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Over the last twelve months, NAATI has made significant investments in its ITC infrastructure, making, amongst many other things, the COVID-19 forced working from home arrangements almost seamless and was an unexpected benefit of the already planned migration.
NAATI has taken a strategic and long-term ITC view to how it does its work and how it supports the many thousands of T&I practitioners and anyone else that interacts with our systems. The aim is to make these interactions simple and as efficient as possible, whilst increasing our operational efficiency and effectiveness, resulting in an overall customer experience improvement.
This year has seen the foundations laid for this approach. The infrastructure that underpins our technology is now entirely hosted in the cloud underpinned by the Microsoft Azure platform. The Microsoft Teams product suite, with its audio and video capabilities, has been essential in smoothly continuing our day-to-day operations and providing good quality, online meetings. There has also been the roll-out of a new cloud-based telephony system using Microsoft Teams Calling across all of our sites.
As David Richardson, Head of NAATI’s IT and Communications team, said: “Timing is everything, and we were fortunate to have our systems and services in the cloud before COVID-19 struck. The need to move all employees to working-from-home arrangements as the pandemic worsened would have been much harder to achieve in a solely office-based IT environment. We now have the capability for our staff to work from anywhere, anytime on any device.”
Having these foundations in place enabled the opportunity for NAATI to move to test CCL online quite quickly as the opportunity for face-to-face testing disappeared due t the pandemic. The use of this methodology has proven to be an excellent and unexpected testing ground for the option of online examination tools used on an ongoing basis. It drove acceleration of the program of work to establish this type of testing as a crucial part of our business-as-usual processes in the future.
Later this year we will be formally launching an online testing environment using the Televic cloud-based platform, building on the company’s ability to develop sustainable and high-tech solutions that guarantee communications in situations that are critical and essential.
Televic’s experience with the translation and interpreting industry in Europe was also a critical factor in selecting their platform. These were all factors in our goal to create certification testing environments that are high quality and available from anywhere.
Subtle changes that may have gone unnoticed, but are no less significant, are the re-launch of our website utilising a new content management system and hosting platform and a refreshed look and feel.
These changes provide a foundation for continuous service improvement and provide a robust platform for the ongoing development of our ITC infrastructure. In an increasingly connected local and global community, we continue to develop our business model to ensure that our services meet the needs of all those that interact with NAATI, be it in person or virtually.
David Richardson is NAATI’s senior manager responsible for Information Technology and Communications. David joined NAATI in December 2019 and, since then, has overseen the implementation of its cloud-based computing environment and telephony, as well as the launch of its new website and improvements to the myNAATI portal.
