New Zealand’s Ministry of Economic Development (MED), currently busy coordinating the 2011 Rugby World Cup,  is set to deploy an OpenText Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution.

It will deploy OpenText Content Server, paving the way for improved links with the general public and across all government agencies.

The ministry provides advice to the NZ government and deals witha diverse portfolio that includes company registrations and insolvencies, issuing patents and trade marks, managing superannuation and the radiofrequency spectrum.  It established the Rugby World Cup Office to help manage the 2011 event. 

Once fully implemented, the OpenText Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution will provide the MED with full content lifecycle management for any type of electronic document.  It offers a single, central, authoritative repository for storing, managing and organising documents ensuring a greater degree of collaboration and compliance between agencies.   

“We’re excited about this opportunity to lead the way with a cutting edge solution.  This will facilitate far better management of information and knowledge across the Ministry, and will pull together a number of fragmented and costly systems, saving us money over the long term,” said Simon Lawrence, spokesman for the Ministry of Economic Development.

The OpenText deployment follows a public tender process conducted by the MED. This saw OpenText’s leading solutions provider in New Zealand, Techtonics, awarded with a four-year partnership to implement and support the OpenText platform.

“Techtonics demonstrated that they can deliver the OpenText project cost-effectively into the future, with the added strength that as a New Zealand company they have an inherent understanding of our working environment and are committed to the long haul,” said Lawrence.

Recently, another New Zealand ministry, the Department of Labour, also began rolling out the OpenText platform using the services of Techtonics. Commenting on their work in the government sector of New Zealand, Greg Bickerton, CEO of Techtonics, highlighted that OpenText’s ECM Suite is increasingly being adopted by the public sector globally as a revolutionary platform for creating ‘borderless’ public service securely and cost efficiently.

"The exponential growth in records and document management presents a challenge to any organisation but it places particularly huge demands on public sector organisations. Without effective data management systems in place, information can become incomplete, unavailable or unusable over time. We are delighted that OpenText has been selected by the MED to help support service provision to the public,” said Graham Pullen, Vice President Asia Pacific, OpenText.