Palmerston North City Council Transforms Citizen Services with Confluent's Data Streaming Platform

Palmerston North City Council (PNCC) serves as the local government authority for New Zealand's Manawatū region, providing essential support to residents through 700 staff members. 

As part of a multi-year digital transformation program, PNCC needed to modernize its approach to data and citizen services. But its existing data infrastructure was fragmented across on-premises and cloud systems, and data remained trapped in disconnected silos. 

"We're operating in a digital, high-velocity ecosystem—streaming should be your backbone, not an afterthought. Confluent Cloud connects everything and has become the baseline of our technology to ensure reliable delivery of business value." - Atilio Ranzuglia, Head of Data and AI, Palmerston North City Council

Confluent Cloud provided a unified data streaming backbone that connects multiple council systems, processing and cleaning data in real time at the source so that it can be reused across multiple departments and applications, including third parties and regulators.

Now, PNCC can process citizen service requests in minutes instead of hours. The council is also looking at building more AI capabilities that automate complex regulatory workflows without manual intervention - a solution that would not be possible without a robust data streaming platform in place.

​​“Driving data-driven decision-making is a cornerstone of our digital transformation strategy. Confluent Cloud has significantly accelerated our capabilities - not only enabling us to reach this goal faster, but also positioning us at the forefront of innovation. It plays a critical role in delivering timely, reliable information that empowers smarter decisions and ultimately improves outcomes for our citizens." - Ryan Eames, Chief Information Officer at Palmerston North City Council

A Data Integration Headache for Local Government

PNCC was capturing key operational data (e.g., financial and regulatory data, property information, IoT data, files from suppliers), but their fragmented approach meant this vital information was trapped in siloed systems. 

"Excel spreadsheets were everywhere. Many systems, most of them running on premises, and many, many versions behind what it should be," explains Atilio Ranzuglia, Head of Data and AI at PNCC.

The lack of integration created expensive problems. When systems failed, recovery was difficult and time-consuming. Key data flows depended on individual expertise; when people moved roles, recovery stretched from days into weeks. Nightly data processing jobs lacked clarity and data governance, which then became costly to fix.

This fragmentation created expensive problems and eroded trust in council systems, leading departments to work around IT with external solutions and temporary fixes to recurring problems.

That’s when PNCC turned to Confluent Cloud.

Creating Real-Time Data Products with a Shift Left Approach

PNCC deployed Confluent Cloud as the central backbone for their digital transformation, implementing a Shift Left strategy that processes and governs data at the source. Shift Left is an approach that moves data quality, governance, and analytics into the front of every digital process. Instead of nightly reports, each transaction publishes a governed event, making it instantly reusable across services, dashboards and AI.

The council made a crucial architectural decision: every piece of data—whether from IoT devices, APIs, or file uploads—flows through Confluent Cloud for processing and distribution in real time.

“We adopted an event-sourced model with retention configured to keep full history for our data products,” explains Atilio. “Subject to our governance and privacy policies, Kafka topics remain the source of truth because we can always reconstruct state from the log. There's no better place to hold that data than Kafka topics.”

To help staff understand the new approach, PNCC described it as a "data supermarket" where departments could easily find and access the information they needed, without swapping between systems or chasing lost paperwork.

PNCC’s architecture can easily evolve thanks to having data products in Kafka topics, allowing data to be synced to multiple specialised data stores (relational DBs, NoSQL DBs, timeseries DBs, data lake), kept updated, powering a multitude of use cases, thereby reducing time-to-data significantly.

Advanced Use Cases Powered by Real-Time Data Products

PNCC has implemented numerous applications that demonstrate the power of real-time data products and Shift Left processing:

Property data products fuel reusable datasets:

PNCC developed comprehensive data products that combine information from multiple operational systems. These data products integrate building consents, resource consents, noise complaints, citizen requests, and regulatory history into a single, reusable dataset.

Building on its Property 360 data products, PNCC is developing a centralized, Google-style instant search experience for property information that unifies properties, history, and regulatory context. Powered by real-time streams and governed schemas in Confluent Cloud, it’s designed to serve both internal and external users and provide rich context for AI-driven processes.

Staff no longer waste hours searching and compiling information, freeing them to focus on complex cases that need human expertise. The same reusable data product also serves regulatory systems, customer service applications, and planning departments—a perfect example of the "build once, use everywhere" principle that now drives PNCC's operations. It’s a process that is streamlined by Confluent Cloud’s schema registry, governance, and lineage capabilities, increasing the trust and quality of PNCC’s data products

AI-powered financial processing:

Processing thousands of supplier invoices once meant staff spent countless hours manually categorizing expenses, often leading to errors and delayed payments. 

Financial visibility was limited, so budget planning was ad hoc every quarter rather than a continuous, measured process. Now, PNCC can stream data into data lakes and AI platforms and train AI models in real time. This provides the models with situational awareness and context on what’s presently happening to enable more accurate spend analysis. Machine learning classifies every line item of every invoice in real time as it enters the system through Confluent Cloud.

"We will soon have great visibility into how the Council spends money in different categories. This means staff will no longer drown in manual data handling, collating with supplier information, and managers can have instant visibility into spending patterns, “ explains Atilio. 

Automating regulatory workflows with AI agents:

Resource consent applications involve around 25 manual steps, which can create bottlenecks for residents and staff. PNCC is piloting the automation of up to 15 of these steps with AI agents that run continuously, while keeping humans in the loop for all decisions. Workflows are orchestrated via Kafka topics in Confluent Cloud so every action is auditable and compliant with council policy. Final decisions remain with council officers; AI supports, it does not decide.

"We’re piloting AI agents to handle repetitive stages, and other agents to review their work" notes Atilio.

If successful, straightforward applications could be acknowledged and triaged within hours, allowing staff to focus on complex cases rather than repetitive paperwork. 

Smart city monitoring with computer vision:

Managing city infrastructure once meant reactive responses to problems after they occurred. Today, PNCC has over 200 cameras and sensors that will be processing computer vision analytics locally and streaming actionable insights through Confluent Cloud.

The system automatically detects traffic patterns, identifies maintenance issues, and even monitors wildlife by analyzing bird songs.

PNCC is developing systems where when heavy rain is detected, city crews receive instant alerts about rising water levels before properties flood. Citizens report potholes and see crews addressing them by afternoon. Traffic lights respond dynamically to actual conditions rather than fixed schedules. 

Confluent Cloud is helping PNCC become the local government that is proactive that actually prevents problems, instead being reactive as complaints are made.

Dramatic Improvements in Citizen Service Delivery

Lightning-fast digital services implementation:

PNCC achieved remarkable improvements in their ability to deliver new digital services. 

Implementation time for new solutions dropped from once a quarter to just a couple of sprints, representing a fundamental change in the council's responsiveness to citizen needs.

A huge boost to citizen service response times:

With Confluent Cloud, PNCC has achieved significant improvements in response times for citizen service requests.

Service level agreements that were previously measured in hours are now tracked in minutes. When citizens report infrastructure issues, contractors receive instant notifications rather than waiting for manual processing or batch processes.

Zero operational overhead:

The fully managed Confluent Cloud approach eliminates infrastructure management entirely. Confluent Cloud provides PNCC with a solution that frees staff from managing their cloud infrastructure and networking, with costs limited to the service itself rather than dedicated staff and infrastructure.

"Our spend with Confluent Cloud is ridiculously low compared to what we pay any other system that offers a fraction of these services, without experiencing downtime,” reports Atilio. “And the fact that new features are available frequently means that the environment is always secure and up to date".

What's Next for PNCC and Confluent?

PNCC continues expanding their streaming architecture to support smart city initiatives across the entire region.

To start, PNCC is exploring advanced analytics integrations and developing their enterprise search system, which would provide citizens self-serve access to public records, leveraging GenAI to classify and summarize record information ingested from many platforms using Confluent Cloud. The council is also building additional AI-powered services and expanding their citizen developer program.

"The velocity of insights and agility Confluent Cloud unlocked is unmatched. It freed up our team from managing complex infrastructure and gave us some much needed time to innovate," reflects Atilio.

Learn more about PNCC