Centralising planning application intake and assessment for a state government planning agency

A state government planning agency needed a more reliable way to manage planning applications from applicants, local councils and other external stakeholders. Applications were handled across disconnected tools and locally varied processes, creating rework, inconsistent data and limited visibility for operational and executive reporting.

DiUS partnered with the agency to design and deliver a centralised application management platform. The platform standardised intake and assessment workflows, automated key steps, improved data quality, and made application data easier to share and report on across the organisation. It also reduced the manual reconciliation previously required before reporting could be relied on.

Reducing fragmentation across councils, systems and processes

Planning applications were managed through multiple tools such as Excel, Word, Jira and SharePoint, with each council and stakeholder group following its own process. This made it hard to track progress consistently, identify bottlenecks, and produce reliable reporting across the full portfolio.

Data collection was not standardised. Councils often provided information in different formats, and manual submissions introduced delays and errors. Without consistent intake data, reporting was slow and often required manual reconciliation before it could be used confidently for senior decision-making.

The agency needed a central platform that could:

• support councils and stakeholders with different levels of digital maturity
• improve consistency and auditability of application data
• reduce manual handling through workflow automation
• provide a dependable foundation for reporting and analysis
• enable progressive onboarding without forcing immediate changes to local systems

Built an API-first application management platform with two portals

The joint team designed and implemented an application management system built around an Application Engine API. The API acted as the system of record for applications, keeping workflow state and data definitions consistent across channels.

It supported two user experiences:

• Internal portal used by agency users such as planners and assessors to track, assess and manage applications.
• External portal used by applicants, councils and advisory groups to submit, update and monitor applications.

The team worked with stakeholders to assess existing workflows and align core steps and data requirements. This included mapping variations across councils, agreeing a common minimum dataset and workflow stages, and applying consistent validation rules, while leaving room for local differences during onboarding.

To minimise disruption, the platform was designed for progressive onboarding. Stakeholders could keep working in familiar tools while still submitting information in a consistent structure that the agency could assess and report on reliably.

Delivered a cloud architecture designed for scale, reliability and reporting

All services were hosted on AWS to provide managed infrastructure suitable for scaling and operational reliability. User interfaces were hosted on Amazon CloudFront, which serves the portals through a global content delivery network for fast, secure access. Services ran in a Kubernetes cluster to support consistent deployment, scaling and resilience of the backend services. User interfaces were built using Vue.js/Ripple to deliver the portal experiences, and services were built in Java or Kotlin to implement the API and business workflows.

The agency’s data lake was strengthened as the primary repository for application data, giving the organisation a single place to store standardised records for analysis and reporting. Automated data pipelines were designed to ingest, standardise and consolidate information from multiple sources so it could be used reliably for operational monitoring and executive reporting.

To support different levels of integration maturity, the platform was designed to accommodate both automated and manual submission pathways. Councils and organisations with more advanced systems could integrate directly via API, enabling machine-to-machine submission of structured application data into the Application Engine. Others could use structured manual uploads, providing a guided pathway to submit information in a consistent format without needing to upgrade their local systems. This allowed progressive onboarding while maintaining a common data structure across all submissions.

Several AWS managed services were used to support the architecture and operational model. Amazon API Gateway managed and secured access to the Application Engine API for both internal and external integrations. AWS Step Functions orchestrated multi-step workflows, coordinating validation, processing and downstream updates across services. Amazon Athena enabled direct querying of standardised data in the data lake, supporting reporting and analysis without requiring complex data movement or duplication.

Data was prepared for business intelligence tools such as Tableau, enabling consistent reporting on volumes, status, throughput, time in stage, and common causes of rework.

A single workflow, better data quality, and clearer reporting

The platform reduced fragmentation by bringing application intake, assessment and status tracking into a shared workflow. Onboarded stakeholders moved away from ad hoc, tool-specific processes and into a system with consistent data structures.

Automation reduced manual effort in routine steps such as notifications and report generation. A feedback mechanism helped councils and other stakeholders identify data quality issues earlier, such as missing or inconsistent fields, and correct them before assessment stalled. Over time this improved the reliability of submissions and reduced rework.

With the enhanced data lake and cloud-based architecture, the agency gained a more dependable view of application activity. This supported consistent reporting and improved visibility of bottlenecks and throughput using a shared dataset, reducing the manual reconciliation previously required to produce reliable reporting.

The platform was designed to scale as more councils and stakeholder groups are onboarded, without needing to redesign core workflows or the underlying data foundation.