we have no agenda," he says. "SaaS has advantages and disadvantages, particularly when it comes to data sovereignty."

Till says the IT team is looking to move back to the civic building between October and December. "We had just moved into the new building around the time of the first quake," he says.

He feels the quakes have endorsed the IT business model. "In hindsight, we had the right structure. We knew who the decision makers were and we could scale.

"After the September quake, we realised we were burning some staff out. Following the February quake we realised we were going to be in it for the long haul, so we implemented better rostering.