A Digital Walk in the Park

The Problem

Managing more than 890 national parks and reserves and with more than 60 million visits a year from people wanting everything from bushwalks to kayaking, New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) have millions of customer interactions to process every year.

NPWS were using several disparate and siloed systems making it almost impossible to provide personalised customer service and gather meaningful data insights for management reporting.

Aiming to significantly improve its customer service by consolidating data within a central platform, the ‘Digital Backpack’ will give park visitors seamless access to all their trip plans, bookings, passes and subscriptions. The solution needed to integrate customer facing systems and offer visitors a continuous experience across different NPWS offerings.

The Approach

Kablamo’s objective was to help implement an architectural solution that was scalable, reliable, and met best practice. Running over 20 technical design and discovery sessions with internal and external stakeholders they investigated the current digital landscape, external interactions and dependencies, product vision and user needs.

Through group workshops focussing on the visitor experience and product vision the team created a joint view of the future for the Digital Backpack. A high level of disconnect was observed between data systems and the lack of communication and systems integration, with data stored in multiple locations and complex pathways for Parks staff in retrieving a single view of the customer. There was a real need for the solution to unify and simplify the system to improve both the customer and admin experience.

The Result

Kablamo’s recommendation was to implement a cloud-based solution that was scalable, future-proof, and secure with a scalable data warehouse. The serverless solution can scale more easily, reduce costs of running with only paying for what is used, and quicker deployments and for updates and critical patches.

Using serverless technologies, with AWS Lambda for compute, Amazon Aurora for data storage, and AWS Glue for ETL, it was recommended that all public facing websites are secured with Amazon CloudFront for load protection, distribution, and improved speed. AWS WAF supports the website for protection against common web exploits and bots that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. These websites will be the entry point for parks customers, as well as staff and external agencies to be able to access their permitted information.