Modernizing how communities interact with local government

Designing and delivering a digital front door for local government services

Overcoming the community "friction tax"

At its core, community trust in local government is built or broken on everyday interactions. Across Australia, when routine tasks like paying rates, lodging a permit or registering a pet are bogged down by clunky systems, residents are often forced to fill out paper forms, make phone calls or visit a council office in person.

This fragmented experience creates a "friction tax" that erodes community trust and makes it harder for residents to access council services. While Australian councils want to modernize, capital expenditure constraints often block digital transformation. Replacing siloed legacy IT systems is cost-prohibitive, forcing operations to rely on disconnected backend applications.

To bridge this gap, ServiceGen and Thoughtworks partnered to create CouncilLink, a single digital front door that modernises how residents access and interact with council services.

The challenge: Resolving community friction

Southern Grampians Shire set out to address a common piece of community feedback: while individual local services functioned well, the overall experience of interacting with the shire could be fragmented and difficult to navigate.

For a geographically dispersed municipality, these access challenges were amplified. Many residents live on rural properties significant distances from the shire’s office. Routine interactions often required considerable travel, repetitive paperwork or multiple touchpoints for what should be simple transactions.

Instead of adopting a rigid, vendor-defined solution, or taking on the full cost and complexity of building its own custom platform, Southern Grampians Shire chose a collaborative approach. The shire partnered with ServiceGen and Thoughtworks to co-design CouncilLink, a scalable shared platform that simplifies access to council services while enabling future innovation across participating councils.

The solution: Modernizing access without replacing core systems

Under a collaborative delivery framework, ServiceGen, Thoughtworks and Southern Grampians Shire worked together to create a platform capable of sitting over existing enterprise systems and presenting residents with a single, intuitive access point for local government services. 

Rather than embarking on costly and disruptive system replacement programs, CouncilLink uses open integration architecture to securely connect existing systems of record through a modern digital experience. This approach reduces implementation risk, protects previous technology investments and enables councils to modernize community access while continuing to leverage core platforms.

Data security, risk management and secure architecture were embedded from inception, ensuring councils retain total control over their data.

Key discovery and co-design outcomes
 

• 15 to 20 high-value service opportunities identified and mapped during the discovery phase.
• Three features successfully built, integrated and trialled in preparation for the initial resident launch.
• Six to seven additional features prioritized for future delivery.
• Automated financial reconciliation capabilities introduced to support operational efficiency.

The implementation: Connecting the digital front door to legacy systems

Southern Grampians Shire’s initial implementation integrated with CouncilWise, its property and rates platform. Once launched, residents will be able to access information and services through a single interface while maintaining robust privacy, security and governance controls.

To minimize risk and maximize learning, the implementation followed an agile delivery approach. Features were progressively developed, tested and validated within controlled environments. This enabled shire staff to verify functionality and incorporate feedback throughout the delivery process, establishing a low-risk pathway to digital innovation ahead of public launch.

Key integration outcomes

• Automated financial reconciliation capabilities introduced to support operational efficiency.

• Secure, scalable architecture established to support future multi-council collaboration and shared feature deployment.

• Next-phase readiness: With testing complete, rolling out the platform to Southern Grampians Shire residents stands as the immediate next phase of the project.

The result: A new model for local government innovation

For Southern Grampians Shire, CouncilLink provides a practical way to improve how residents access local services, reducing barriers to engagement and creating a more convenient and connected community experience. With testing successfully completed, rolling out the platform to the shire's residents stands as the immediate next phase of the project.

This upcoming launch marks a pivotal step, as the platform has successfully progressed from concept through development to demonstrate a practical new approach to modernising local government services. More broadly, it provides a powerful blueprint for how Australian local governments can look to collaborate in the future to meet rising community expectations while sharing the investment of digital innovation.