Client
This Victorian-based water utility company requested Astral develop an Enterprise Information Management strategy and roadmap to provide a platform for structured information management, storage, and access across the organisation
An initial analysis of the organisations current Information Management practices, identified the following:
- Many siloed legacy systems and manual processes that reduced efficiency and productivity.
- Many network drives, OneDrive, mismanaged and siloed information in SharePoint, vast volumes of documents and a lack of consistent information management practices
- There were different approaches to managing and storing unstructured information, including poor version control
- Complex processes to retain asset related information through the different stages of design to operations
- Unstructured customer information was stored in multiple systems making it difficult to access all information related to a single customer.
Strategic Recommendations
Astral engaged with business representatives across all business areas to understand in further detail current information management processes, risks and issues and areas of improvement and prepared the strategy based on this.
The Strategy included a definition and implementation of an information governance program. It also included the establishment of an ECM platform for the management of both vital and working documents. The recommended solution utilised compatible solution sets to meet the business requirements of different document classes.
It also identified and prioritised vital business applications to utilise the new IM platform based on business priority versus potential risk to the business. These included controlled documents, engineering drawing management and digital asset management. The analysis also identified many legacy applications that could be decommissioned following the implementation of the new IM platform.
“In the delivery of an EIM strategy and roadmap Astral provided the governance framework needed to help us drive value from our information assets throughout their full lifecycle.
Furthermore, the ability to leverage Astral’s product knowledge and vendor neutrality across the IM market was invaluable, greatly assisting in executing on the architecture roadmap to ensure we are providing the greatest value to the business.”
Enterprise Architect Lead – Large Australian Water Utility
Benefits
- Establish single source of truth for unstructured information
- Increase staff productivity
- Decrease staff frustration related to Information Management (IM)
- Drive a consistent approach on how to manage information across the organisation
- Reduce risk related to accessing out-of-date asset related information
- Simplify the IT landscape – reduce the number of IM applications used by the organisation.