Case Study: Ballarat City Council achieves user-led innovation and greater efficiency with Microsoft Power BI

Ballarat Council releases efficiency genie, unleashes user-led innovation

Ballarat City Council faced scaling and resilience challenges as legacy on‑premises systems and niche applications struggled to meet the needs of a rapidly growing regional population. To modernize its platform and democratize innovation, Ballarat City Council adopted the Microsoft cloud stack—working with Microsoft Power BI alongside Azure, Dynamics 365, Office 365, Power Apps and Power Automate—to reduce risk and costs, improve disaster recovery, and enable user‑led low‑code/no‑code development.

Using Microsoft Power BI and the Power Platform, Ballarat City Council set up an internal Power User Group and split work into Collaborators and Makers, growing the active team from 12 to 38 members and producing 335 Power Apps and 592 Flows. The council replaced paper processes (for example a digital gift register), streamlined rostering with Teams Shifts, deployed inspection and audit‑trail apps, and achieved faster approvals, greater visibility and measurable productivity gains while modernizing infrastructure with partner support from Olikka and DXC.

Ballarat City Council

Rhett Nunn

Manager for ICT Solution Design and Development