Citadel scores big with NSW Office of Sport

The Citadel Group has taken the New South Wales Office of Sport off paper-based workflows and onto a cloud-based content management system that also fulfils its security obligations.

The NSW Office of Sport is a small organisation sitting within the state government's Stronger Families cluster that offers services to promote activities, whether through informal sport or otherwise.

The department implemented a cloud first strategy much like the rest of the NSW government – a tall order for an office that was largely paper-based up until now.

NSW Sport also wanted to bring its records management under a single platform and team along with three other executive agencies within the NSW government: Venues NSW, NSW Institute of Sport and the Sydney Olympic Park Authority.

On top of that, NSW Sport is under stringent legislative and policy obligations when it comes to managing data.

The goals were to have information available to staff anywhere, anytime and anyplace, be more cost effective and to meet legislative and regulation obligations, NSW Sport director of information management and technology Ingrid McAlpin told CRN.

In stepped Citadel Group, who after winning an open tender, deployed its own cloud-based content management system based on Micro Focus.

Three years ago, Citadel acquired Kapish, one of only two gold business partners for HPE's TRIM records manager suite. TRIM was renamed to Content Manager after Micro Focus bought HPE's software business in September 2017.

Citadel identified a gap in the market for a cloud-based version of Micro Focus's Content Manager by combining its own managed services expertise with Kapish's experience. Citadel's director of sales Stewart Hollingdrake told CRN that there was already an install base customers working in highly-regulated industries, mostly government, that had a need for Content Manager but wanted someone else to take over responsibility.

Out of that opportunity spawned Citadel IX, an Azure-hosted content manager that allows customers to access secure data from anywhere.

Citadel began rolling out IX in mid-2018 and completed it that December, which removed the majority of paper-based workflows from the office.

Although there was a large technical component, McAlpin said the biggest challenge was in change management, though the office made big savings by improving staff productivity.

"Everything from [Mike] Baird saying in 2017 that everyone in NSW government was able to work agilely. Having the old solution, we couldn't do that. People could not work agile because their documents were locked in to an old system.

"Now they can because you can get your documents securely anywhere. These people are working on quite confidential information, and we can manage those anywhere they work. Similarly with the cloud first policy and with our cyber security policy, all of those things we have to meet and this was a way a small IT team could actually do that."

NSW Sport is now looking to embed Citadel IX further into its processes across the organisation, and later down the track will look at implementing AI and better data loss prevention.