Department of Labour – Employment Relations Service

The Department of Labour's Employment Relations Service (formerly known as the Industrial Relations Service) exists to help employers, employees and unions make the Employment Relations Act, and employment relationships, work.

Their role is to provide in the first instance information to employers, employees and unions.

The Employment Relations Service is also be involved in mediation, investigation, the Employment Court and operates the Labour Inspectorate.

Business Objectives

The Employment Relations Service recognised the need to be able to full text search all decisions/judgments that are made. A full text search was required in order to assess:
• how prevalent a decision/judgment was
• how the decision/judgment came to be made
• any follow up to the decision/judgment
• any changes/interpretations to the decision/judgment.

The recording of judgments by external parties often only includes notable judgments, therefore the extra details as listed above were not available for each and every decision/judgment.

The requirement was also that the system had to fully integrate with their existing Case Information Management System (CiMS). This was to ensure a seamless method of recording, management and retrieval of Case Information and decisions/judgments.

General

The Employment Relations Service has three web servers (knowledge libraries); one in Auckland and two in Wellington. One of the servers in Wellington is for testing and training.

Staff situated in Auckland or Hamilton are defaulted to the Auckland library (server) but can also choose to search on the Wellington library. Staff situated in Palmerston North, Wellington, Christchurch or Dunedin default to the Wellington library, but can also choose to search the Auckland library.

Business Benefits

SilentOne is the repository for corporate memory. The benefits to the Employment Relations Service have been:
• Seamless integration with the existing case information management system.
• Any person who holds the correct security can access a decision or judgement irrespective of where that judgement was issued.
• Staff are able to search and retrieve the full text and open it out of the Case Information Management system interface
• It's fully integrated and completely seamless.
• The Employment Relations Service staff are more easily able to share intellectual property and information.
• Mediators out in the field can access the information when and where they need it (via laptop, Virtual Private Network (VPN)).

Future Direction

SilentOne's architecture enables information that is stored in a wide variety of formats and locations to be accessed quickly and managed efficiently. It is also extremely scalable because of its distributed nature and low-level integration with the Windows Server operating system.

The Employment Relations Service identified a relatively narrow business need (by admission) but realise that in the future they will be able to extend SilentOne's capability further. For example public determinations could be published internally into SilentOne and then web enabled to provide public access to these determinations.

Quotes

Ian Hight (Silent One)

"SilentOne's open architecture enables us to provide tailored solutions to address the specific business needs of the customer. The seamless integration at the Employment Relations Service, is an excellent example of how SilentOne can be used as "engine-ware" to support broader applications."

Gordon Barlow (Registrar CiMS Auckland Employment Court, Employment Relations Service)

"Because SilentOne is completely integrated into our Case Information Management System it supports our business rather than driving it - which is exactly what we wanted."

For more information, contact us