It was the end of an almost three-year project designed to bring Water Corporation's record keeping practices in line with compliance requirements laid down in the State Records Act 2000.
The utility is responsible for delivering water and waste water services to households, businesses and communities across the 2.5 million square kilometres that make up Australia's largest state.
Headquartered in Perth, the organisation has 45 offices and depots from which it manages more than $11.5 billion worth of water-related assets.
Those assets range from modern irrigation schemes to 1900's dams through to small bores sunk in remote regions during the 1800's.
Until recently, making data accessible and shareable across multiple sites - and remaining well protected - wasn't an easy task.
Konrad Tauber, IS relationship manager, Information Services branch, Water Corporation, said the biggest issue was being able to find things.
"Given the type of work that we do and the nature of the assets that we are responsible for, a lot of our documentation needs to be kept permanently and finding past records can be critical," he said.
"Historically, information was maintained by separate departments in a range of systems.
"There was also a hard-copy system where important documents would be put into a central file and this would have to be sent around if someone from another area or department wanted access to the records."
Electronic files made it easier to send copies of documents to others but this raised issues of original content. Recipients would save copies to their own server and, as amendments were made, different versions of the document would be saved to files throughout the organisation.
Trissa Dent, information and ECM project coordinator for the Water Corporation, said the challenge was sharing information across 45 locations without duplicating it.
The question of compliance
The introduction of Western Australia's State Records Act 2000 dramatically increased records management requirements for State Government entities.
The Water Corporation responded by implementing an Open Text records management solution for its management and records management teams.
The solution worked but by 2005 it was apparent that the limited roll-out was not enough to meet compliance.
A broader enterprise content management deployment was needed, one that would centrally store and support document life cycle management for all Water Corporation emails, office applications, graphics and engineering files.
To resolve the problem, the Water Corporation turned to WA-based ECM system integrators WindowLogic.
The two organisations had worked together on a number of projects in the past and both Tauber and Dent were confident it could provide a depth of document management experience and knowledge that wasn't available internally.
Another factor in the decision was that WindowLogic was locally based.
"Whenever we have to rely on expertise that is outside this state, it makes it a lot harder," added Tauber.
Defining the problem
The first step for WindowLogic was to help the Water Corporation define what it needed.
Keith Walker, managing director of WindowLogic and program manager for the ECM solution, said the client realised that enterprise content management was a problem area.
"Even though [the Water Corporation] had an Open Text solution for several years, it was being treated as a tactical solution primarily for records management and it wasn't getting full value for its investment in the technology," he said.
An investigation showed that in addition to the fragmentation of information, Water Corporation staff were confused about the roles of various information systems within the organisation.
There were inconsistencies in language, structure, security and processes between departments. The situation was also complicated by a lack of original content control and audit trails.
The net result was that work was duplicated, there was limited re-use of existing material and records keeping practices were not compliant with state regulations.
"One of their biggest issues was the use of email as a document management repository, making high value document contents practically invisible to the corporation," said Walker.
"This kind of siloed information meant that Water Corporation had a limited ability to manage the life cycle of electronic documentation."
With the problems now identified, four projects were set:
- Simplify and standardise the creation and capture of information assets throughout the Corporation;
- Improve users' ability to correctly capture context and manage the lifecycle of content;
- Improve access to and control of all document-based assets for all Corporation staff, key alliance partners and contractors;
- Support other corporate information management initiatives.
WindowLogic also led a technology review to examine available ECM solutions before recommending that Open Text was the right one for Water Corporation's purposes.
Dent said it had experience with the solution and was happy with it, so it made sense to stick with Open Text.
Three streams
Given the size and geographical branches of Water Corporation, the eDOCS deployment was always going to be a large and lengthy assignment, but Walker said he was never fazed by the project.
"WindowLogic handles deployments of this scale on a regular basis and we've developed a solid methodology through our experience in deploying ECM products," he said.
"It's a foundation methodology more than anything which adapts to whatever internal project management disciplines our clients follow."
Walker said his first and most important challenge was to get executive support for the program of work, which would then allow WindowLogic to allocate and commit resources on a long-term basis. The next step was to tie down operational support and business units right down to commitment from the line managers.
Tauber said this "buy-in at all levels" was essential because the reseller had to obtain executive approval at each project milestone.
"We had to put up a new business case to justify the next step and so on. We had to keep re-justifying the project to ensure it remained pertinent to the business no matter how our business was developing."
Almost half of the three year project was devoted to the initial review and strategy development. Using WindowLogic's methodology, all project activity was divided into three streams: document management, governance and supporting documentation.
Once the strategy had been agreed, the next four months were spent defining issues and requirements followed by another five months which saw the project team design, build and test solutions leading to development of the enterprise model.
The last phase was given over to physical deployment, training and change management.
"We had three deployment teams running. They were each involved in conducting five week programs to set-up, customise and provide training for approximately 100 staff at a time," said Dent.
"There were at least 60 separate work groups to do, all handled one at a time. It was a complex schedule, making sure we had everyone where they needed to be."
Managing expectations
During the final roll-out, minor modifications were made for a number of the work groups as part of a strategy to get user acceptance.
"The customisation was designed to make everyone feel special," said Walker.
"We needed to get the message out to the end user that there was something in it for them, but we still kept all customisation within the boundary of the agreed enterprise model. That's how you keep a project on track."
Another factor to ensure staff cooperation and speedy take-up of eDOCS was that the project team got sign-off from each of the 60 work groups acknowledging that all necessary work had been completed and managers were happy with the solution. Prior to that, the project team audited each department's use of the ECM to show it could use the system.
This process helped to highlight and resolve any problems. It also put an element of control on managers once they had signed their acceptance of the system.
Staff sat through classroom and online training sessions, although the project team's preference was to deliver classroom training wherever possible.
"These types of ECM projects aren't technology projects," added Walker. "You are fundamentally changing the way people work every day and you can't do that by sticking a bit of software on someone's desk."
Walker, Tauber and Dent are all in agreement that the biggest challenge was the cultural change inherent in an ECM deployment.
Rather than saving documents to a local drive, files are now stored centrally and are theoretically accessible to all (although some security restrictions apply depending on the level or position). Standard structures, formatting and cataloguing have replaced the former department-specific practices.
"It's a massive change in the way people work and the way they have to think about the documents and the information they are creating," said Dent.
"This way makes it clear that the information belongs to the Corporation as a whole rather than to individuals or a particular section. That change in attitude is huge."
Tauber added the impact is not so much about a software product or how you use it, it's about creating an environment where people have to change the way they work. For example, staff now spend time and effort saving documents in ways that they didn't have to before.
Twelve months later
While customers may not notice any change, better document and information management practices are delivering noticeable changes and efficiencies in the Corporation's back office. The problems of locating data, sharing information and document version control have all been resolved.
"What we've done is extend the understanding of records management compliance across the Corporation," said Dent.
"We have a single repository where all corporate information goes and any document created now has to be attached to a corporate file. The records management component of the solution applies life cycle management to the documents so that each and every corporate file has retention and disposal policies attached to it."
The solution has also benefited the Corporation's email system.
"There is very little sent around the organisation now that is actually a document. People send references or links to documents instead. This has had two impacts. Firstly, it means that our mailboxes are considerably smaller," said Tauber.
He cites the example of a social club email which was issued as a link to a document in the eDOCS system earlier that day. Before, the email might have been a page or more of text issued to members' internal email accounts.
"The second benefit," added Tauber, "is that if you only send a reference, you can be sure that everyone is accessing the same version of the document."
Walker is confident that the hardest part of the project is now over but said there will be more work for the internal team in the year or so ahead.
"They've met the goals and objectives that they set out to achieve, but enterprise content management is a journey," he said.
"There's no finish date because business needs and demands will always evolve. I think the Water Corporation is in the enviable position that they have the vast majority of their content under management. The challenge for them now is how they add value to it. For example, how do they provide more collaboration or integrate with existing enterprise resource applications?"
Whatever direction the Water Corporation takes next, the eDOCS deployment has ensured that the organisation has a centralised repository of content. It has helped to break down previous information silos at the same time as delivering a more structured security model. Most importantly, it has delivered a solution that resolves the issue of records management compliance both now and in the future.
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