How Ethos Urban Found the Keys to Seamless Development
A world built on data
Ethos Urban is an Australian organisation focused on delivering a better urban experience; one that blends design, economics, engagement and planning, and that is focused on the future, with sustainability and human needs guiding every decision.
Ethos Urban has spent the last quarter-century working with both the public and private sectors to enact urban change. This is a high growth and ultra-innovative team. Over the years they’ve come to understand exactly what urban success looks like, and the steps that must be taken to get there.
But such a complex problem as developing smart, sustainable, productive and human-centric cities demands an equally complex approach. Ethos Urban’s teams, located in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, must apply what they call ‘collective intelligence’ to the problems that they’re presented with. This means pulling property data from a wealth of sources, and using intelligent solutions to draw meaningful insights from all the zeroes and ones.
A mess of bureaucracy and red tape
As part of the urban development process, Ethos Urban looked to identify the landowners that would be impacted by any proposed change, and exactly what those changes would mean for them on a property-by-property basis.
The task was more complex than it might initially sound. Ethos Urban worked within 100+ local government areas, each of which brought its own rules and processes. All in all there were 40,000 policy records to be trawled through in order to ensure all the I’s are dotted and T’s were crossed.
Perhaps there was conjecture as to whether a new building in the city centre breached height restrictions. Maybe a change to the historic status of a building led to implications for the land and property owners that surrounded it. It was a challenge to access all the necessary property data and information, and many hours were wasted reviewing policies of little relevance, leaving less time for the team to interpret the impact of policy and planning updates to developers and property owners.
Ethos Urban devoted a significant team to this incredibly time-intensive exercise; one that in many ways wasn’t sustainable in the long term, nor particularly feasible in the short term.
Making sense of it all with FME
Having been made aware of Seamless by a mutual connection, and having seen the potential for FME to improve and digitise many of the manual processes that currently held them back, Ethos Urban reached out.
Both organisations were technology-focused, both were high growth, and both put a strong focus on collaboration and project management.
The aim was to grant Ethos Urban access to the latest policy and planning rules from the websites of local and state authorities. Historically these updates were difficult to collate, as they were haphazardly posted across government websites and through public notices.
FME connected up hundreds of data stores and websites, tracking, pulling, formatting and delivering any policy and planning changes. Instead of trawling through endless documents, the idea was for Ethos Urban’s policy analysts to be automatically made aware of every change, and to provide the highest quality and most up-to-date recommendations on the back of these regular insights.
At the very beginning of the relationship, Seamless travelled to Australia to meet the Ethos Urban team and to gain a deeper understanding of their situation and requirements. From that moment on the entire solution would be built and delivered virtually, with fortnightly project sessions during the development phase replaced with virtual training sessions once the platform was ready to go.
The result was Ethos InSite, a platform that not only kept the Ethos Urban team up to date on the latest planning policy changes, but delivered these updates to third parties too, connecting them with an Ethos Urban expert in the process. The tool ensured that everyone was better informed of policy changes and the potential impact on their sites, and by offering external access, Ethos Urban turned an internal tool into a lead generation machine.
Trading low value for high value
The consultants at Ethos Urban can now spend more time on higher-value tasks: understanding policy changes and making informed decisions based on this new information. Research has been replaced by analysis: every morning the team is presented with a consolidated report on new changes, and how they could impact a particular area. They are then able to reach out to their network, and campaign for clients to ensure the best possible outcomes are achieved.
As it turned out, of the 40,000 policy records that the team were once asked to trawl through, only 1000 were particularly relevant. And not only did FME integrate hundreds of public sites, it also connected to the company’s CRM, and to Mailchimp, allowing information to be automatically updated and sent across internal systems and beyond.
Zooming out, FME has allowed Ethos Urban to advise on ever-smarter and more sustainable urban environments, built for the needs of today and tomorrow.
