When Megan Cappelleri was appointed Manager Information Management for the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games Corporation (GOLDOC), she was certain she had just landed her dream job

As a Gold Coaster, not only was she firstly able to share the region’s excitement about the impact of the expected $A2 billion impact  in infrastructure and tourism for the region. There was also the professional challenge of structuring and implementing an information management regime for a Greenfield project at an organisation that will grow to over 1000 employees and 15,000 volunteers by the time the sporting extravaganza begins on April 4 2018.

Ask any information manager at a large organisation what are the major headaches of the job and you will get some pretty stock standard answers: users are resistant to change, they won’t alter their embedded practices, there are unmanaged information repositories all over the shop, and unstructured data is out of control. When Megan came on board with GOLDOC in August 2012, there were only 15 staff  and the IA and enterprise application platforms were a blank slate. 

This placed her in the enviable position of being able to implement an enterprise content manthe agement (ECM), intranet and collaboration platform before bad habits were allowed to form.

"As an organisation we have obligations to the state of Queensland in terms of the way that we manage our information, but we also have obligations to the Commonwealth Games Federation.  So in terms of our planning and our establishment, we need to make sure that we’re balancing both of those compliance requirements as we’ve moved forward,” said Cappelleri.

The prospective growth in headcount between now and 2018 meant onboarding flexibility and scalability was a major consideration. 

"Also we’re not establishing a corporation to go on forever, we’re establishing a corporation for a five year journey.  So in what we build now, we also need to always be planning for what we leave as a legacy to both the state of Queensland and for the future Commonwealth Games host cities,” said Cappelleri.

"So to establish an information management function, we needed to consider what corporate applications we were  likely to have, and how would the solutions that we selected potentially work with those types of solutions. We also needed to consider data migration requirements.”

As Knowledge Manager at a Queensland water utility Allconnex Water (established in July 2010 to amalgamate the water businesses previously held by three local government authorities) Cappelleri already had experience in designing an information management architecture.

When faced with the challenge of doing the same at GOLDOC, it was decided to take an atypical approach to begin with the selection of an ECM platform before deciding on major corporate applications including payroll, finance, procurement, HR, contract lifecycle, business intelligence, and CRM.

OpenText was the selected vendor for all document, records and content management, with Knowledge Partners as the implementation partner. The selection was announced in March 2013, while decisions on corporate applications are set to be announced in mid-2014. Datacom has been selected as managed service provider for the standard Windows server and desktop environment with Windows 7 and Office 2010. 

IA Platform

"I think that it’s fair to say that information management underpins any business and any solution,” observes Cappelleri.

"So it was my sentiment that if we had our information management right, and had people thinking about the way that they were managing their data and working with their information, that would then transpire into all corporate applications, and we’d have a robust information management architecture that we could then build on in terms of business intelligence and reporting and analytics and everything that we needed out of the other.

"We were in a fortunate position as a Greenfield to not have to get solutions to meet our existing processes; we could actually build our processes around solutions.”

"Also, again I was fortunate enough not to have to come in and do a lot of change management and break bad habits in terms of the management of paper.  

"Professionally, being involved in a Greenfield environment is always great, because you get to plan how you really want things to be done, without trying to establish new ways of doing things and dragging people along the change journey.  It is really refreshing to be able to be part of something from the ground up that will contribute significantly to the successful delivery of a great Commonwealth Games in 2018.

"It is quite exciting what we are doing with OpenText with the help of Knowledge Partners, not just as a records and document management system, but as an entire content management system.  

"So far in our deployment we have created an intranet using OpenText Communities, which is our landing page for all of our staff as soon as they open Internet Explorer, so it gives them direct access to our content management system straight away.   We are also looking at a raft of workflow-enabled capabilities so that we can work with our games delivery partners and external clients in terms of, approval processes for the use of our brands and emblems and things like that.  

Social Media

"We already have a very large social media presence, so we will be looking at integrating that, but we’re also using OpenText socially internally as well.   We have tools like Pulse, which allows us to follow each other, follow documents, set notifications.  So we’re very collaborative in the way that we approach our work.”

Collaboration is a huge challenge for GOLDOC. As well as working with international sporting bodies to coordinate the participation of 6500 athletes and team officials from 70 countries at the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games (GC2018) itself, there is the task of coordinating with multiple layers of federal, state and local government in Australia in preparation for the event. These include police services, emergency services as well as transport and main roads authorities.  

"OpenText is assisting here with the delivery of collaborative work spaces for our delivery partners, so that the people that we work with, have  got a secure repository where our internal staff can work with external parties and still manage version control and security of our documents,” said Cappelleri.  

"And we’re also using OpenText Everywhere to access ECM from smartphones and tablets, because we’re such a mobile workforce, and our mobility will increase as we grow and move into GC2018 venues; this way everyone’s got at hand access to their documents and records via their iPhones or iPads or whatever they need to take on site.

"We’ll be doing some work with Queensland State Archives in the near future to develop a GC2018 specific retention and disposal schedule.  At the moment, we are still holding the paper physically for all of our incoming correspondence, which is day boxed but our rule is if a document is born electronic, it remains electronic.  We route our correspondence electronically, so ends users don’t typically deal in paper, but we will still maintain the hard copy until we’ve got the appropriate retention and disposal approvals in place.”