Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula Shire (MPS) has selected the Objective Enterprise Search solution to provide its 650 users with a single place to search more than 10 million pieces of information stored in multiple repositories. The Shire expects this to result in more responsive and better quality service to its residents.

The search solution follows a 2008 rollout of the Objective ECM system including: a correspondence management system that has daily reports of overdue correspondence, Kofax scanning software with zoned character recognition, and  integration with the Shire’s key corporate applications (TechnologyOne’s Property and Rating system and the Merit CRM).

“We wanted to reduce the amount of time people spend conducting the same search in multiple Shire systems,” said Leigh Oldmeadow, Senior Information Planner at MPS.

“Information can be found across a range of systems. Our team members need one place to search for information held in any or all of those systems,” he said.

Objective will deploy its browser-based search application to enable MPS team members to conduct a single search, across multiple systems, simultaneously. A single set of optimised results is presented to users showing the most relevant and up-to-date information, regardless of the system in which the information is stored.

“Making sure that the most relevant results are returned at the top of the list is critical in delivering a single view of a topic. Without the ability to customise what information is most relevant, team members may need to review many pages of search results to find what they are looking for.

“By giving our team members a single search interface for all of our systems as well as optimised search results, we will achieve a significant reduction in the amount of time spent looking for information. This will contribute to better quality and more responsive service delivery for our community,” said Oldmeadow.

“At the present we are only including “objects”, that is, images, Microsoft Office documents etc. in our network drives, not structured data in our corporate applications and databases
- these will be considered in the next stage.”

There are no current plans to deploy SharePoint, although the council’s Web CMS is currently being reviewed.

Objective Enterprise Search provides facilities to select search scope and further refine search results by drilling down on result metadata.

MPS uses a Business Classification Scheme and Objective adds some metadata as part of the capture process as well as grabbing metadata from the Microsoft Office application. In the case of the integrated corporate applications, the metadata is captured as part of the process of automatically capturing the documents and creating files in Objective.

Version numbering is done automatically by Objective, and the user can choose to leave a document in draft or publish it.

Objective Enterprise Search is being deployed at MPS in stages, with new information sources being added over time.

“The Enterprise Search takes into account all native securities at the time of indexing, including both the security in Objective and on the network drives. At this stage ES will not include data from corporate applications,” said Mardon

Tony Walls, CEO of Objective Corporation said, “Objective Enterprise Search was specially developed for public sector organisations to solve a substantial challenge that they face - finding all the related and most relevant information that is stored across a number of disparate IT systems. Through the use of Objective Enterprise Search we expect that Mornington Peninsula Shire will set a new best practise benchmark for Australian councils.”