Strategy Use Case
This Astral client is a Victorian-based water utility who requested the preparation of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategy and roadmap to address the disparate and inconsistent approach to how unstructured information is managed and stored across the organisation. Information existed in silos across the organisation making it difficult to locate information due to the multiple locations where information could be stored.
Business Challenges
- It can be a time-consuming process to locate information as documents may be stored in various locations. Multiple versions of a document are often found or it is not always clear whether a document is the latest version.
- The large number of network drives (and huge volumes of documents that exist on them) makes it difficult for some staff to know where to store and where to find information.
- It is a difficult and complex process to retain and manage all unstructured information that relates to an asset throughout the different stages (e.g. from design through to operations).
- Unstructured information relating to a customer is stored in multiple systems making it difficult to easily access all information that relates to a single customer.
- The organisation is relying too much on information stored in people’s heads.
- There are no corporate policies relating to how to manage unstructured information. As a result, there is no consistency in how information is managed or guidance available to assist the business.
- There is no formal training provided in how unstructured information should be managed.
Strategic Recommendations
Astral engaged with business representatives from across all business areas to understand current information management processes, any issues or risks with how unstructured information is managed and to discuss what improvements could be made.
Taking into consideration strategic elements that included the business strategy, IT strategy, compliance obligations and the organisation’s current IM maturity, an ECM strategy was prepared.
In addition to the definition and implementation of an information governance program, the strategy included the establishment of an ECM platform for the management of both vital and working documents, but which utilised compatible solution sets to meet the business requirements of each document group.
The strategy also identified the key business applications that should be the first to utilise the new ECM platform based on business priority and potential risk to the business. These included controlled documents, engineering drawing management and digital asset management. The analysis also identified a large number of legacy applications that could be decommissioned following the implementation of the new ECM platform.
Business Benefits
- Establish single source of truth for unstructured information
- Increase staff productivity
- Decrease staff frustration related to IM
- Drive a consistent approach to how to manage information across the organisation
- Reduce risk relating to accessing out-of-date asset related information
- Simplify the IT landscape – reduce the number of IM applications used by the organisation