Australia’s National Archives has announced the winners of its inaugural Digital Excellence Awards, with successful Agency SharePoint rollouts leading the way.

Projects were judged on how well they met the public’s needs; improvements to efficiency and productivity, and on their ability to meet international standards in digital records management.

Winners in the three categories included the departments of Immigration and Border Protection, and Human Services (joint winners), the Federal Court of Australia, and the National Offshore Petroleum Titles Administrator.

A rollout of SharePoint 2013 and RecordPoint at the National Offshore Petroleum Titles Administrator (NOPTA) won in the Small agency category (under 200 staff).

NOPTA, a newly created branch of the Department of Industry and Science has two offices in Perth and Melbourne. Both offices process and administer petroleum titles information, applications and documentation. The geographical separation of NOPTA’s offices, and in keeping with its mandate of relieving regulatory burden, it was a prime candidate for a completely digital EDRMS. Prior to the establishment of its EDRMS, NOPTA was reliant on the issuing of hardcopy files from services based centrally within the Department.

NOPTA is now able to automatically create of the bulk of the metadata (including spatial metadata) associated with a record as a record moves through its lifecycle to finalisation. SharePoint as the collaborative document portal and RecordPoint as the EDRMS have been tied together by linking the BCS to the content types used by staff to store the documents.

Using workflow processing and automated tasking, NOPTA has been able to generate the required records automatically, allowing staff to concentrate on the document content rather than the management of the record itself. Apart from the Records Management team, Staff are not required to know how to use the EDRMS. NOPTA’s EDRMS integration is now seamless with core business activities.

The establishment of an Electronic court file by the Federal Court of Australia was awarded winner in the Medium agency category (200-1000 staff).

The first Australian fully-digital official record of all court documents, this completely replaces paper court files and was implemented using SharePoint which was customised to suit the Court’s requirements. Development also included making SharePoint interoperable with the Court’s legacy systems such as the case management database.

ECFs were brought online incrementally state by state from July 2014 until November 2014. More than 4000 electronic court files have now been created containing 30,000 documents. The Federal Court and the Federal Circuit court together receive more than 12,000 filings and process more than 125,000 documents each year.

Documents become available to the Court within moments as more than 90 per cent of documents lodged via eLodgment are automatically entered into ECFs. Paper documents submitted by litigants are scanned and uploaded via eLodgment kiosks at the registry.

Documents are encoded in a secure PDF format and all documents retained permanently are saved in PDF A1-A file format to ensure long term retrieval and access.

Joint winner in the Large agencies category (more than 1000 staff), Immigration and Border Protection’s ImmiAccount self-service project allows for visa applications to be submitted and manage in a digitised format, using a secure online account. Since going live in November 2013 it now has over 1.8 million users, more than 2.3 million applications and A$1 billion in revenue collection.

The other winner in the Large agencies category was the Department of Human Services for the myGov digital service established in 2013

As at the end of December 2014, there were 6.1 million active myGov accounts and an average of 20,000 new accounts are created each day. On average people sign in to the service 180,000 times each day. Some 35.4 million letters have been delivered to themyGov Inbox with an average of 127,000 letters delivered each day.

The myGov service provides Australian citizens with a single username and password to access their online services from a number of government agencies, currently Medicare, the Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink, Australian JobSearch, the Personally Controlled eHealth Record, Child Support, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

The department’s document lodgement service enables users to securely lodge and store and access documents such as forms, medical certificates and payslips, online or through the self-service mobile apps. Since its release onto Centrelink platforms in January 2013 an average of 1800 documents have been lodged per day and more than 1.24 million documents were lodged by 30 November 2014.

‘A focus on the business benefits of better information management and how well agencies exploited the value of information were also taken into account,’ said David Fricker, Director-General of the National Archives, who was one of the judges. Mr Fricker is also President of the International Council on Archives, based in Paris.

The other judges were Terry Moran AC, president of the Institute of Public Administration Australia and Phil Robertson, Chief Information Officer of National ICT Australia and member of the National Archives of Australia Advisory Council.

‘We were delighted with the standard of entries from Commonwealth agencies across Australia,’ said Mr Fricker. ‘These new awards are part of our strategy to encourage agencies to enhance their digital information management skills and I see these winning projects as being a great inspiration to other agencies.

‘We recognise that not all agencies are able to totally transform their existing records management practices, but even incremental improvements are important.

‘This award process enables us to identify what successful Commonwealth agencies are doing – many within their existing budgets – and how others might benefit from their experiences.’

Benefits identified by the judges in the winning projects included automating workflows, major productivity gains, successfully integrating multiple platforms, enabling efficiencies, and enabling staff to move to higher value activities.

More details on the winning projects are available HERE