Global defence contractor BAE Systems chose Australia as the location of a pilot deployment of SharePoint 2010, known as Project Olympia, spearheading a rollout of a new document and records management system to a large part of its 100,000 strong workforce across the globe.

BAE Systems manufactures military equipment for submarines, aircraft carriers, war planes and tanks, including the  J-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Australia is one of the company’s major home markets, along with the UK, US, India and Saudi Arabia.

Its chief client in Australia for more than 50 years has been the Australian Defence forces. It has more than 6,000 staff at 100 locations around Australia. Some of its current projects in Australia include maintenance of the Royal Australian Navy's Guided Missile Frigates and building components at the  Williamstown shipyard for the RAN‘s Hobart Class Air Warfare Destroyers, due to enter service in 2013. It is the second largest global defence company based on 2010 revenues of £22.4 billion.

The rollout of SharePoint 2010  will eventually impact on around half of BAE Systems Australia workforce of 6000, and a large portion of the company’s 100,000 global workforce.

Brett Penno, Team Lead - Information Lifecycle Management at BAE Systems Australia, said, “BAE Systems continually looks to implement and improve policy, process and infrastructure to retain control over its documents and records. This is to ensure compliance requirements are being met, litigation risks are reduced or responded to in a timely manner and intellectual property protected. Like most organisations, we have areas that manage their documents and records very well. These tend to be those involved in product lifecycle management (PLM); servicing of aircraft, ships, product design, manufacturing and support.”

BAE Systems uses PTC’s Windchill PLM solution as its enterprise standard for product development. Windchill delivers a secure, global platform for access to product data and design to enable collaboration across disparate sites and partners, support effective change and configuration management in order to quickly respond to customer requirements.
“Everything is pretty locked down in these PLM environments, but falling outside of that we have quite a large unmanaged document environment, things like our file server environment, existing SharePoint environments and other collaboration environments, email and communicator messages.

“There is quite a volume of information being stored and managed in that space,” said Penno.
“It was recognised globally that we needed better management over unstructured data, to satisfy regulatory and compliance requirements. It was also important to provide strong evidence of conformance against contracts and be able to respond in timely manner for discovery and legal hold requests. Then there were the basic organisational and business requirements, assisting staff to find information and documentation  whilst protecting the company’s intellectual property, and allowing easier collaboration and sharing with other home markets.

“We needed to maintain and share our corporate knowledge a bit better, rather than keeping it in silos.”

In an effort to address and drive the development of a solution , BAE Systems put in place  a global Document Creation Retention and Disposal (DCRD) policy, to which all home markets must comply. Australia was then selected for a pilot project using SharePoint 2010 to develop that solution, known as Project Olympia.  BAE Systems has a number of underlying technology options available to it in implementing a document and records management solution, including Oracle UCM/URM and Autonomy. SharePoint 2010 was selected because its use is already prevalent across a number of home markets so it is a platform users are already very familiar with.

“It was felt that SharePoint 2010 had evolved enough to deliver against the core requirements. We were still wary of the gaps, hence the need for the pilot,” said Penno.

A team of 15 information management staff at BAE Systems Australia were joined by counterparts from the US and UK operations to develop an underlying solution to handle records and document management globally. Project Olympia kicked off in January 2011, but only after the BAE corporate legal team spent many months  mapping out what was needed in terms of business requirements and process.

The Project Olympia team were then given a 9-month deadline to create a working pilot. This was completed in September 2011 on schedule, and is now being deployed in Australia, the UK and other home markets. Establishing the pilot across three business groups and 75 staff in Australia required a series major systems upgrades; from Office 2003 to 2010, SharePoint 2007 to 2010 and Exchange 2010 as well as implementing Microsoft Lync 2010.

“There were quite a few technologies changes we needed to address, but the technical challenges were not the hardest part, the core amount of effort was in  establishing  an understanding of what we needed to implement and the organisational change management processes to support its implementation.”

Four project streams were run mostly in parallel for the nine-month duration of the project, seeking to establish a document creation retention and disposal policy, establish processes, iron out a technical framework and manage organisational behaviour change.

Project Olympia saw the deployment of SharePoint 2010 across three business groups: Information Systems, Legal and an engineering/project team. Each group had a short deployment followed by 4-5 weeks working within the new collaborative environment to enable swift feedback on what was working and what was not. Penno encourages anyone engaging in a similar pilot to spend a good deal of time planning their metadata strategy and how that will drive the record retention schedule.

“It’s one of the things you really need to get sorted out before you engage in a  pilot like this, you need to understand what metadata you are going to capture on a document  as well as when it is declared as a record. You also need to define how that will support the record retention schedule and it application in SharePoint.”

“Content can come from many places, it may be in SharePoint already or living outside in fileshares, from email or even Communicator messages. You need to address all of these plus others for your organisation.”

BAE Systems has chosen to utilise the  Records Centre in SharePoint 2010, which becomes the place to host and manage records for their retention duration.

“While SharePoint provides a good part of the overall solution, we also needed to look additional functionality. SharePoint alone didn’t meet all of our requirements,” said Penno.

“We utilise the DocAve Software Platform from AvePoint in a number of areas to provide the additional capabilities we required.”

This included the use of the Remote Blob Storage (RBS) Extender, Archiving and File Connector for improved storage management and the Migrator for migrating content from different disparate systems into SharePoint 2010.

“We have used AvePoint solutions extensively in the past when we have needed to migrate content after acquiring other companies, taking information from old LiveLink systems or file servers into SharePoint, so we have got quite a bit of experience and background with them,” said Penno.

“We are also looking to AvePoint’s platform to apply Legal Hold across documents and records, and are working with them to develop their solution further to meet our Legal Hold requirements.“

Another critical ingredient was a tool to provide simple integration between the Outlook 2010 email client and SharePoint 2010, which is being provided by harmon.ie for SharePoint. This provides  an Outlook sidebar that provides full access to SharePoint from the email client.

“We needed a third party component for pulling email and email attachments into the SharePoint world as well as assisting the user to apply metadata and handle attachments at the same time. This is not natively supported in Outlook 2010. We reviewed and evaluated a few options, and ended up going with Harmon.ie. It’s not well known in Australia, but it met our requirements at an appealing price point.”

The final solution also required a good deal of custom development work from a team of three internal SharePoint developers, who were manly devoted to customising the document and record management process.

“With SharePoint 2010 there are two methods to declare records, either in place or create a centralised Records Centre; we went with the latter model. There are pros and cons to each approach, but we felt this way was more in line with the way BAE Systems works in having a centralised record centre team,” said Penno.

“Using the Record Centre approach in SharePoint provided us with a greater level of manageability, support for applying different security models as well as improving the overall search experience across records.”

“One thing you discover that isn’t advertised by Microsoft when setting up a Record Centre is the need to implement a tight coupling of Taxonomies in the Term Store, Content Types, Meta Data, Content Organiser and Retention Rules. The tools to support the deployment lifecycle of all these components across multiple environments aren’t provided. You need to develop the deployment tools yourself or seek a third party vendor. In addition to the deployment tools you also need a strong governance model to support the on-going management of the solution”

Penno recommends anyone considering a pilot deployment should ensure they get signoff on metadata and retention rules up front rather than having them evolve through the pilot.

“Some other challenges we faced included the utilisation of Content Types and globally unique document identification codes”

“We only use a small number of content types and mostly drive the retention rules applied to records based on the value of metadata selections. We also plan to apply retention policies on some Content Types. To allow us to apply retention policies at any level in the Content Type hierarchy instead of only at the base level we ended up having to break the inheritance model in our Content Types. The inheritance between Content Types is represented logically.”
“The globally unique document id issue was addressed by implementing a process around the document id feature SharePoint 2010 already provides. Not everything had a technical solution”.

One of the other challenges of Project Olympia was developing a pilot generic enough to be capable of deployment in a range of different locations around the world.

“There is a lot of legacy mindset in a large enterprise, and changing that can be challenging. You need to keep working at it, and continually reinforce the message of what you are doing and why you are doing it,” said Penno.
“And while you are deploying, communicate, communicate, communicate. Records and document management is not a sexy topic, but if people come to understand what it is and what you are trying to achieve, the lights start to come on and people begin to realise the benefits.

Other elements of the solution that evolved over the duration of the solution development included not requiring documents to be checked in and checked out by users. Doing so allows  multiple users to simultaneously collaborate on a document. Some consideration also needed to be given to document versioning limitations in order to  keep a lid on storage requirements. Working in the sensitive world of defence contracting also means security is an extremely important consideration.

“We have to be very protective to what information we expose, even within BAE Systems,” said Penno.
“We are using metadata to identify what information must be restricted, where and how, although the metadata itself is not being used to enforce the underlying security applied.

It turns out that this solution will fill 80-90% of our needs. It is a good fit, and integrates well with a lot of other products that we use, such as Office 2010. In addition to this it provides a great underlying framework for deployment of other capabilities including Reporting Services, Excel Services, Visio Services, Form Services as well as BI solutions.

“The Microsoft solution stack is depending more and more on SharePoint as the backend so we are looking to build on that as well. We identified the need early on for the creation of new roles in organisation, we established the need for record managers and record officers to support the staff when they ask questions, and help them understand what a record is and what process they should follow. It is important that these roles are provided to make this solution work at the end of the day. Especially when it is the staff being asked to determine what documents, emails and messages they choose to send to the Records Centre. Our metrics show less than 5% of emails become a record, which means only a small percentage go into Records Centre.”

Before the pilot can be rolled out globally there is a roadmap in place to migrate the current SharePoint, Office and Exchange infrastructure to the 2010 versions.

“As for Records Management this is just the beginning for us, in addition to rolling out the Olympia pilot solution in each home market we still need to address a number of areas.”

There are many specific line of business (LOB) applications employed within BAE Systems, e.g. manufacturing, engineering, R&D and financial management. While data will stay in these repositories, FAST search is being deployed to make this information accessible BAE Systems plan to leverage connectors to hook into environments such as Oracle ERP/URM/UCM, PLM systems like Windchill and other LOB applications. FAST will be used to deploy enterprise search within Australia. Eventually BAE Systems hopes to provide a search solution that spans the globe.