How Assurity Cloud helps WorkSafe use BetterWorkNZ to improve work.
OVERVIEW
Worksafe sought to develop a Crowdsourcing platform that employees could use to enhance their work participation and engagement. Initial testing of the new BetterWorkNZ platform showed promise. However, moving the platform from concept to production posed a challenge. The platform must comply with government security, privacy, and accessibility standards. Assurity Consulting provided a ready-made solution using their government-approved AWS-based Assurity Cloud. As a result, the BetterWorkNZ platform was up and running in a matter of weeks and is already delivering invaluable insights.
KEY OUTCOMES
ABOUT THE CLIENT
WorkSafe New Zealand is our country’s primary workplace health and safety regulator, employing over 600 staff to ensure that all New Zealanders have access to healthy work, safe work, and equitable outcomes in the workplace.
THE CHALLENGE
Solving business problems is unnecessarily difficult. “Workers don’t have the right tools to share and explore their problems and find innovative solutions that work for them,” explains Richmond Johnston, Innovation Manager at WorkSafe.
“In the past, this was achieved with macro level, centralised and time-intensive tools to explore problems or challenges people might face in their work – things like workshops or clipboard surveys. These tools limit participation, cannot validate differing conditions across organisations and contexts, are inaccessible, and can’t provide transparent information flow.”
While mulling the issue over, the Innovation team proposed a crowdsourcing platform that equips workers to log activities and ideas and connect them directly with management. This platform was fully funded via the Digital Government Innovation Fund. The team went straight to sandboxing, quickly establishing viability and building a candidate app.
Accessibility is one of the great advantages of publicly accessible cloud platforms. For the inconsequential cost, an organisation like WorkSafe can spin up a cloud tenancy and experiment or explore ideas under the ‘fail fast’ mantra.
It soon became obvious WorkSafe was on to a good thing, and it set about transitioning the platform for production. That’s when the problem became apparent. “While cloud services are cheap and easy to access, you can’t roll out a state-backed platform without an approved platform which offers the security, stability and performance expected by the government. That’s why it has pre-approved platforms available so that the general public can have confidence in any government service.”
OUR SOLUTION
“You don’t know what you don’t know, but what we did know was a safe pair of hands was necessary,” said Richmond, “We approached Assurity Consulting
for a solution; as it happens, AWS is a government- approved platform, and their Assurity Cloud is built on AWS – things were looking up.”
Assurity Cloud is a secure Platform-as-a-Service for experimentation, collaboration and co-design. Offering portable assets and full functionality, including user access control, developers can build, deploy and run applications, benefiting from real-time metrics and built-in quality assurance. This is beyond valuable to the development of a new crowdsourcing application like BetterWorkNZ, but what WorkSafe’s Innovation team was really excited about was the partnership they had with Assurity.
Richmond says that even from their initial meeting, Assurity demonstrated an insightful ability to understand requirements, challenges and recommend solutions. “We don’t have AWS expertise, and quite frankly, focusing on the infrastructure is not where we add value. When Assurity Consulting got involved, they quickly provided the platform, expertise, and experience necessary to take crowdsourcing off the drawing board and into the hands of workers.”
The Assurity Cloud platform was set up to provide WorkSafe with a ‘prototype’ view, with consulting support available to guide the ‘lift and shift’ from the previous cloud to the new one. As is typical with Assurity Consulting, a ‘lean in’ approach saw the company become part of the WorkSafe project team, participating in and contributing to standups and delivery teams while sharing knowledge and guiding towards the final solution architecture.
RESULTS
Richmond says there’s a simple way of explaining what Assurity achieved for WorkSafe. “They saved our bacon,” he quips. “If we had to do audits and train up on a new platform and so on, it would be expensive and painful. We didn’t have to do that.
What that means in practice is that the Crowdsourcing platform is in the hands of those who can benefit from it – Aotearoa NZ’s frontline workers.
Richmond is proud to be part of innovation by Kiwis for Kiwis and is making the application available across multiple industries and government departments for free. For example, it is being used in forestry, where it is a crowdsourcing innovative technical solution to improve the working environment. In Construction, Fulton Hogan, Downer and Fletchers are collaborating in search of solutions to common problems, beginning with physical and verbal abuse directed towards roadside workers.
In both examples, the businesses have made commitments to trial and prototype a selection of the most viable and desirable ideas. Richmond says more than 60 ideas have already come through for consideration and analysis.
“Crowdsourcing goes beyond health and safety. It’s about improving work by engaging those who do it; if we can do that, outcomes will be better, and people will be happier in their jobs.”
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