Each year Service Providers (SPs) must collate and supply significant volumes of data on water and sewerage services to numerous State and Commonwealth agencies. The Statewide Water Information Management (SWIM™) project was created in 2006 to simplify reporting of up to 900+ indicators reported by some Queensland SPs. Today, thanks to the SWIM™ system, swimlocal™ and data translation tools require the reporting of only around 200 indicators in total which are then passed on to State and Commonwealth agencies in specified formats.
SWIM™ has been developed in stages. The SWIMonline pilot with small and medium councils for the 2007-8 reporting year received a strong response and in the 2008-9 year more than 80% of providers used SWIM™ to accomplish their water and sewerage reporting requirements. Today, generally all Service Providers report using SWIM™ and the quality assurance of data is greater than ever before in Queensland.
The success of SWIM™ is critical to consistent and transparent reporting for the Queensland water industry which is being assessed by its ability to provide data in an accurate and timely manner. SWIM™ has evolved from a reporting process to a tool with a clear focus on business planning, giving SPs comparative and benchmarking data as well as responding to ongoing and ad hoc data requests from a variety of organisations (such as Government agencies, researchers and consultants).
The data collection period runs per financial year from 1 July to 30 June. Other deadlines include BoM data on 31 August each year and NPR, ABS and Queensland Government data on 1 October.
Data can still be submitted if you missed the deadline and errors can be corrected at any time – please contact swim@qldwater.com.au if you need assistance.
Water and sewerage data was originally uploaded to SWIM™ via webforms and Excel spreadsheets accessed via the internet (SWIM member’s Portal). However, now all data is imported via either database software called swimlocal™ which is installed directly on SPs computers and/or the Annual Data Web Portal. All qldwater members have access to a free (limited) version of the swimlocal™ software (to enter their regulatory required annual water and sewerage data and some metadata) and the swimlocal™ Admin Tool for managing additional metadata.
All members are encouraged to direct any other data requests that could more appropriately be managed via SWIM™ to qldwater for assessment within the SWIM™ framework. For example, in 2010 a request from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to all SPs in Queensland sought paper-based reporting on over 100 indicators, many of which were already stored in SWIM™. With the permission of Queensland SPs, qldwater negotiated with ABS and reduced the 24-page report into five indicators on top of data already collected, realigned the due date with other SWIM™ requirements, and then sent the data automatically to ABS through SWIM™. This mandatory reporting requirement was intercepted only after members forwarded the data request to qldwater.