Strategy Use Case
This Astral client is an Australian federal agency that has offices in all Australian states and territories, who engaged Astral to perform an independent review of its digital records management solution to assess how well the solution meets the agency’s business requirements as well as their compliance obligations, specifically records management, privacy and security.
Business Challenges
- There is a poor user uptake of the system, given the intended scope and purpose of the solution.
- The solution is not meeting the agency’s compliance obligations as they relate to records management, freedom of information, privacy and protective security requirements.
- There are no business rules and guidelines to govern the use of the solution. There is no direction about what to use the system for and when not to use it.
- The majority of the applications that the solution was meant to replace are still operational.
- Information silos remain with each business area able to lock out the rest of the organisation if they choose to.
- Users complain that the system is slow and has patchy performance.
- It is not possible to access the solution from some remote locations.
- For some users, the document security is inflexible and not able to meet their business needs.
- The search function is frustrating due to the high volume of results returned that are not relevant to the criteria.
Strategic Recommendations
Astral’s assessment identified that whilst the solution set had the capability to meet the agency’s business requirements, the main issue was how the agency had implemented the solution from a business perspective. This included both the technical configuration of the system and the approach taken by the agency to design and roll out the solution across the organisation.
Astral recommended that the agency make changes at both the organisation level (i.e. put in place structures, controls and practices for the whole program of work), and at the solution level (i.e. make system configuration changes and leverage all functionality available to integrate with other systems and drive business processes).
The strategic recommendations included the establishment of an information governance framework, the creation of policies and procedures to govern how information is managed in the solution and the appointment of the agency’s executives to IM-related roles to demonstrate management’s commitment to the IM program. Of critical importance was the preparation and execution of a business change management plan to educate staff about the importance of information as an asset to the agency.
Business Benefits
- Drive a consistent approach to the management of information across the agency.
- Agency is able to meet their IM-related compliance obligations
- Increase staff productivity
- Provides fast, efficient, and simple method to locate documents.
- Enable collaboration across different business areas
- Reduce the risk of an incorrect document version being accessed
- Users are confident that the documents are properly secured