.: Case Studies :.

Office of the Auditor General

The Audit Office exists as a constitutional safeguard to maintain the financial integrity of New Zealand's parliamentary system of government. The Audit Office, as an Office of Parliament, is independent of the Executive Branch of Government.

The Audit's Office role is to assist Parliament to strengthen the effectiveness of government and to account for its performance, in a manner consistent with Parliament's intentions.

Annually the OAG manages the audit of some 3,800 public entities as well as one-off enquiries, such as the recently complete Airways Corporation enquiry, and reports to Parliament.

Business Objective

In March 1999, OAG began researching a way of making information more readily available to staff on an organisation-wide basis. The OAG separately identified the requirement for an intranet and an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS).

It soon became obvious that considerable benefit would accrue if the two could be combined to "push" documents to users of the intranet. OAG wanted to ensure that staff were made aware of information that was being created within the organisation.

To do this a profile was created and each profile was specific to an individual user. Files corresponding to that profile would dynamically update within the intranet environment. If, during the course of the day a file was created that matched the user's profile, a link to the file would appear in the user's personalised intranet screen - therefore being "pushed" out to the user. The users can determine how long these links appear on their homepage.

The "profile" relates directly to a search query within SilentOne. Documents checked in to the knowledge library which carry those properties (metadata) or content relating to the profile would appear in the results set in the intranet window.

Product Trial

In December 1999 a Project Team was formed at OAG and they met on a fortnightly basis. The most time consuming part to the entire project was determining the document classification structure for the implementation of SilentOne. At first, the project team looked at basing the classification of their information on the existing file structure but that would have been cumbersome, so they decided to base them on business outputs.

A Pilot Group was formed to trial SilentOne for a period of three weeks. A variety of users were chosen for this trial and feedback sought to ensure all user requirements were being considered and met.

SilentOne was then rolled out to the entire organisation (52 users) in April 2000. It now contains approximately 22,000 documents - a large number of these documents were imported in bulk from the existing LAN environment.

The Intranet was rolled out in June 2000 and is known internally as CAGNet. The part of each user's home page where the links to documents which match a user's profile appear, is called their "Rolling Horizon".

Business Benefits

Silent One is the repository for corporate memory. Some benefits to Office of the Controller and Auditor General are:
• Newly created information relevant to each individual in the organisation is now "pushed" out to them via the intranet
• Information is more readily shared
• Finding documents/files is now much faster
• The system is less complicated than their previous shared drives/personal drives filing structure
• There is a huge time saving due to the fast retrieval of information
• They have a modern high-tech implementation that is easy to use and intuitive

Quotes:

Ian Hight (Silent One Limited)

"OAG have placed a great deal of emphasis on not only their documents but also ensuring that the system is very intuitive. SilentOne has allowed OAG to combine two projects; document management and the intranet into one integrated system."

Steve Botica (Manager Information Services - OAG)

"SilentOne is a great tool for managing, storing and retrieving our documents. Because it is integrated with our Intranet it gives SilentOne that extra dimension - it is much more than just another EDMS."

User(s): Raewyn Glaister

"One of the benefits of implementing SilentOne was being able to automatically integrate our Records Retention and Disposal Schedule into documents stored in SilentOne."

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