How Objective Connect simplified the public housing process in New Zealand

During Collaborate 2020, Rebecca Finbow, Global Head of Customer at Objective, interviewed Nigel Lamb and Lydia Klimovitch of Kāinga Ora - Homes and Communities to learn more about their journey with Objective Connect.

Kāinga Ora is a newer public housing organisation in Wellington, New Zealand and has recently celebrated its first birthday. However, the function of public housing has been in existence for more than a hundred years and Kāinga Ora is the newest iteration of it.

Kāinga Ora’s primary function is to provide public housing for New Zealanders in need, but a major new feature has been the incorporation of construction and urban development and legislation. To help achieve this, Housing New Zealand, HLC and KiwiBuild joined forces.

Nigel Lamb, Building Design Quality Assurance Assessor at Kāinga Ora, explained that administering the standard design plans for the new state housing is challenging. There are 250 typologies - incorporating dozens of documents and large file sizes.

Kāinga Ora provides the standard plans and in order to receive building consent rapidly through a bulk assessment, they have to be able to share the drawings easily. This is where Objective Connect comes in.

Simplified collaboration and secure information sharing

“We have about 110 design partners connected and they are accessing any of these tens of thousands of documents all the time,” explained Nigel.

Kāinga Ora began using Objective Connect back in 2018 when they found that sharing information externally with partners and collaborators was difficult via a government site.

“Once we started actually looking into Objective Connect, we discovered just how easy it was to set up. Now we are able to promote the idea of large documents being securely shared,” commented Lydia Klimovitch, Records Manager at Kāinga Ora.

Once we started actually looking into Objective Connect, we discovered just how easy it was to set up. Now we are able to promote the idea of large documents being securely shared.

Lydia Klimovitch

Records Manager at Kāinga Ora

“We have developed very organically. In fact, it’s too much development almost because we extended the number of connections just this year. We were already at 87 percent, so you can see people are using Objective Connect very, very actively,” said Lydia.

“Very few people struggle to use Objective Connect, so it is quite discoverable for our users and a big deal for a government website,” said Nigel. 

Tapping into the potential of Objective Connect

While Nigel mostly uses Objective Connect as a library, some colleagues are using it as a collaborative workspace.

“Our asset managers and developers – individual project managers are sharing workspaces and they are doing it as a collaboration workspace. And so, they are able to upload new documents and “bulk upload” into Objective ECM,” commented Lydia. “So now external participants can deposit new documents and they are stored in the correct place, the correct way in Objective ECM.”

Now external participants can deposit new documents and they are stored in the correct place, the correct way in Objective ECM.

Lydia Klimovitch

Records Manager at Kāinga Ora

Rebecca commented: “During COVID, we’ve heard from a number of customers how Connect has been a real lifesaver for them, but we’re now starting to hear from customers who previously would have used paper files or memory sticks just how easy it is to be sharing securely with Connect. I guess, from a record manager’s perspective, the fact that, if people upload information into Connect and it’s back into your file system – into ECM – that makes your life a lot easier and hopefully helps you sleep better knowing that all those records are exactly where they’re supposed to be.”

Lydia and Nigel were asked to describe Objective Connect in a few words. “Big, powerful and friendy.” Nigel answered. “Mine would be ‘easy to use’,” Lydia said.

“It’s just so easy. I don’t think we’ve even tapped into the full potential of it. There are so many different ways you can use it.”