Its been a long but worthwhile journey to implement an Objective EDRMS at Hobsons Bay City Council, reports Chris Eddy, Director Organisation Development.

Situated on Port Phillip Bay, around 10 kilometres west of central Melbourne, Hobsons Bay City Council has around 480 computer users. Alll were using an ageing document management system custom-built 12 years ago in Lotus Notes before migrating to Objective in 2008.

The Council has just upgraded to Windows 7 and Office 2007, and is in the process of virtualising its data centre and refreshing its core switches for VOIP telephony.

“The previous system had rudimentary functionality, because of its limitations and a lack of strong policies and procedures around it was notable in its lack of use,” said Eddy.

In addition to the DMS, staff were storing content on network drives and managing their documents out of their email inbox. With no limits on inbox size, this had led to an explosion of up to 5GB in individual inboxes.

“We really had a bit of a mess on our hands, you could not be confident anything could be found,” said Eddy.

Arriving in 2004 with direct responsibility for record management, Eddy appraised the problem and realised there would be no quick fix. As it would require significant investment from council, a business case was needed, which was begun in 2004. Two years in development, this resulted in a tender being issued in 2006, which Objective won in 2007.

“We chose Objective as it represented the easiest to use, most flexible and streamlined solution,” said Eddy.

Objective performs a range of key business functions within the Council, which range from handling incoming correspondence to compiling council reports.

“At one point we were looking at a SharePoint solution, but baulked at the amount of development required. It looked like a bit of a bottomless pit compared to some of the off the shelf systems out there,” said Eddy.

“Implementing Objective involved a significant change management program. We began by getting management support for a program lock down all network drives. Since we went live with Objective, they became read-only and we gave staff three months to migrate documents to Objective.

“We had people with mailboxes of 4-5GB which equated to 10s of thousands of emails going back many years, so that was a cultural change as well. We began with a 1GB limit and have brought that down to 750MB and looking to go further.
Managing images is a challenge for the future.

“We can store images in Objective 7.4 but it does not give thumbnail previews. I was looking at a separate DAM platform but when Objective announced the functionality that would be included with the 7.5 release I decided it was better to wait.”

The image challenge derives from storing resources for PR & marketing, as well as photos taken for building inspection, food safety and engineering, that are still stored on network drives.

Typically staff will all take hundreds of digital images and come back to the office and download them to shared drive with no thought to naming and file size limitations.
Prior to the rollout of Objective there was not a functional retention strategy at Hobsons Bay, as thee previous DMS had a disposal schedule but staff weren’t using it.

“Documents are now appraised and sentenced upon registration into Objective,” said Eddy.

“When entering documents there are some metadata fields that are mandatory. We do a lot of training to impress on people the fact that the more data they can put against an object the easier it is going to be for someone to find it when they need it at a later stage.
Most of the data on shared drives has now been migrated across to Objective, apart from a few exceptions such as some complex documents such as Access databases or documents with lots of linkages.

“Its a requirement that if an email is a corporate record then its put into Objective, but that’s only as good as people complying with it. Its very easy to do in Objective, its just a drag and drop or single click and all of the metadata is automatically captured,” said Eddy.

In the future Hobsons Bay is looking to expand its implementation of Objective to include management of engineering’s AutoCAD drawings.

“Workflow is also very powerful in Objective and something we want to use more of,” said Eddy.

“The search is very powerful in Objective but we are also looking to be able to search across other repositories,” he said.

VOIP telephony will provide voicemail linked to email for archiving, which becomes another data type to manage in Objective.

“As we move into areas such as audio or video, another strength of Objective is that virtually all we need to do is create a new object type, then create a set of metadata against it and it becomes easy to manage. I’m confident that whatever comes the system is customisable and scalable to cope with our changing needs.”